Mexico's 33rd State.(Nations to Watch)('Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants')

Byline: Tony Emerson

Jorge Castaneda's new book shows how U.S. policy on immigration backfired, and what's to be done.

They were by one count the largest protests ever to hit a string of major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles. Bigger even than the civil-rights movement and Vietnam. Up to 5 million people may have marched against the doomed immigration reforms of 2005, which appeared to threaten illegal aliens with imminent deportation. That this issue could muster such masses, mainly Latinos, is largely a function of what Jorge Castaneda describes in his new book, "Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants," as a "radical transformation" in U.S.-Mexican relations.

For more than a century Mexicans were migrants, crossing the border to make a few bucks and return home. Now this pattern of "circularity" has ended, says Castaneda, a former foreign minister of Mexico and frequent NEWSWEEK contributor. Tightening border controls and immigration rules has backfired, he says, both failing to slow the flow of several hundred thousand Mexicans into the United States each year and making those who come afraid to venture the trip home. The result is that migrant workers have become immigrant settlers. From 1920 to 1970 the Mexican population in the United States held steady at well under a million, before spiking to 2.2 million in 1980 and 11 million now, or six times more than the second largest immigrant population (the Chinese).

Castaneda uses the shift from migrant to immigrant to explain the growing "crisis" in U.S.-Mexican relations, and the special vitriol of the immigration debate that now roils the U.S. presidential campaign. More than 11 percent of the Mexican population now lives in the United States, and more than half say they would come if they could. As their numbers in the United States boom, many are now pushing to settle in rural areas and small towns, where outsiders are more of a shock than in cities. In part because of sheer numbers, Mexicans can live in the United States much as they would at home, speaking Spanish, buying Mexican goods, assimilating less than other immigrant groups and therefore provoking a louder backlash.

Neither side has fully recognized the new reality. The United States has effectively become the 33rd state of Mexico. The Mexican economy in the United States ...