17
of significance. This finding lends strong support to the theory that migrants supporting family in
Mexico are willing to work for lower wages than migrants supporting families in the United
States
12
.
Conclusions
In conclusion, among Mexican undocumented workers in the United States, temporary
migrants earn significantly less than their settled counterparts. This difference is significant even
controlling for education level, U.S. duration, job length, number of U.S. trips and occupation.
This finding supports the theoretical conclusion that a migrant intending to spend at least part of
his foreign earnings in his home country might be motivated to migrate to a country like the U.S.
at a nominal wage lower than the wage which would be required to make permanent migration
an economically rational thing to do.
More broadly, this analysis supports the theoretical assertion that temporary migration is
not a middle-ground between permanent migration and no migration at all. At least with regard
to migrants' wages, temporary migration is clearly different from settled migration. Although
U.S. (and European) workers may find the concept of temporary migration somehow more
palatable, there is little evidence that it affords any real protection from competition with
migrants in general or from any deflation of wages in increasingly immigrant-concentrated
sectors. On the contrary, this analysis finds that the employers of temporary migrants are the
beneficiaries of a system such a system. U.S. workers can expect to benefit from programs which
settle and integrate immigrants, rather than those which perpetuate or even require circulation
between the U.S. and Mexico.
12
Generally the wives of temporary migrants are in Mexico and the wives of settled migrants are in the United
States (Massey and Espinosa 1997).
Convention