Summary Of Labor And Inequality By Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz's Labor and Legaility: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network, describes the lives of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who work as busboys In a Chicago restaurant. Gomberg-Munoz gives insight into the new lives of the boys, through her compilation of their experiences both before crossing the border and after moving away from home into an unknown world. As an ethnography, the book gives information and details of the workers without arguing or taking a stance on immigration itself; it is instead presented in a manner that attempts to give readers a full understanding of the undocumented life through the revelation of the ones living it. She provides readers with a perspective on the daily struggles faced when living

As undocumented workers, the security of the job is never guaranteed, but the Lions are able to heighten their job security through their displays of the stereotypes. They take the idea and culture of working hard and use it on themselves as a self-enhancement to how they see and approach their job, and it gives them that willingness to continue. They want to make themselves indispensable to the job and in order to do that they have to show it their work

Globalization is the process of international integration best exemplified by increased trades, increased inter-connectedness of nations and their financial sectors and large-scale international migration. The United States and Mexico have a long history of economic relations with many believing that migration to the United States from Mexico being due to poor economic development in Mexico. Gomberg-Munoz conjectures that the labor migration "is generated not by a lack of economic development, but by development itself-and by uneven development in particular" (27). Initially for much of the 20th century, marked by treaties like the Bracero Program in 1942, the U.S. very much encouraged the migration of labor from Mexico to the U.S. But with the Bracero Program, employers began to work around the program's costs of hiring by networking through their current Mexican workers, thus easily bringing in the worker's families and friends to work undocumented (31). The United States' hypocritical response was to then round up these workers and transport them across the border to Mexico (all while condoning the use of Mexican labor), largely decreasing the number of visas given from unlimited to only twenty thousand from 1965-1976