Author: Pablo Mateos
NAFTA’s southern frontier: Central American transborder migrant workers in Mexico
The number of Central American migrant workers in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost State, has increased substantially over the last decade. Beyond the official Census figures, which report 21,000 Guatemalans resident in Mexico in the 2010 Census, there is a much larger and growing population of transborder temporal workers that cross every month, week or even daily the Guatemalan- Mexican border to work in Mexico. This collective includes either workers with temporary work documents, residents, citizens and undocumented migrants. This paper presents the preliminary results of a project aimed to understand the volume and key characteristics of the transborder labor market in Southern Mexico, through the analysis of secondary data from surveys together with in-depth interviews carried out in Chiapas and Guatemala. We focus on the analysis of the main factors that make this population extremely vulnerable and make recommendations for Mexican migration and labor public policy, with implications for the whole North America - Central America migration and labor systems.