Globalization and Mexican Agriculture

RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES
Winter Quarter 2008

Globalization and Its Impact on Migration in Mexican Agricultural Communities

David Lindstrom
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University

Wednesday, January 9, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Eleanor Roosevelt College Administration Building
Conference Room 115, First Floor
Reception to follow

Research on the economic re-incorporation of U.S. migrants who return to Mexico has focused almost exclusively on the purchase of farmland and small business formation: little is known about the occupational trajectories of return migrants who do not make capital investments. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the migration literature by examining the impact of return migration and cumulative U.S. migration experience on occupational mobility in Mexico. Occupational and migration histories collected in 93 Mexican communities by the Mexican Migration Project are used to estimate hazard regression models of occupational transitions and logistic regression models of life-time occupational mobility. Results suggest that return migrants encounter difficulties in reentering the Mexican labor market, and realize no long-term occupational gains in Mexico from U.S. labor force experience.

David Lindstrom received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago with specializations in Demography and Statistics, and joined Brown University in 1994. He is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the Graduate School, a core faculty associate of the Population Studies and Training Center, and a former Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics, survey research, and migration. His research examines the determinants and consequences of migration in economically developing societies, the transition into adulthood, and the changing dynamics of reproductive health and behavior. He has received grants for his research in Mexico, Guatemala, and Ethiopia from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, RAND, the Packard Foundation, and the Compton Foundation. He currently directs a major longitudinal study of adolescent health and transitions into adulthood in southwestern Ethiopia.
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These seminars are open to all members of the UCSD community, as well as faculty and students from other universities and the general public. For directions to CCIS, visit our website. Parking permits can be purchased at the information booth on North Point Drive (north end of campus). Visitors may also use metered parking spaces (max. 2 hours) in the North side parking lot. Papers previously presented at CCIS seminars can also be downloaded from our website under “Working Papers.” For further information, please contact Ana Minvielle (E-mail: aminvielle@ucsd.edu, Tel#: 858-822-4447).

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