Of all the responsibilities that the United States has with many countries regarding its economic, political and military interventions, Rogers Smith takes an honest and theoretically-grounded approach to examine the historical obligations that the United States has to Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants. In its treatment of U.S. responsibilities the article “Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligations” represents a rich exception in U.S. academia. My commentary, however, will focus only on the implications of Smith's argument for the obligations that the United States has to Mexican immigrants who come originally from rural communities.

Smith argues the following:

To clarify his argument, Smith suggests that “their own values imply that modern constitutional democracies must recognize special obligations to all persons who are who they are, and who have the values and aspirations they have, partly because their identities have been constituted by the governments' coercive measures—whether or not those persons are currently legally citizens of those democracies.”Footnote ²

We could argue that over the last hundred years, the identities of many rural communities in Mexico have been constituted more by U.S. immigration policy and the labor demands of U.S. employers than by similar policies and economic factors in Mexico. In the early 1990s, I argued that many Mexican rural localities have been transformed in a process called “Norteñización,” a process by which a Mexican rural community becomes socially and economically integrated into the United States.Footnote ³ (El Norte is the term traditionally used in rural Mexico to refer to the United States.) For members of these “northernized” localities, processes in the United States have become more relevant than processes occurring in Mexico—for instance, the creation of jobs in the United States is more important than the availability of jobs in Mexican cities, and hence, in that sense, Los Angeles is “closer” to many rural Mexican communities than Guadalajara or Mexico City.

In these rural localities, four generations of norteños, documented and undocumented, have worked in the United States. Generally they have achieved a better standard of living through that work, and therefore they have become dependent on migration. They have adapted their social and cultural structures accordingly, and, for this reason, increasingly prefer migration to “El Norte” over internal migration, as they gain more access to U.S. labor markets in the United States through the social networks they have constructed.

One can argue—as Smith describes—that the incorporation of these communities into the United States was a consequence of aggressive U.S. westward expansion during the Jacksonian era. Mexico emerged as an active supplier of labor to the United States because of two factors in particular: first, the passage of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and second, the inauguration of Mexico's Ferrocarril Central railroad in 1884 connecting Mexico City to Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border, a railroad built by U.S. investors and controlled by them until the Mexican government took over in 1906.

After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, U.S. employers faced with the absence of Chinese workers first looked for other Asian workers (such as the Japanese) and then turned to Mexico as a source for temporary labor.Footnote ⁴ Recruiters working for U.S. employers along the border and within Mexico were key to bringing many Mexicans to the United States.Footnote ⁵ Thus for more than a century, rural Mexican localities have provided a steady northward flow of migrant workers. At first, workers came mainly from the Central Western region of Mexico, but nowadays virtually all of rural Mexico is connected to the United States through labor migration. Unfortunately, as Smith notes, due to limits on immigrant and temporary work visas, seven million Mexican workers in the U.S. today are undocumented, an estimated 57% of the nation's undocumented foreign-born population.

Yet despite the large number of Mexican men and women admitted as immigrants, until the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, U.S. immigration policy, by action and omission, constructed the Mexican migrant as a temporary worker, preferably male, compliant to his employers' needs and employment conditions, and not planning to settle permanently in the United States. And U.S. employers considered flexible and temporary Mexican laborers to be superior to their Asian immigrant counterparts. In 1942, the U.S. and Mexican governments signed an agreement creating two worker recruitment programs that institutionalized Mexican labor immigration. The first, the Bracero program, focused on agricultural labor; under its auspices 4.6 million labor contracts were granted between 1942 and 1964.Footnote ⁶ The second, and smaller-scale, labor recruitment program focused on railroad maintenance, and between 1943 and 1945 authorized a further 69,000 contracts.Footnote ⁷

During the twenty-two years of the Bracero program, many undocumented workers also found agricultural jobs in the United States; in fact, in many of those years, the “wetbacks” (as the undocumented workers were called) outnumbered the Braceros.Footnote ⁸ And while U.S. authorities apprehended an estimated five million illegal migrants during this period, U.S. immigration policies to some degree enabled (and continue to enable) the continued presence of undocumented labor, reflecting the interests of U.S. employers who depend on cheap, flexible, and legally vulnerable laborers.Footnote ⁹ Perhaps the most famous example of this was the “Texas Proviso,” cynically inserted by the farm lobby in the federal Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which explicitly excluded employment as a form of harboring illegal immigrants.Footnote ¹⁰

We might extend Smith's argument about the U.S. obligations to Mexican undocumented workers and their communities to the obligations that the Mexican State has regarding violence toward unauthorized Central American migrants who try to cross Mexico en route to the United States—for example, the horrifying murder of seventy-two Central American migrants in Tamalulipas on August 24, 2010, allegedly perpetrated by a drug gang. (Mexican police continue to discover more bodies of victims at other sites.) The Mexican government itself is working with U.S. government authorities to prevent Central American workers from entering the United States, and ironically, murders of Central American workers in Mexico on their way to the U.S. are the most powerful deterrents to that immigration these governments could hope for.

In the final part of his essay, Smith argues that “Despite the current anti-immigrant and especially anti-Mexican fervor … a potent coalition could be built in favor of restructured immigration policies that would give greater priority to the legal immigration of Mexicans, perhaps even including Mexicans currently working in the United States without legal authorization but also without any other history of illegal conduct.” Such a coalition is certainly to be desired, but the recent failure in Congress of the Dream Act—a law that would have granted legal permanent residency to the undocumented children of immigrants who have lived in the United States for most of their lives, graduated from U.S. high schools, and successfully completed two years of higher education or U.S. military service—suggests that many (if not most) U.S. citizens and their representatives prefer to ignore the history of how the identities of especially Mexican immigrants, actual and potential, have been shaped. They are therefore perhaps not as prepared as Smith would hope they were to accept the obligations to those immigrants which he calls upon them to recognize.