D. Spener et R. Capps, North American free trade and changes in the nativity of the garment industry workforce in the United States, INT J URBAN, 25(2), 2001, pp. 301
Citations number
100
Categorie Soggetti
Politucal Science & public Administration
Journal title
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH
In this article, we address the question of the extent to which US producer
s' reliance on cheap immigrant labor can continue to retard the march of ap
parel manufacturing out of the country as garments produced by even cheaper
labor overseas flood the US market in the post-NAFTA period. The article i
s divided into five sections. In the first, we introduce concepts that are
key to our discussion, including the new international division of labor th
esis, dual labor market theory, the state's role in boundary management and
the implications of these with regard to industrial development and migrat
ion in Mexico and the United States. In the next section, we examine change
s in the regulatory regime governing international trade in garments and th
e subsequent shifts that have occurred in Mexican apparel exports to the Un
ited States on the one hand, and in Mexican and US garment employment on th
e other. In the third section, we review the role immigrants play in the US
garment industry and the debates about if and how immigrant workers and en
trepreneurs contribute to its international competitiveness. We then turn o
ur attention to a case study of garment production in El Paso, Texas, where
thousands of Mexican-immigrant and Mexican-American women have lost their
jobs as seamstresses since the implementation of NAFTA began in 1994. In th
e fourth section of the article, we analyze data from US County Business Pa
tterns, the decennial US Census of Population and Housing, the annual March
US Current Population Surveys and the US Department of Labor's records of
certified NAFTA-related layoffs to ascertain the extent to which El Paso's
experience of heavy immigrant garment job losses is typical of the rest of
the country. In the concluding section we discuss the implications of our a
nalysis for the future of the US garment workforce.