Contradictions of diasporic institutionalization in Mexican politics: the 2006 migrant vote and other forms of inclusion and control

Abstract

This paper examines patterns and contradictions involved in the institutionalization of the relationship between Mexico and its diaspora, with special focus on the migrant vote for president from abroad in 2006. While migrants have made increasing, and increasingly successful, demands for political inclusion, and have succeeded in becoming part of Mexico's imagined political community, the institutionalization of their inclusion has been done in ways that control and limit migrant influence. These measures of inclusion include migrant participation in Mexican state entities such as the Institute of Mexicans Abroad, and in state and local politics, and the granting in 2005 of a key citizenship right, the right to vote from abroad for president. However, the implementation of the right to vote made it a largely symbolic right in 2006. Limits on other practices, like running for office, also exist. All this may suggest limits to the extent to which the political class will accommodate migrants’ demands for inclusion. The paper examines specifically diasporic institutionalization during three periods in the history of the movement seeking the migrant vote: before Vicente Fox's 2000 election; during the first five years of his presidency, until the migrant vote law was passed in 2005; and during the 2006 election season. Related methods of diasporic political practice are also analysed.

Keywords:

• Diaspora
• migrants
• Mexico
• diasporic institutionalization
• vote

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and Ruben Hernandez Leon for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Marco Martiniello and Jean-Michel Lafleur for their patience in awaiting the final draft. This paper was completed while the author was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. I draw on prior work on institutionalization of migrant-state relations, including Guarnizo (1998a), Guarnizo and Smith (1998b), Vertovec (1999a), Itzigsohn (2000), Østergaard-Nielsen (2001), Smith (2003a,b), Goldring (2005) and others.

2. Here I adapt Schedler's (2002a) analysis of Mexican electoral competition as a nested game within the larger process of electoral reform. Electoral reform is promoted by electoral competition; electoral reform that opens politics, in turn, makes elections more competitive. My point here is that migrants have been used as a tool in the larger agenda of electoral reform and have benefited from it. But, as democratic consolidation occurs in Mexico, the political class may not need to use migrants to promote electoral reform. If this turns out to be the case, then migrants may not be as able to mobilize allies in the Congress in the democratic consolidation phase as they were during the democratic transition phase.

3. I draw on a mainstream sociological understanding of the term ‘institutions’. For more specific work, see Berger and Luckman (1966), DiMaggio and Powell (1983, 1991) and Granovetter (1992); in economics or political science, see, for example, Grief (2006) or North (1990) and Allison and Zelikow (1999).

4. The literature on the state in sociology and political science is voluminous and well beyond the scope of this paper. I refer the reader to Weber's (1964) essay on politics as a vocation and to more contemporary classics such as Tilly (1975, 1992), Poggi (1978), Evans, Rueschmeyer and Skocpol (1985), Giddens (1987) and Mitchell (1991); also to contemporary anthropological treatments of the state, such as Ferguson and Gupta (2005).

5. The literature on bureaucracies is also huge. One place to start would be David Beetham's Bureaucracy (1996).

6. I draw in this section on histories related in Calderon Chelius and Martinez Saldana (2002), Moctezuma (2003), Smith (2003a,b), Calderon Chelius (2004), Goldring (2005) and Delano (2006).

7. Hernandez’ office turned out to be relatively short lived, lasting only until 2003, but this is a story for another time.

8. This raises the very interesting question of whether migrants will end up becoming an interest group openly identified at the level of rhetoric as being in competition with local politicians or whether the process of choosing some migrant candidates will remain hidden.

9. www.ime.gob.mx has a fuller explication of the IME and CCIME's relationship and missions.

10. See www.ime.gob.mx for information about the matricula consular.

11. See the IME website for more information. www.ime.gob.mx.

12. As cited in Migration News, vol. 6, no. 1, 1999.

13. See the IFE's final report (2006) ‘Informe final sobre el Voto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior y Numberalia Electoral’, Mexico, DF, accessed at: http://mxvote06.ife.org.mx.

14. I would like to reiterate that I see the Mexican political class's response as one that can be understood using this logic. I do not, however, impute to them any adherence to Huntington's recent writings, which have veered from sensationalist to alarmist in discussing conflicts of civilizations and in their flawed analysis of Mexicans as a drag on American society (Huntington 2004; for cogent responses, see Jacoby 2004; Alba 2006).

15. Technically, Rodriguez was an adviser to the Coordination of the Vote for Mexicans Abroad, an entity organized by the IFE to implement the vote.

16. The full results are shown in Table 1.

17. This is a quick calculation using the estimate of 4,000,000 possible voters in the US, multiplying this number by the respective percentages of Calderon (1,480,000 or 37 per cent) and Lopez Obrador 1,360,000 or 34 per cent) and subtracting the difference, or 120,000. I am willing to make the huge assumption that these percentages correspond to those in the actual population because these are the best data we have, though they would obviously be open to challenge in the face of other data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Courtney Smith

ROBERT COURTNEY SMITH is Associate Professor of Sociology, Immigration Studies and Public Affairs, at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, Sociology, CUNY