Latino Incorporation in the United States in Local and Transnational Contexts

Latino incorporation into the United States reflects this country’s political involvements abroad and its political economy at home, set within an evolving global system and varying levels of transnational life. The timing of a particular group’s incorporation into the United States, and the peculiarities of the locality in which it settles, also affect its context of reception and its trajectory. This chapter will look at how various groups have become incorporated into the United States over time, focusing on variations in their contexts of reception, including the following: their labor market and geographical concentration; the political context of their initial out-migration from their home countries and their immigration into the United States, including their legal status; their continued links with their home states and societies; and the transnational life that emerges from these. The process of Latino incorporation into the United States is set within a larger system I call the Inter-American Migration System (Smith, 2003a, 2003b). The Inter-American Migration System theory sees migration as resulting from economic and other pressures stemming from globalization; from politics, including the pressures stemming from U.S. immigration policies and foreign policies, and sending state policies that tend to directly or indirectly produce migration; and from the self-perpetuating nature of migration, including a transnational social field that engages home country politics, to varying extents, with U.S. politics. In some cases, such as Cubans, the overwhelmingly political nature of the causes of their migration and their context of reception has been most important and has given them a political and social importance beyond their numbers and a relatively prosperous incorporation. In other cases, such as Central Americans, the political causes of their migration and their subsequent context of reception have led to the opposite effect: a diminution of their political and social power relative to their numbers and a relatively impoverished incorporation. In other cases, such as the Dominicans, their initial out-migration began largely for political reasons, but as American politics changed, the country lost its foreign policy importance, and the primary cause of migration incorporation has become economic. Moreover, over time, the transnational world that Dominicans have forged between their two islands has been determined much more by their primary settlement in New York than by larger U.S. policy.