Between waiting and settling down

The document presents the results of the research project “Between waiting and settling: labor and residential integration of immigrants and displaced persons in border cities of northern Mexico: the cases of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez”.

Between 2016 and 2019, Mexican border cities with the United States received an extraordinary influx of migrants. Both because of their national origin (mainly Haitian, Honduran, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and internally displaced Mexicans and deportees from the United States) and because of the collective pattern of their mobility (in groups and caravans), these movements were an unusual phenomenon in a region that for five decades has been a transit zone and area of ​​gradual settlement for migrants.

Tijuana was the first city to receive the initial waves in 2016, with approximately three thousand Haitian migrants. By the end of 2018, more than six thousand people had arrived on different dates, all belonging to the "Central American Migrant Caravans." A few months later, in mid-2019, Piedras Negras, Coahuila, received another wave of nearly two thousand Central Americans in a caravan. Simultaneously, a flow of around four thousand people, mostly of Cuban origin, arrived in Ciudad Juárez. Less visibly or with less publicity, other contingents of Central American migrants continued to arrive in various cities along Mexico's northern border.

In a context of increasing restrictions on border crossings and asylum in the United States, these new migratory flows have posed various challenges for the social and civic integration of people on the move, in terms of employment, housing and documentation.

This document presents summaries of the extensive research reports carried out within the framework of the project “Between waiting and settling: labor market insertion and residential strategies of migrant populations in northern border cities in Mexico: The cases of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez” (Analysis of labor market insertion and residential strategies of migrant populations in northern border cities in Mexico: The cases of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez), carried out by a team of researchers from El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, with funding from the Center for Labor and Education Studies of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA Labor Center) and the Solidarity Center (AFL-CIO), Mexico City Office.

The objective of this research was to analyze the structural frameworks and life strategies for residential and labor integration of migrants, both foreign and Mexican nationals, during the period 2015–2020 on the Mexico-United States border. During this period, border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez experienced changes in both the countries of origin and the mobility patterns of people arriving in search of international protection, within a political context adverse to the asylum system and the border closure due to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Coordinated by Laura Velasco

Participants: Jesús Javier Peña Muñoz – Marie Laure Coubès – María Dolores París Pombo – María Inés Barrios de la O – Lorena Cecilia Mena Iturralde – Emilio Alberto López Reyes – Gabriel Humberto Pérez Duperou

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