Contemporary Labor Migration and Displacement

Migration between Mexico and the United States is one of the largest and longest-running labor migration corridors in the world. Its modern shape was set in part by the Bracero Program, a bilateral guest-worker agreement running from 1942 to 1964 that brought several million Mexican agricultural laborers into the US under temporary contracts to fill wartime and postwar labor shortages, establishing migration networks between specific Mexican states and US regions that persisted long after the program ended. Migration continued, increasingly unauthorized after 1965 reforms tightened legal quotas, through the late twentieth century, reaching a peak of an estimated 12.6 million Mexican-born people living in the United States around 2007, before the 2008 financial crisis, tighter border enforcement, and improving economic conditions in Mexico contributed to a net decline; since around 2010, roughly as many Mexican-born migrants have returned to Mexico as have left it in many years. The corridor remains economically vital in both directions: Mexican migrants sent home over $63 billion in remittances in 2023 alone, according to Mexico's central bank, now one of the country's largest sources of foreign income, exceeding oil exports and roughly on par with foreign direct investment.