A comparative analysis of Mexican-and European-origin immigration to the United States: proposing an interactive colonization theory

From the 1970s, Latin American immigration, mainly from Mexico, increased rapidly surpassing European migration in the 1980s for the first time in US history and now constituting over half of the total foreign-born population in the United States. In this paper, I compare this newer, Latin American wave of immigration to earlier, European waves and find that though a combination of push-pull and structural perspectives does much to explain the European experience, it fails to explain Mexican-origin migration and nature of incorporation. Therefore, I argue for an interactive colonization approach to understanding the uniqueness of the Mexicanorigin immigration experience. Reprinted by permission of Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, an imprint of Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Netherlands