Contemporary Socioeconomic and Political Determinants of Puerto Rican Emigration to the United States

Demographers had previously found that at the beginning of the industrialisation programme promoted by the government (by the end of the 1940s and the entire decade of the 1950s), nearly one third of its population emigrated, encouraged by the Government, in what was then described as the most dramatic emigration phenomenon within the Caribbean region until that period. [...] The departure of hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican families and individuals had its genesis at the beginning of the twentieth century, followed by the immense flow of emigrants to the United States during the subsequent decades, in different waves of emigration. [...] The great wave of emigration of the 1950s until mid-1960s, followed by the beginning of a process of return migration from the second half of the 1960s. [...] 12 Starting in the 1930s, but at an increasing pace during the three subsequent decades, the United States government, with the collaboration of the government of Puerto Rico, put in practice a programme of mass sterilization of the female population of Puerto Rico, as well as the introduction, at an experimental level, of the contraceptive pill. [...] While 5% of households received 25% of the total income generated in the country, the two quintiles of households in the lowest income levels (the poorest 40%) received only 9% of income.42 In the context of the U.