Richard Jones

The University of Texas at San Antonio | UTSA · Department of Political Science and Geography

In May 2020, 2 months after COVID-19 arrived in the High Plains of Texas, meatpacking plant workers were discovered to be contracting the virus in large numbers. Working conditions in the plants—close spacing on the disassembly lines, cold temperatures, noise (shouting to be heard), etc.; along with congregant settings among the immigrant workers b...

In May 2020, two months after COVID-19 arrived in the High Plains of Texas, meatpacking plant workers were discovered to be contracting the virus in large numbers. Working conditions in the plants-close spacing on the disassembly lines, cold temperatures, noise (shouting to be heard), etc.; along with congregant settings among the immigrant workers...

Objective This study questions whether the Deferred Actionfor Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has promoted the educational and career advancement in a subgroup of Mexican youth who crossed illegally by their parents at a young age, or has not promoted such advancement. Methods I draw upon recent research on this topic. From the American Community Survey...

The predominant narrative of covid-19 emphasizes its unpredictable origins, virulence, human targets, and spatial targets. Its international spread may be erratic, but at the regional level, diffusion research has been able to forecast its spread with some accuracy. This study reviews research showing how infectious disease spread over space may be...

This study investigates the educational and economic attainment of Mexican Dreamers over the 4 years since DACA was implemented (2012–2016). A time-space stream of benefits and barriers is evaluated at the national, state, and individual levels. Based on assumptions linking the DACA-eligible to DACA recipients, I examine the annual American Communi...

In this study, grounded in the literature on transnational migration, a theory of transnational social gravity is developed in which economic, social, and psychological dimensions of transnationalism increase or remain stable initially, and decline after reaching separate inflection points based on competing bonding social capital with the origin a...

In this chapter I ask whether the 2012 Presidential Executive Order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) improved the rates of employment and college attendance for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children. DACA gave temporary residency status to this group, known as “Dreamers.” “Dreamer” stands for Develop...

Almost one-fifth of the “surge” of Central American migrants crossing the US border in early 2014 was unaccompanied children, mostly from the “Northern Triangle”—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Although prior research identifies violence, economic factors, and US policies as probable causes, determining their relative importance is more chall...

Objectives The question raised here is whether global labor migration has reached its high-water mark and will not in fact recover its prerecession magnitudes. This study examines this question, and the underlying causes of migration regression, reviewing studies at the international level and carrying out a case study of Jerez municipio, Zacatecas...

A new migration pessimism argues that the economic benefits of international labour migration for migrant households may not justify the social costs. This article provides a test of this argument based on the author's survey of 304 households in Jerez municipio (municipality), Zacatecas, Mexico, in 2009. The results indicate that active households...

Various authors have begun to address the social impacts of international migration on families left behind. Family disintegration results from two separate factors: family separation and the loss of traditional values. Findings from this research (based on a random survey of over 400 households in three municipios of the central part of the state...

Since 2000, and especially since 2007, there has been a reduction in the importance of international migration and remittances in major global sending regions as a result of recession in receiving countries, anti-immigrant policies, and improvement in economic opportunities in origin countries. A household survey in five rural communities in Zacate...

A three-stage diffusion model of international migration and inequality posits that household income inequality first increases, then decreases, and finally increases again as a community's migration experience deepens. Analysis of data from a survey of 417 households in the Valle Alto region of Bolivia supports this model. Concomitant with the reg...

In response to Giddens' structuration theory, this study attempts to unravel the linkages between migration and local economic growth by moving beyond the household to the community level of analysis, and by considering lagged relationships over several years. The case study -24 towns in central Zacatecas, Mexico-concludes that remittances from US...

One-fifth of the Bolivian population lives abroad, and transnational behaviour strongly links their villages with destination communities. In this article we address whether the increasing difficulty of return migration (owing to legal and geographic barriers) results in diminished social and economic remittances to the country of origin. Results f...

Until recently the role of international return migrants in local economic development has received little attention from researchers. Drawing upon Granovetter's notion of embeddedness and Levitt's concept of social remittances, I argue that return migrants are more locally embedded (in terms of local networks and cultural affinity) and better able...

Historical, political and economic factors have had a profound effect on the origins, destinations, permanence, selectivity, and adjustment problems of Mexican migrants to the United States.

At the same time that the Third World has become more dependent on international wage-labor migration, developed countries have become less hospitable to this migration. This inhospitality is beginning to have negative repercussions on rural sending regions such as north-central Mexico. This study is based on a survey of a stratified random sample...

The increasing difficulty of return migration and the demands for assimilation into host societies suggest a long-term cutting of ties to origin areas—likely accentuated in the Bolivian case by the recent shift in destinations from Argentina to the US and Spain. Making use of a stratified random sample of 417 families as well as ethno-graphic inter...

Division of Social and Policy Sciences, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249–0655

Mexico and Ireland, traditionally countries of emigration, experienced pronounced multinationalization of their economies during the 1990s. In Ireland net emigration declined, but in Mexico it remained quite high, suggesting that Ireland advanced in the mobility transition while Mexico did not. Several reasons are offered to explain this, reflectin...

The traditional spatial assimilation model, though still operative, has proven inadequate to explain new trends in urban residential location in which, for example, disadvantaged and newly arrived groups move directly to the suburbs where they may re-segregate rather than disperse. Understanding residential patterns after 1990 often benefits from a...

This study examines the factors that influence the residential segregation and spatial patterns of twenty-seven ancestry groups in San Antonio (Bexar County), Texas, in 2000. It is hypothesized that the residential segregation of an ancestry group (measured by its dissimilarity index at census tract level) is positively related to the recency of th...

The neighborhood supermarket shopping center is an increasingly important element of the suburban retail landscape. An analysis of patronage differentials for such centers in San Antonio, TX, reveals that both competitive share and retail mix factors are important. Correlation analysis of a patronage density index with locational and management var...

Despite some evidence for the economic advancement and suburbanization of urban-bound immigrants in the United States, the preponderance of evidence points to increasing residential segregation of these groups in ethnic enclaves in U.S. cities. In this study, based on an extensive literature review, the segregation of an ancestry group is tied to t...

Despite some evidence for the economic advancement and suburbanization of urban-bound immigrants in the United States, the preponderance of evidence points to increasing residential segregation of these groups in ethnic enclaves in U.S. cities. In this study, based on an extensive literature review, the segregation of an ancestry group is tied to t...

The mobility transition from emigration to immigration in Ireland in the 1990s resulted in significant return migration, whose relationship to new multinational jobs at the micro‐scale has not been investigated. Spatial analyses of county data (Census and IDA) reveal that return migration was high in areas with high MNC and other job growth such as...

Over the past one and a half decades, smaller cities and nonmetropolitan areas in Mexico have attracted manufacturing plants, led by the export manufacturing sector. Maquiladoras in particular are increasingly locating their plants in such places in the "deep interior" Mexico-outside of the border states. Using 1980 and 1990 Mexican census data for...