The Politics of Temporary Protection Schemes: The Role of Mexico’s TVRH in Reproducing Precarity among Central American Migrants (original) (raw)
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2021
The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPPs), also known as “Remain in Mexico”, and Mexico’s response program, the Northern Border Migrant Attention Plan, embody how human rights have developed under neoliberal capitalism. Historically and presently, US asylum policy serves as a type of extraterritorial mobility control which manipulates non-domestic space to detain and contain asylum seekers. Despite an international legal framework, widely held popular ideals of human rights as wellbeing for all are challenged by the breakdown of human rights in practice, as in the case of the MPPs and the response of the Mexican state. Contradictions in human rights can be attributed to neoliberal influence on human rights doctrine, which favors an unequal distribution of wealth and power, and is policed by neoliberal state institutions. And, neoliberal governments often appropriate the language of human rights to further state-centric agendas. The Northern Border Migrant Attention Plan is first and f...
A Global Protection Gap: Migrant Insecurity in Mexico
Latin American Policy , 2024
Over the last decade, Mexico has transitioned from being a major source of immigrants to an important transit and destination country for asylum seekers and migrants from Central and South America. As President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018, he pledged to implement a migration policy that prioritized humanitarian protection and honored Mexico's international and national human rights commitments. To what extent have these goals been achieved? In this paper, I rely on a variety of sources to document the widening gap between Mexico's legal and stated commitments to the protection of migrants' rights and their implementation. The evidence presented here suggests that migrants' security in Mexico is threatened not only by organized criminals and human traffickers, but also by state actors, highlighting the tension between the government's emphasis on citizen security. I discuss the international and domestic political dynamics exacerbating this international protection gap and highlight the role of civil society actors and intergovernmental organizations, in ameliorating it.
Migration Policy Practice, 2021
I started to write this contribution as the devastating news concerning the violent deaths of 19 migrants in Camargo, Mexico – presumed to be Central Americans –began to circulate in civil society’s WhatsApp groups and social media feeds. The news, coming less than a week after the inauguration of Joseph Biden Jr. as the incoming United States President, is overwhelming for many reasons. If confirmed, these violent murders will be the latest in a series of high-profile cases that to this day have remained unsolved, concerning the deaths and disappearances of migrants in transit and internally displaced people in Mexico – most notably, the San Fernando massacre in August of 2010, where 72 migrants from Central America, South America and Asia died in a calculated military-style attack (Casillas, 2010); and the case of Cadereyta in 2012, when the remains of 49 migrants were reportedly found by the Mexican army (Varela Huerta, 2017). These cases – and the many, many others that migration researchers and activists have collected in the course of their work over the years – stand as a dark reminder of the lack of a single mechanism in the entire Central America–Mexico–North America corridor to improve migrants’ safety in the context of their journeys, and of the absence of conduits allowing migrants to safely and securely report the violent acts committed against them. Most ominously, they are evidence of the lack of efforts from governments throughout the region to hold accountable the vast range of actors who perpetrate the heinous acts that migrant people endure in the course of their journeys.
2020
This thesis argues that Mexico’s refugee regime - its institutions, its legal instruments and its norms - are under serious pressure and, as a result of that pressure, a new refugee regime is emerging in the country. This new refugee regime is based on the notion that the movement of refugees, asylum-seekers and irregular migrants should be effectively managed and strictly controlled. Such pressure, resulting in an aggressive border enforcement strategy implemented by the Mexican state, has come directly from the United States government. New policies and contractual agreements emerging from the United States and Mexico (2018-2019) have made it nearly impossible for Central American refugees to receive asylum status in the United States, leading many to question the capacity of Mexico’s refugee institutions to respond to the needs of the ‘migrant caravans’ in accordance with human rights principles. Through an in-depth analysis of the institutional framework addressing the needs of ...
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Frontera Norte, vol. 33, 2021
In a context of restriction of both irregular migration flows and those in need of protection in the global North, the objective of this article is to analyze the implementation of Mexican refuge policies after the legal changes of 2011. Based on the documentary review and the statistics from the administrative records of COMAR, the obstacles encountered by those who require international protection to be granted refugee status, or, in this case, complementary protection (protección complementaria), are analyzed. While Mexican legislation is generous in terms of the possibility of granting these legal protections, the analysis of their implementation allows us to account for practices of blocking, deterrence and immobilization that-in the logic of containment-make it difficult, as well as with often prevent, achieve international protection.
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The widely reported increase in violence-based displacement from Central America to Mexico has been managed as a non-crisis by the Mexican government, which continues to try to assuage its powerful neighbours to the north and to control what has been termed the United States’ “third border” (Grayson 2006), between Mexico and Guatemala/Belize. This chapter is based on work that has sought to understand migration and displacement as lived experience, and argues that mobility is a deeply historical, personal, and conditioned process, in which the self—at the center of a complex web of shifting opportunities and oppressions—is itself in flux, at the apex of damage and possibility. Rather than crises, mobility is too often lived as protracted and contingent struggles.
Frontera Norte, 2021
In a context of restriction of both irregular migration flows and those in need of protection in the global North, the objective of this article is to analyze the implementation of Mexican refuge policies after the legal changes of 2011. Based on the documentary review and the statistics from the administrative records of COMAR, the obstacles encountered by those who require international protection to be granted refugee status, or, in this case, complementary protection (protección complementaria), are analyzed. While Mexican legislation is generous in terms of the possibility of granting these legal protections, the analysis of their implementation allows us to account for practices of blocking, deterrence and immobilization that-in the logic of containment-make it difficult, as well as with often prevent, achieve international protection.