Adding Return Migration to the Equation: U.S. Immigration Policy and Migrant Families in Mexico

This chapter studies the implications of increasing return migration from the United States to Mexico post-2008 and the immigration of U.S.-born people to Mexico for family life. Our aim is to quantify and analyze the sociodemographic characteristics, living arrangements, and household characteristics of returnees and U.S.-born immigrants in Mexico to document divergent family migration processes at the population level. We couple this demographic portrait with narrative accounts of seven returned migrants we interviewed in Mexico City in 2019 to illuminate how people navigate return and 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. 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.