Considerations for a New Research Agenda on Migration and Refugee Studies: Lessons from Studying Migration and Foreign Policies in Mexico

Abstract

Since 2000, Mexico has faced challenges in developing migration policies as it transformed from an emigration country into a country of return, transit, immigration, and forced internal displacement. With limited institutional capacities to address this complexity, Mexican policymakers transferred key policymaking powers to the foreign policy apparatus to bend to the Trump administration’s coercive demands that Mexico contain and deter migration. Based on an interdisciplinary study, we delineate a new research agenda relevant for migration and refugee studies, especially for cases in which the overlap between foreign and migration policy grows as countries deal with complex migration dynamics.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• foreign policy
• migration policy
• mixed migration

Introduction

How can states with complex migration profiles develop migration policies based on their own interests while under strong externalization pressures from other states?

Working as a team of nine researchers from demography, sociology, political science, international relations, and economics, we conducted an interdisciplinary study from December 2020 to June 2021, observing how Mexican migration management agencies were dispossessed—mostly de facto, but in some instances, de jure—from key powers when determining migration policy at the turn of 2020 by foreign policy bureaucracies and priorities, in a juncture of extreme external pressure exerted by the United States executive branch. Our motivation was to better understand the implications of such a takeover¹ for migration and foreign policy scenarios in Mexico, but we quickly observed that our research raised serious analytic questions, which point to opportunities for new, relevant research agendas for migration and refugee studies in the Americas at large. We consider our study to be explorative given that it emanates from a particular case that we deem extreme. Yet, we see potential to deepen our insights and develop them further into hypotheses, especially for cases of complex migration profiles and migration policy externalization pressures. In this type of cases the overlap between foreign policy and migration policy (typical for any case in areas such as diaspora policies, but also the issuance of visas) expands in the management of complex migration dynamics.

The foreign policy takeover of key migration management in the face of a “Crisis”

Mexico’s migration profile has changed dramatically since the turn of the 21st century in three major ways: increasing transit migration, declining emigration, and increasing return and immigration. The new profile is made even more complex by increased forced internal displacement, with implications for foreign relations, especially with the United States (Martin et al., 2014). These changes, resulting in a negative net Mexico–U.S. migration rate for more than a decade, challenge the view of Mexico as primarily an emigration country, and of its emigration being mainly economically motivated. Today, Mexico has become a destination for people seeking humanitarian protection and is faced with defining its role in a region characterized by mixed migrant flows.

Adequately addressing the challenges of this new profile requires strong institutions and a comprehensive approach. However, Mexican migration policymaking has moved sluggishly to meet the challenges posed by these new migration dynamics that would require shifting attention to the integration needs of returnees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants. On top of this slow reaction, policy backsliding since 2019 is evident. From having created (at least on paper) a comprehensive agenda for migration policy (under the Programa Especial de Migración) between 2014 and 2018, Mexican authorities reduced their scope to focus on deterrence and containment of migration. Key in this chain of events was the takeover of migration competences by foreign policy officials, sparked by the external shock of pressure posed by the United States to control and reduce the passage of migrants (Camarena, 2021) and officialized by the Mexican President’s creation of a “special commission to look after migration” (López Obrador, 2019). This pressure reached a peak under the last years of the Donald Trump presidency.

The meager investments that Mexico has made on migration management, and only in the heavily overburdened asylum system, buckle under the compound challenge of (1) stopping the inflow of migrants trying to reach the United States; (2) admitting migrants back under the U.S. Migrant Protection Protocols (MPPs) or Title 42;² (3) holding migrants in conditions of uncertainty in highly insecure cities at the northern Mexico border; (4) legitimizing all these methods by arguing that they are sovereign decisions in the name of humanitarian norms; and, (5) using the language of the Global Compact, with the objective of providing for a “safe, orderly and regular” migration. Under the politicization of migration stemming from the United States in the last years, and the specific coercion exerted by President Trump onto Mexico, utter incoherence ensued in Mexico between official policies and discourse and the realities of policy implementation. The displacement of institutions from their mandates left stakeholders—governments, international organizations (IOs), human rights and migrant organizations, and migrants themselves—at mercy of the two Mexican agencies that emerged as de facto migration policy leaders: the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (in charge of negotiating with the United States) and the National Institute for Migration (in charge of migration control). For Mexico, this meant a takeover, which put at stake the possibility of having an integral migration policy based on legitimate own interests but also its role in its proximate and larger neighborhood.

Again, rather than providing an explanatory account of the case or a detailed account of it (already published in a policy report), our objective herein is to piece together the lessons and meta-level reflections toward a new research agenda for migration and refugee studies in the Americas. Concretely, we identify key areas in migration research that can contribute to our comprehension of how migration and foreign policy are interconnected. After we introduce our report, its data, and methods, we make the case of why a project on Mexico’s current migration policy is of interest for the Americas. We then present our proposals for a new research agenda as challenges that fall broadly into two scholarly fields to study the overlap between foreign and migration policy: migration studies, and political science and international relations.

The report, data, and methods

This article presents a meta-analysis of findings of our research project which were included in an open-access report published in October 2021 (Masferrer & Pedroza, 2021). For our project, we collected and worked with mostly primary data and employed a mix of methods of analysis. For conducting specific descriptive statistical analyses, we made information requests from the Mexican Federal Institute of Access to Public Information and used (1) Mexican census data from 2000 to 2020; (2) administrative data from the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance; the Migration Policy Unit, Registry and Identity of Persons; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC); and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS); and (3) estimates and projections from the UN World Population Prospects. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 64 key actors (40 male, 24 female) on the context, causes, and implications of the current takeover we studied. We identified interviewees by their current and previous expertise in migration policy and foreign policymaking in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. These experts stem from realms of (1) academia and think tanks (17: 9 from the United States; 4 from Mexico; 1 each from Italy, the UK, China, and Germany); (2) the bureaucratic apparatus of government agencies (27: 22 from Mexico, 2 from the United States, 2 from Guatemala, and 1 from Honduras); (3) civil society organizations (8: 5 from Mexico, 2 from Guatemala, and 1 from Honduras); (4) international nongovernmental organizations (6: 3 from Mexico, 2 from the United States, and 1 from Switzerland); and (5) others, such as consultancies (3 from Mexico).

We conducted interviews in three formats: 15 persons participated in recorded public discussions, and the remainder were interviewed individually or in small focus groups under Chatham House rules, which grants them anonymity.³ As a basis for the questions that guided the interviews, we limited ourselves to sketching open questions on the migration and foreign policy challenges that Mexico faces and probed for the interviewees’ interpretation. To draft the questions, we reviewed primary and secondary sources: current laws, reports and briefings on migration and foreign policies, official press releases, academic articles and books, and news reports published between December 2020 and June 2021, searching for the term migran-. Most importantly in our methodology, our project was driven by a deliberative process that aimed to make the most of our diverse disciplinary perspectives and the different techniques employed to collect information. For seven months, our team held discussions biweekly to promote interdisciplinary reflection, small workshops on our data (to assess quality and ensure the uniqueness of each analysis), and feedback discussions after the interviews.

A case of complex migration and extreme overlap of migration and foreign policy

Given its geographical position as a site of historical socioeconomic exchanges and also complex migration patterns, Mexico plays a key role in the North and Central American “migration system” (Masferrer et al., 2019). The Mexican migration policy landscape became increasingly complex given large-scale migrant return due to the post-2008 Great Recession and increased U.S. immigration enforcement as well as increasing immigration from the United States. The total foreign-born population in Mexico increased from 500,000 in 2000 to 1.16 million in 2020 yet still comprises less than 1% of the population. The largest immigrant group in Mexico is U.S.–born (751,000).

Despite the volume of returnees and U.S.–born immigrants, political and media attention have focused on other migrant populations that generate more tension: specifically, those from Central America. Mexico and the United States face an increase of arrivals from northern Central America, mainly Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (Cohn et al., 2017). Almost 90 percent of the 3.78 million Central Americans living in the United States in 2019 were from these countries: 1.4 million from El Salvador, 1.1 million from Guatemala, and 746,000 from Honduras (Babich & Batalova, 2021). However, according to Mexican census data, the total population born in these three countries residing in Mexico was less than 100,000. Moreover, these northward flows from Central America are not new, dating back to the 1980s (Castillo, 1990). Politics around these migrant flows increased as the composition changed in the last decade to include an increasing number of unaccompanied children and families (Rodriguez et al., 2019). Most have arrived in the United States (Rodríguez, 2016), but an increasing number seek asylum in Mexico, along with migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, and Cuba as well as newer intercontinental flows from African and Asian states.

In the face of this growingly complex migration profile, Mexican migration legislation experienced a dramatic overhaul toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century,⁴ which modernized it to the progressive and human rights standards set by other Latin American countries that had already decriminalized irregular migration and developed legislative paths to regularization, pioneered by Argentina in 2004 (Melde & Freier, 2022). The region was at the forefront of progressive migration policies in a global comparative perspective. Despite debate among scholars about what prompted each country to adopt such policies (Cantor et al., 2015), the Mexican reform was the result of long-standing internal advocacy of migrant rights organizations and also an event shock of international headlines that created an external political crisis with various Latin American governments: namely, the massacre of 72 Latin American migrants by a criminal group in San Fernando, Tamaulipas in August 2010 (Arias Muñoz & Carmona Arellano, 2012).

According to the resultant 2011 Ley de Migración, Mexican migration policy must be guided by “shared responsibility” between countries of origin and destination, and “hospitality and solidarity” and “congruence with what Mexico guarantees to migrants in its territory and what it claims from other governments for Mexican migrants,” all within an “integral framework, in line with the complexity of migration in Mexico as country of origin, transit, destination and return” (Ley de Migración, 2011). The legislation has been widely praised by a broad audience, with the only immediate critiques that it lacked a proper integration dimension and failed to address transit migration. Both absences are critical in hindsight. A decade later, coercive pressure by the Trump administration on Mexican authorities to choke the flow of migrants going northward provided the critical juncture at which the foreign policy apparatus heavily influenced migration policy.

Because of the slow and painstaking trajectory that Mexico followed to adapt its law and create agencies to address a more complex migration profile, the takeover clearly had momentous consequences for migration policy. Any sense of an integral strategy for migration policy was lost in miscommunication and bureaucratic battles between agencies (Camhaji, 2019). Moreover, foreign policy is guided by the goal of minimizing threats posed by the United States to the current Mexican government’s political agendas (Covarrubias, 2021) and whenever possible, to accentuate the governments’ signature infrastructure and social transfer programs (Yúnez-Naude, 2021; Zepeda, 2021). However, in the extremely asymmetric negotiations between Mexico and the United States, coherence with Mexico’s own regulations took a secondary role (Ferri, 2021), not to mention the well-being and safety of migrants, except for that of Mexican nationals abroad, which is by definition under the purview of the diplomatic apparatus that took control.⁵

A new agenda for revisiting concepts to address the diversity of migrant populations

While by now the linear emigration-settlement paradigm has been overcome in Mexico as in other countries in the region, a growing complexity in the composition of migrant flows challenges us to observe flows moving back-and-forth between internal and international displacement (forced migration), in/voluntary return of individuals, families and unaccompanied minors, and increasing immobility and uncertainty. This challenge is acute in Mexico and its subregion (northern Central America and North America) but seems to be relevant also for South America ever since the exodus of Venezuelan and Haitian migrants began. We now turn into how studying these diverse migrant populations at once can help us delineate new research agendas.

Challenges to studying mixed internal and international migration flows

Much has been written in terms of the blurriness in an old binary that distinguishes migrants from refugees and asylum-seekers (Hamlin, 2021). Criminal and drug-related violence in Mexico has provoked forced internal displacement and a different kind of exodus (Chort & de la Rupelle, 2016), becoming a driver for undocumented migration to the United States (García et al., 2022; Gzesh, 2018). Recent analyses on the impacts of violence and insecurity on internal migration show an increase of forced internal displacement since the Mexican so-called war on drugs started in 2006, with important regional patterns and differences over time (Rodríguez Chávez, 2021a, 2021b). Our findings show how these Mexican migrant populations have been overlooked by policy, although recent displaced flows coexist with other flows and aim for integrating to local societies and border cities in northern Mexico (Barrios de la O, 2016; Velasco Ortiz, 2021). Mexican asylum claims in the United States reached a high of approximately 7,000 applications in 2019, but most are denied (approximately 13% have been accepted from FY2012 to August 2022) (TRAC Immigration, 2022). Mexicans have also sought asylum in Canada (Escalante, 2004; P. Martin et al., 2013), which was stymied by a visa imposition from 2009 to 2016, even if other types of migrant flows continued (Van Haren & Masferrer, 2021).

Mexican and U.S. governments have announced a series of measures for reducing emigration by “addressing the root causes” of migration and investing in development in southern Mexico and Central America (U.S. National Security Council, 2021). Earlier similar efforts have failed, partially because different development plans have failed (García, 2016; Villafuerte Solís, 2014). Further unclear is how mixed-migration flows will respond to these specific development programs and measures, when implemented. However, there are reasons to believe that these programs will fail to deter people from emigrating. For example, scholarship on the migration/development nexus suggests that development increases out-migration in the short term (De Haas, 2007, 2020). To better understand mixed flows of internal and international migration and to understand what potentially might reduce emigration, it is key to combine economic forecasting with evaluating those programs that promote development and investment in low-income areas and high-violence areas (which do not necessarily coincide) in Mexico and Central America that are relevant to the migration dynamics of the region.

It was unclear by the end of our research project how labor markets will be affected by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and how violence and conflict, or the impacts of environmental factors and climate change, will impact emigration patterns and trends or migrant integration processes in the Americas, even if many research participants speculated about these issues.⁶ Projecting mixed-migration flows has been widely acknowledged as challenging. Although recent studies are working on how to forecast forced migration (Muttarak, 2021) as well as studying other demographic aspects of it (Hugo et al., 2018), projecting mixed migration in the region is still pending. More broadly, as we mention earlier, this calls for the need to rethink the link between internal and international migration. This has been highlighted for the Mexican case through return migration (King & Skeldon, 2010; Lozano-Asencio et al., 1997), but now has become more important in the face of new drivers for migration, particularly linked to forced forms of migration due to violence, insecurity, and deportation.

The challenge to observe beyond the emigrant/immigrant divide: Return migration and other migrant groups

The increasingly blurry distinction among emigrants, returnees, and immigrants between Mexico and the United States highlights the importance of studying binational citizens and north-to-south flows. Emigration declined dramatically post-2008 (Villarreal, 2014), but most of the 10% of the Mexican-born population living abroad (11.2 million in 2019) reside in the United States. According to Pew Research Center’s most recent estimates, of the 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2017, almost one-half (4.95 million) are Mexican, and the vast majority of them are long-term U.S. residents (one-half have lived there more than 17 years) with limited rights (López et al., 2021). Not only they fear the risk of deportation (Passel & Cohn, 2018): in 2021, half of Latino immigrants and a third of U.S.-born Latinos worry they, a family member or someone close could be deported (Moslimani, 2022). Since 2008, thousands were pushed to return due to the economic impacts of the 2008 U.S. Great Recession and the increase of deportations and immigration enforcement (Massey et al., 2015). Many returnees are joined by U.S.–born family members. As a result, the largest immigrant population in Mexico is U.S.–born (751,000 of 1.17 million), including one-half million minors, most living with a Mexican parent (Masferrer et al., 2019). Two of every three U.S.–born minors are dual nationals according to 2020 Mexican census data: in other words, have both Mexican and U.S. nationality and are legally citizens of both countries.

For a new research agenda, this means not only revisiting family and child migration (Boehm, 2016; Caldwell, 2019; Hamilton & Bylander, 2021; Zúñiga & Saucedo, 2019) and transnationalism (Waldinger, 2021) but also building a stronger dialog among migration, family, and citizenship studies (Mateos, 2017) and understanding new meanings of dual nationality (Harpaz, 2019). Recent scholarship has already shed light on challenges of returnees and U.S.–born immigrants on the educational system (Jacobo-Suárez, 2017; Medina & Menjívar, 2015; Zúñiga & Hamann, 2015), accessing health services and social security (Borja et al., 2021), and integrating into the Mexican labor market (Denier & Masferrer, 2020). However, a productive research path is to delve into the long-term processes involved within these dynamics. For example, within sociology and population studies, deportation and new forms of return migration call for understanding new forms of family separation and disruptive events for family life (Cardoso et al., 2016; Dreby, 2015). Within demography, the unexpected migration of children found in 2010 data defined changes in the estimations in U.S. and Mexican censuses (García-Guerrero, 2011; O’Hare, 2015) and has still important implications for population projections and demographic estimations in work. For policymaking, this calls for thinking new forms of family reunification procedures or legal channels for children and family to migrate.

In a larger regional scope, what we discuss in this section applies to other contexts where mixed–migrant status families are on the rise: for example, Colombian returnees and Venezuelan-born children in Colombia, or U.S.–born children in Central America. The arrival of Haitians and their children born in Brazil or Chile during 2021, or births in Mexico among the decades-old Haitian diaspora (Yates, 2021) will only increase the number of mixed migrant families from increasingly diverse origins. This illustrates how immigration policies and migration drivers in other countries of the Americas impact regional migration patterns, lack of access to legal channels for migration may spur future migration, and mixed families are influenced by complex migrant trajectories.

Observing the increase in involuntary immobility and uncertainty

Our study illustrates the importance of acknowledging a reality of increasing involuntary immobility for rethinking fundamental migration studies frameworks. Mexico has become a site where the “age of involuntary immobility” (Carling, 2002) becomes an observable reality. As thousands of asylum seekers make their way to or through Mexico, an increasing number of obstacles including borders, bureaucracies, and pandemic-imposed restrictions turn mobility trajectories into dangerous journeys (Mainwaring & Brigden, 2016; Vogt, 2018), prolonged involuntary waiting (Ceja Cárdenas, 2022; Jasso Vargas, 2021; Miranda & Silva Hernández, 2022), and thousands of people “stuck in motion” (Frank-Vitale, 2020).

More fundamentally, this new reality compels us to reconsider how migration territories are experienced, labeled, and contested: (1) rethinking notions of origin, destination, and transit given local dynamics (i.e., town size, political climate, assistance capacities, and economic opportunities); (2) how these factors impact broader mobility dynamics; and (3) how knowledge of the local context can shape mobility and immobility processes as well as interactions with local communities (Gil Everaert, 2020; Turnbull, 2016). On the one hand, since 2016, many of those seeking to request asylum in the United States remain trapped at Mexico’s northern border as a result of policies such as metering, MPPs, and COVID-19 restrictions (Leutert et al., 2018; Miranda & Silva Hernández, 2022; Isacson, 2022; París-Pombo & Díaz Carnero, 2020). Forced to wait in some of the most dangerous places in Mexico, cities are underprepared for receiving and providing shelter and assistance (Gil Everaert, 2020). On the other hand, 7 of 10 people seeking refugee status in Mexico are stuck at Mexico’s southern border, in some of the poorest states of the country, with their mobility constrained due to restrictions of the Mexican refugee legal framework (Gil Everaert 2020). Therefore, the concept of “time since arrival”—key for theories and studies of integration processes—acquires an utterly different meaning. We are challenged to account for new temporal, spatial, and legal limbos.

Analytically, these challenges invite us to delve into integration or inclusion practices beyond national or regional legal frameworks and policies (Velasco Ortiz, 2021). They compel us to pay attention to border spaces and binational communities, and to the unlikely alliances that shape moments of waiting, including concepts such as “migration industry” (Hernández-León, 2005) and “migration brokers” and “migration-facilitating capital” (Kim, 2018). This dimension includes a critical examination of phenomena such as smuggling (Sanchez & Zhang, 2020), restrictive migratory policy, humanitarian assistance (McNevin & Missbach, 2018), and the intersections between mobilities and inequality. As permanent protection is replaced by temporary protection globally (Voutira & Doná, 2007), concepts such as “liminal legality” (Menjívar, 2006) and “legal violence” (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012) prove useful for analyzing the status shifts characterizing the lived reality of asylum-seekers.

If the restrictive migratory policy turns and, in particular, externalization of migration policies continues south, observations from Mexico will be salient for other states, particularly Guatemala and other northern Central American countries. The restrictive turn is relevant also in the United States among those registered under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Temporary Protected Status, or other uncertain legal statuses (Menjívar, 2020; Patler et al., 2019). Externalization, on the other hand, already carries a long history, which we acknowledge given that many studies have focused on “the new spatiality of the border” (Rumford, 2006, p. 156), “the delocalization of the border” (Bigo, 2002; Salter, 2004), “the externalization of the border” (Casas-Cortés et al., 2010; Casas-Cortés et al., 2015; Cobarrubias, 2020), and “the vertical border” (Soriano-Miras, 2017). However, a more fundamental point about externalization that our research highlights is the growing relevance of foreign policy in managing migration, which bears relevance for immobility and uncertainty of migrant populations.

Agenda for observing the overlap between migration policy and foreign policy in political science and international relations

The challenge of differentiating overlaps of migration policy and foreign policy

Our study provides evidence from an extreme case of power asymmetries that constrict the sovereignty of weaker countries to determine their own migration policies, but also how two-level politics matter inside a country to tip the balance among agencies in the management of migration. We had hypothesized that the overlap of policy areas we studied would lead to an impoverishment of both policy areas. In the Mexican context, migration policy became subordinate to foreign policy, which could have meant a net gain for foreign policy bureaucracies: that is, by subordinating migration policy to its objectives, foreign policy would gain leverage over internal/domestic agendas. This was an attractive option for the Mexican government, which had a weak migration policy agenda in that it makes migration policy, usually a very complex area of policymaking, easier to steer. Moreover, foreign policy—an area that changes significantly from one government to the next—gains purpose and scope from occupying migration policy (Covarrubias, 2006, 2019). These dynamics are not universal but are prevalent in countries trapped in dyadic or regional hegemonic migration policy dynamics, particularly through externalized migration controls (Smith in this special issue). In more symmetric constellations, and where governments have an interest in developing comprehensively devised migration policies around socioeconomic, demographic, and political goals, alignment with foreign policy objectives need not necessarily dictate subordination. Still, the structures of the two policy areas will likely still make a difference in the approaches, with foreign policy bureaucracies being usually more hierarchical (Reslow, 2015); see the upcoming section “The challenge of managing not migration, but narratives of crisis in the face of regional migration dynamics.”

The Mexican case throws light on countries that emerge as “regulators” of migration by virtue of their geography or perceived policy interests. As shown in our report, Mexican policymakers argue that the country is becoming a “regulator of migration” as an attempt to square the circle and justify how the (seemingly illegal or extralegal) measures to control and contain migration cohere with Mexico’s legal commitment to its policies on paper (Masferrer & Pedroza, 2021). Norman’s research (Norman, 2016, 2020) suggests that by taking on the role of regulators, countries that shift from having a primarily emigration profile to complex profiles seek to acquire regional leverage: They present themselves as interlocutor of bigger powers and as rule makers for smaller ones. The reframing strategy also allows governments to steer away from the stigmatized category of “transit countries” (Düvell, 2012). Migration policy as a foreign affairs issue has been studied for the relation between the EU and third (nonmember and non-accession) countries (Betts & Milner, 2007; Lavenex & Schimmelfennig, 2009; Wunderlich, 2012)), but delving into the intricacies of the EU and its policymaking modes, the resulting explanatory models become too specific to the case (Reslow & Vink, 2015). For the North American context, both geography and a strong history of migration force the United States and Mexico to address migration together, but the high power asymmetry between the two countries and dependence of one on the other make for an extreme, if not necessarily unique, dyad. Our research suggested that in the region, Mexico is eager to take a regulator role, as proven by its continued implementation of immigration enforcement, despite receding U.S. pressure. Guatemala seeks the same, as demonstrated by its discourse on “walls of prosperity” and the active engagement in the construction of returnee and migrant detention facilities with USAID support (Morales, 2021; Ramos, 2021). The circumstances of both cases suggest that the expectation of impoverishment of migration policy when it is subordinated to foreign policy is true, even if there were expected gains in the form of a more prominent role in regional affairs. The question might also be productive for understanding migration policy change in other Latin American countries that have in recent years acquired increasingly complex migration profiles. Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Panama come to mind as cases in point. In cases of such complex profiles, a takeover of migration policy by foreign policy will make the former inevitably narrower via different mechanisms: the activities of institutions designed for wider migration mandates skew under the foreign policy focus; horizontal dynamics that should be in the scope of migration policy become streamlined under more vertical decision-making; and finally, some migrant groups are overlooked—for example, internally displaced persons. Unless based on broadly consulted and legitimized strategies for dealing comprehensively with migration policy, foreign policy bureaucracies can be expected to reduce the focus of migration management and overlook potential costs and gains of migration: for instance, those deriving from demographic dynamics and regional labor market needs.

Refining theoretical lenses to study the administration of migration policies

Research agendas in the Americas can make significant gains from investigating the administrative dimension of migration policies (Briggs, 2007). We use the term administration and not management because we want to emphasize the classic understanding of formal bureaucratic structures rather than the diffuse notion of management, which might include other actors. Although some migration policy experts consider bureaucracies as a factor when explaining policy changes on the base of foundational case and comparative studies (Fitzgerald & Cook Martin, 2015; Margheritis, 2016), these perspectives can be further strengthened in Mexico and Latin America more broadly. Does the allocation of migration policy to ministries of different kinds (foreign affairs, population, welfare, interior) make an observable policy difference across countries, or can we test the effects of changes in bureaucratic authority on policy, as some have observed for the EU (Lavenex & Kunz, 2008; Zaun, 2018)? How prone are the Americas to a pendular movement of migration and foreign policies, particularly considering the concentration of executive authority due to their presidential systems? Our study suggests that in contrast to other policy fields, such as energy, health, education, or antidiscrimination, foreign policy tends to be more centralized due to its professional bureaucracy. We wonder whether a takeover of migration policy by foreign policy authorities, by virtue of the very characteristics of these policy fields, will generally mean subordination. From a methodological point of view, we consider that the tools in the field of public policy remain mostly unused, but they could serve us well to understand the structural differences between policy fields in administering migrant flows and the degree to which a takeover of migration policy by a foreign policy bureaucracy can become entrenched, as compared with takeovers from other ministries: most commonly, those related to internal security (Geddes, 2005). Two further additions would be to consider the role of NGOs in steering, supporting, and implementing policies to manage migration different levels (Caponio & Jones-Correa, 2018; Panizzon & Van Riemsdijk, 2019; Rother & Steinhilper, 2019).

The challenge of managing not migration, but narratives of migration crisis in the face of regional migration dynamics

Having a team that included demographers and discussions with demography experts, our analysis of the evidence at hand invited us to deeply question narratives of crises that obscure systemic flows and prevent routinized policy responses to expectable migration flows (including spikes). Connected to this, we think that it would be productive to revisit ideas of region and regionalism, particularly for what they mean in terms of mobility management in well-developed migration systems.

Our project sought from the outset to look beyond narratives of migration crises. Is it warranted to call “crises” situations that have become recurrent and protracted? Like several others (Bhambra, 2017; Cantat, 2016; Kumar Rajaram, 2015; Menjívar et al., 2019), we see the formulation of crisis narratives as a device to legitimize extralegal measures to deal with what is actually a normal and projected movement of people in the region. Simply put, crisis narratives are too recurrent to be credible. Since 2014, they have routinely been revived to draw attention to periods of heightened yet foreseeable migration that in the face of chronically insufficient administrative capabilities, create humanitarian emergencies. Crisis narratives serve to legitimize radical takeovers whereby the interests of one policy field are imposed on others and whereby the responsibility for “crisis” is imposed on migrants themselves.

In trying to dissect the regional component of the case, our research also makes us question whether geography is the main determinant of a region or whether a region is rather defined by the existence of a “(migration) system” that connects territories with complex multilevel dynamics. An analytical spot between these two concepts could be mobility regionalism, but does this presume a definition of regionalism that necessarily includes a web of multilateral institutions? We are challenged to think of such regional institutions and agreements (formal or informal) as encompassing not only regular migration and professional mobility but other kinds of mobility and, more importantly, the mechanisms that manage resilient migration flows, which often mix intra- and extra-regional flows (IADB & OECD, 2021). These questions can substantively inform new research on Mexico-Central America, Mexico-Latin America, Mexico-the Caribbean, and Mexico-the United States-Canada, but are also relevant for dynamics in South America and other regions.

Final thoughts

In this article, we present various pathways for a new research agenda in migration and refugee studies that arises from the theoretical and methodological challenges we encountered while studying a case of a state with a highly complex migration profile where the overlap of migration and foreign policies is extreme. First, we focus on the complexity because current migration patterns in Mexico and the North America-Central America migration system include migrant populations with diverse motivations and heterogeneous characteristics. This challenges the easy taxonomy in migration studies between emigration country versus immigration/settlement country (Pedroza, 2020).

The current policy emphasis on containment, externalization, and deterrence in the case we studied prevents policymakers (but also scholars) from adequately dealing with (and characterizing) migrants from mixed flows; neglects return migration and flows going south with their long trajectories and long-term patterns; and hinders us from observing significant new phenomena, such as increasing involuntary immobility and the effects that these will have on mobile and nonmobile populations. Second, the overlap of migration policy and foreign policy that we explore suggests productive research paths that can be explored from political science angles. One is a more rigorous theoretical differentiation of types of overlaps of migration policy with other policy fields, including a refinement of theoretical lenses to study the administration of migration policies. This focus should render robust results if we manage to compare across countries with varying international power constellations. Another path is to strengthen our critical perspectives vis-à-vis the use of crises narratives to describe what we know to be migration patterns and systems, also questioning whether such patterns and systems add up to new concepts of regionalism.

Authors’ contributions

Claudia Masferrer and Luicy Pedroza co-coordinated the research project and contributed equally to the conceptualization and writing of this article. All other authors are members of the research team, their names appear in alphabetical order, and contributed to this article clarifying arguments made in the subsections. We thank Fernando Arnábar for his research assistance throughout the research project.

Conflicts of interest/competing interests

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment

We thank Fernando Arnábar for his research assistance throughout the research project.

Additional information

Funding

This article is a product of the research project “The intersection of Foreign and Migration Policy in Mexico Today” which was funded by the Open Society Foundations.

Notes

1 We use “takeover” to explicitly refer to the displacement of responsibilities that suddenly fell under the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. We are aware it is a strong word, but we believe other words such as reordering, or reorganization do not convey the degree of extreme overlap that occurred for the migration policy areas of migration control and refugee policy, on which we focus here.

2 Title 42 refers to a U.S. public health disposition that blocks entry and allows expedited return through land crossing points as a measure to control the spread of communicable diseases.

3 For transparency purposes, by request, we may share details of the dates of the interviews or interview guides, but we cannot reveal specific ranks or institutions as to prevent giving away identities.

4 The two main pieces of legislation are the 2011 Migration Law (Ley de Migración; see http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/ref/lmigra/LMigra_orig_25may11.pdf) and the 2011 Refugee Law (Ley sobre Refugiados, Protección Complementaria y Asilo Político; see https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/211049/08_Ley_sobre_Refugiados__Protecci_n_Complementaria_y_Asilo_Pol_tico.pdf).

5 With 50 consulates across the United States, the Mexican consular network has remained highly flexible and trained in local level negotiations to secure protection and a wide range of services to the Mexican migrant community, from the legal and documentation services to services that reach far into atypical social dimensions, including health, education, culture, language, and psychosocial services (Pedroza et al., 2016).

6 For a public discussion on the challenges of projecting international migration, watch the video recording of our online webinar (https://migdep.colmex.mx/politica-exterior-migratoria.html). The United Nations has recently published the 2022 World Population Prospects wherein it recognizes how challenging international migration is but assumes short-term impacts of the pandemic (UN, 2022).