Report on the regional level migration of migrant workers within Latin America and the Caribbean - discusses demographic aspects, occupational structure and legal status of migrants, their impact on home countries and host countries, and relevant migration policy. Bibliography and statistical tables.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was amanifestation of widespread public concern over the volume of undocumentedimmigration into the United States. The principal innovationof this legislation-the provision to impose penalties on employers whoknowingly hire undocumented immigrants-was a response to thisconcern.This effort at restriction was tempered in IRCA by other provisionspermitting the legalization of two types of undocumented immigrantsthosewho had resided in the United States since January 1, 1982; andwhat were called special agricultural workers (SAWs), persons who hadworked in perishable crop agriculture for at least 90 days during specifiedperiods from 1983 to 1986. Approximately 3.1 million persons soughtlegalization (what is popularly referred to as amnesty) under these twoprovisions. The breakdown was roughly 1.8 million under the regularprogram and 1.3 million as SAWs. Mexicans made up 75 percent of thecombined legalization requests.

This Fall 2009 (VII, 4) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge entitled “Migrating Identities and Perspectives: Latin America and the Caribbean in Local and Global Contexts,” focuses on the complexity of identity formations experienced by migrants in the world-system, with a regional focus on Latin America and the Caribbean which have been at the heart of many recent scholarly debates in migration studies and the subsequent emergence of transnationalism. The collection can be therefore understood as an attempt to establish an intellectual dialogue between different academic disciplines, as well as theoretical perspectives. Among the various themes of this issue is the importance of context, as illustrated through the use of comparisons, and the application to the domestic migration context of theoretical approaches commonly used to explain international migration. Another theme that emerges among these papers is that of integration, or in the case of deportees—a very specific group of immigrants—reintegration. A crucial aspect of incorporation is identity formation, often central to migration research and highlighted in a variety of ways in the papers. Contributors include: Terry-Ann Jones (also as journal issue guest editor), Eric Mielants (also as journal issue guest editor), Per Unheim, David Carment, Carlo Dade, Dwaine Plaza, Cédric Audebert, Heike Drotbohm, and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

Since Mexico-U.S. migration represents the largest sustained migratory flow between two nations worldwide, much of the theoretical and empirical work on migration has focused on this single case. In the last few decades, however, migration has emerged as a critical issue across all nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the region seeing its position changed from a net migrant-receiving region to one that now stands as one of the foremost sending areas of the world. In this latest volume of the ANNALS, leading migration scholars seek to redress the imbalance offered when only studying a single case with the first systematic assessment of Latin American migration patterns using ongoing research on the Mexican case as a basis for comparison. Each chapter examines specific propositions or findings derived from the Mexican case that have not yet been tested for other Latin American or Caribbean nations. Using a common framework of data, methods, and theories, they offer a new perspective on the causes and consequences of migration in the Western Hemisphere.