André Lemelin Conference 2024
With Claudia Masferrer (El Colegio de México – COLMEX)
On Tuesday, March 12th, 2024, 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.
Hybrid event:
Room: 1106 (385, Sherbrooke East Street, Montreal, QC)
Zoom
Note: The presentation will be in English. Questions may be asked in French.
Abstract
In this work we study the implications of increasing return migration from the United States to Mexico post-2008 as well as the immigration of U.S.-born people to Mexico. Our aim is to quantify and analyze the socio-demographic characteristics, living arrangements, and household characteristics of returnees and U.S.-born immigrants in Mexico in order to gain a sense of the extent of these divergent family migration processes at the population level. We couple this demographic portrait with narrative accounts of seven returnees we interviewed in Mexico City in 2019 to illuminate how people navigate return and its implications for family life in the context of restrictive and heavily enforced U.S. immigration policy. We emphasize the importance of considering return migration when studying migrant families, especially in the Mexican case. A focus on return migration reveals that U.S. immigration policy affects not only families in the United States, but also in Mexico. In other words, we bring a much-needed binational perspective to the study of the impacts of U.S. immigration policy on migrant families.
Bio
Claudia Masferrer is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Demographic, Urban, and Environmental Studies, the Coordinator of the Seminar Migration, Inequality, and Public Policy, and a Member of the Research Group on Demographic Dynamics at El Colegio de México. Claudia holds a PhD in Sociology from McGill University and an MSc in Statistics from the University of Texas at Austin. She held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre Urbanisation, Culture et Sociéteé, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in 2015. Her research focuses on internal and international migration, reintegration of returnees, immigrant integration, demographic dynamics, inequality, and how policy mediates these processes. She has studied return migration to Mexico and its implications for more than a decade. Her scholarship has been published at academic journals (Demography, Population and Development Review, Journal of Migration and Human Security, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Advances in Life Course Research, Population Research and Policy Review, Revista Latinoamericana de Población, Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, among others), as policy briefs, and as book chapters in edited volumes. She is the author of Atlas of Return Migration of the United States to Mexico (2021), coeditor of La década en que cambió la migración. Enfoque binacional del bienestar de los migrantes mexicanos en Estados Unidos y México (2021), editor of Migración y desigualdades ante la pandemia COVID-19 en México y Estados Unidos (2021), coeditor of The intersection of foreign policy and migration policy in Mexico Today (2022), and coeditor of Migration Between Mexico and the United States: IMISCOE Regional Reader (Springer, 2022). Since 2023, she is an Associate Editor of International Migration Review. She is currently member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and Canadian Studies in Population.