PRESENTATION

The international movement of people has become a phenomenon of transcendental importance for the world and our region. According to available data at least 20 million people from Latin America and the Caribbean live today outside their countries of origin, mostly in the United States of America, where they represent the largest ethnic minority. In the year 2000 the remittances these migrants sent to their families back home reached approximately 18 million dollars.

However, the importance of this issue and its relevance during the last decade is not commensurate to the lack of information available to analyze it and evaluate its impact on the affected countries. In order to contribute to ongoing efforts to fill this void, SELA's Permanent Secretariat, the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and UNESCO's International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) organized in Caracas, on August 1 and 2, 2002, an international seminar on "Migrations and Regional Integration" in which distinguished experts from the region presented important studies on the issue of migration.

By dedicating this issue of Capitulos del SELA to the phenomenon of migrations we aimed to gather in one single publication some of the documents presented at the seminar (space limitations did not allow us to include all the documents) with a view to contribute to their dissemination and analysis by those who follow this issue, including government agencies in charge of the movement of people.

Most experts coincide in pointing to a contradiction that has arisen within the current international context: on the one hand, developed countries promote the liberalization of goods and services yet, on the other, they modify their national legislations to impose harsher restrictions on labor migration and the settlement of foreigners within their territory. Thus, migration appears to be the only process excluded from the all-encompassing globalization.

The papers included in this issue provide a comprehensive view of the evolution of international migration in Latin America and the Caribbean: its social, demographic and economic traits, migration trends, migrants' profiles, the social effects of migration and future tendencies. We also include here two interesting documents on the phenomenon of migration at the world level and on the International Labor Organization's norms regarding labor migration.

The case of Mexico and Cuba deserve special consideration, basically because of the importance of the issue of migration in their overall relations with the United States of America. Thus, we include three studies on those countries' particular migration situation.

Mexico's case is particularly relevant due to the vast volume of Mexican migrants who have been entering the USA since the 1980's, the largest migration flows worldwide. Within Mexico, the case of Jalisco, Michoacán and Guanajuato deserve special consideration since one third of all Mexican migrants to the USA during the period 1995-2000 were from those states.

All three of them are in Mexico's central-western region, an area that has traditionally produced migrants to the USA.

The case of Cuba is noteworthy not only because remittances represent one of that country's major foreign currency revenues, after revenues from sugar exports and tourism, as far as gross volume of revenues is concerned and the main source of net foreign currency revenues, but also because of the political nature of the issue of migrations within the framework of Cuba's relations with the USA, particularly since the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959.

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