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51 Int'l Migration Rev. e1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/imgratv51 and id is 1 raw text is: f l INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW Book Review Skill of the Unskilled Work and Mobility among Mexican Mzgrants. By Jacqueline Hagan, Ruben Hernandez-Leon, and Jean-Luc Demonsant. Oakland, CA: University of Cai- fornia Press, 2015. iv, 300 pages. $29.95. JENNIFER A. JONES University of Notre Dame In the closing pages of Ski lb of the Unskilled, Hagan, Hernandez-Leon, and Demonsant warn us that insisting on the discrete, yet largely undertheorized, cate- gory of unskilled laborer reinforces the kinds of inequality scholars and policy makers seek to remedy. Such a lexicon, they argue, justifies lower wages, bad working conditions, and marginal labor rights (203). Skills of the Unskilled pro- vides us with the tools to dismiss this notion, marshaling data from an impres- sive five-year study to examine the experi- ences of Mexican sojourners and the impact of migration on their labor-market trajectories as they travel from Mexico to North Carolina and back again. While public perception and much of the litera- ture frame workers with low education as unskilled, Hagan et al. find that overre- liance on formal education measures fails to capture migrants' actual skills. For example, while most migrants acquire little formal education, they are highly likely to acquire skills in the home. Hagan et al. show that only 4 percent of return migrants reported learning skills through formal vocational training while about half reported learning skills infor- mally (51). In Leon, Mexico, for example, a long-standing leather district is supported by small businesses that do piecemeal work, with skills taught informally within families and among neighbors. Such informal learn- ing often translates into job opportunities abroad yet is almost entirely omitted from the literature on labor migration. In the 1990s and 2000s, changes in both the US and Mexican economy and trade policies, as well as in US immigration policy, reorganized the circularity of Mex- ico-US migration. During this period, migration from Mexico went from a regio- nal to a national phenomenon, with one- fifth of Mexico's working-age population residing in the United States by 2000. Detailing the intersection of labor-market pulls, policy barriers, and resource net- works that shape Mexican migration, Hagan et al. find that most unskilled migrants leave Mexico at a young age with- out documentation and obtain entry-level positions in the United States, motivated by various economic factors including a desire for higher wages, new skills, house- hold resources, or debt payment. Once in the United States, migrants achieve these goals by transferring skills acquired infor- mally in Mexico, as well as learning new ones on the job. In the United States, Hagan et al. argue that employees continue to learn technical skills through credentialing and training as well as by reading manuals, apprenticing with other employees, and additional informal methods that happen both on and off the job. Moreover, they point out that existing scholarship often fails to account for the acquisition of soft or tacit skills - cultural competency, organization, efficiency, and interpersonal skills - that are not well captured through formal measures yet are essential in industries like service and tourism. This omission is particularly problematic when we consider gender, as women are more likely to be employed in the service indus- try, rendering their new skill sets largely unrecognized and the specific labor-market barriers experienced by women not well understood. While much of the scholar- ship presumes that return migrants achieve economic gains through acquired capital, Hagan et al. argue that diversified skill acquisition plays an important role in shaping mobility within both the United States and Mexico. C 2016 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/imre.12283 IMR Volume 51 Number 1 (Spring 2017):el-e2 el

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