View/save PDF version of this document - La Strada International

narrowing income inequalities within sending communities and, over time,between regions of rural Mexico. They show that international migrationprovides migrants with higher incomes and contributes a larger portionof household income than does internal migration, although they do notattempt to determine how differences in levels of earnings affect choices toengage in one form of migration or the other.Shifting focus from sending to receiving areas, Susan Carter and RichardSutch analyze the effect that international migrants might have on theemployment and wages of native-born workers, some of whom are internalmigrants. To inform contemporary debates about U.S. immigrationrestrictions, they examine a historical case of immigrant labor marketimpacts based on U.S. county level census data from 1910. They expectthat if international migrants have an adverse impact on native-bornworkers, it will be more obvious in the past than today because of therelatively higher ratio of international to native-born workers and becauseimmigrant and native workers were more similar in educational and othercharacteristics than they are today. Through their analysis of migration todifferent counties and regions of the United States, the authors find thatboth immigrant and native workers migrated to the same urban labormarkets. Not only did immigrant and native born workers not “crowd out”one another, they conclude, but the arrival of both contributed to moderatedand long-term economic growth. The authors argue that if research is to berelevant to policy, current “textbook” models of labor markets must berefined to reflect the markets’ open and dynamic nature.Comparing the Impacts of Internal and International Migration onDevelopmentIn this section we have grouped together articles that address either internal orinternational migration separately but within the same countries or regions.The purpose is to facilitate comparison of similarities and differencesbetween the two forms of migration as within the same geographic contexts.In the volume’s afterword, we pursue more systematically what can belearned from comparisons at the different levels of analysis of the family,community, nation, and region.20In India, Priya Deshingkar’s chapter presents an overview of short-terminternal or circular migration. In the absence of accurate survey data, shecompiles village and regional case studies into a national portrait of howrural villagers take up temporary employment in other agricultural areasand cities in order to supplement and sustain their rural livelihoods. Inmost instances, short-term migration seems to minimize poverty more than