David Spener argues that U.S. educational policies reflect an implicit economic need to socialize immigrants and minority group members to fill necessary, but undesirable, low-status jobs. Transitional bilingual education programs, which provide only a limited period of native-language instruction and do not ensure English mastery, prevent immigrant children from attaining academic fluency in either their native language or in English. The subsequent discrepancy between the learning capacities of immigrant children and their monolingual peers reinforces stereotypes of immigrants and some linguistic minorities, and serves to socially legitimize their economically required limited access to better jobs.
As the United States has intensified surveillance of its southern border with Mexico, unauthorized migrants have become increasingly dependent on hired smugglers when they cross the border and reach their destinations in the US interior. According to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, tighter border controls have systematically transformed migrant smuggling into a sophisticated and highly profitable industry dominated by large-scale criminal syndicates that prey on migrants desperate to enter the US without official authorization. In this article I argue that despite the rise of larger-scale smuggling organizations, smuggling of migrants across the US-Mexico border is still undertaken by small-scale and~or part-time smugglers who are embedded in the Mexican migrant community itself. Moreover, I suggest that the logic that predicts the elimination of small-scale smugglers from the market is flawed because it is based on an unrealistic assessment of the requirements for mounting a successful smuggling enterprise. I base this claim on preliminary findings from an ongoing ethnographic study of migrant smuggling on the South Texas-Northeast Mexico border that I began in summer 1998. Depuis que les Etats-Unis ont intensifid la surveillance de leur fronti&e avec le Mexique, les migrants non autoris~s ont de plus en plus recours aux passeurs de clandestins engages pour traverser la fronti~re et arriver ~ leur destination am~ricaine. Selon le United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (service d'immigration et de naturalisation des Etats-Unis), les renforcements du contr~le frontalier ont syst&natiquement transform~ la migration clandestine en une industrie perfectionnde et tr~s rentable domin~e par des associations de malfaiteurs qui exploitent les migrants voulant a tout prix rentrer aux Etats-Unis sans autorisation officielle. Dans cet article, nous faisons valoir le point de vue selon lequel une grande part de la migration clandestine entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique est encore contr~lde par des passeurs dont le travail est d" envergure rdduite ou ?z temps partiel et qui sont intdgrds dans la communaut~ migrante mexicaine et ce, en depit de la mont~e des r~seaux de passeurs qui oeuvrent ~ grande dchelle. De plus, nous proposons que les prddictions voulant que les passeurs qui travaillent ?z petite dchelle seront dlimin~s du marchd ne sont pas fondees puisqu ' elles reposent sur une dvaluation peu rdaliste de ce qui est n~eessaire pour r~ussir le trafic d'immigrants. Des r~sultats pr~limi-naires d~coulant d'une recherche ethnographique en cours entreprise h l'dtd 1998 et portant sur le passage de clandestins le long de la fronti~re entre le sud du Texas et le nord-est du Mexique viennent appuyer cet argument.
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