“Remain in Mexico”: changes in the American migratory context

Abstract

The Mexican context is key to the study of the diversity of migratory movements in the Americas. This article adopts a multidisciplinary approach to analyze how state actors, and in particular the governments of United States and Mexico, produce certain actions that directly affect the case study presented here, namely migration from Guatemala to Mexico. But it is essential to provide an in-depth analysis from the sociology of migration to understand how Guatemalan migrants benefit from choosing to migrate to Mexico without continuing the journey to the United States. This phenomenon represents a transformation for Mexico in the context of migration. Thus, the country can be considered as a state of origin, transit and destination at the same time. The political narrative of both the recent US administrations of Trump and Biden, as well as that of the current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) should be considered as one of the causal factors of the deviation of Guatemalan migration. While in the US certain immigration restriction measures such as Title eight and Title forty-two exemplify institutional strictness with respect to immigration, on the other hand AMLO instrumentalizes solidarity towards migrants to obtain certain advantages, often linked to the Mexican economy. And while in the polarized US society migrants are often unwelcome, the humanitarianism of the Mexican population contributes to immigration from Guatemala. This latter migratory movement, which is defined as intra-South as it corresponds to two countries belonging to the Global South within Latin America, Mexico and Guatemala, also results from sociolinguistic and cultural affinities that unite Mexicans and Guatemalans. Based on both the US academic literature and related neoliberal perspectives, which analyze the migration phenomenon in terms of the problems it poses for the United States, as well as on the humanitarian and Latin Americanist theories linked to migration studies produced in Latin America, an analysis of the initial causes and reasons for the continuation of the Guatemalan migration deviation is proposed. In this way, it is possible to understand in depth what leads Guatemalans to settle in Mexico and what are the differences with the traditional South-North migration to the United States. Initially, the article defines what the theoretical framework of the study is, in order to show how the differences in migration studies, depending on their origin, provide different interpretations of migration in Latin America. Specifically, the southern border of Mexico is often analyzed, both by institutions and academia, as the main cause of the migratory pressure that will later be created at the border with the United States. On the contrary, as it is introduced in this article, this same southern border has been studied, especially by the academic literature of Mexico, for the great contribution offered to the Mexican economy by Guatemalan cross-border workers. For this purpose, historical, sociological and linguistic elements bring together the two countries, Mexico and Guatemala, resulting in an intra-South migratory movement that lives from a mutual support from both populations. It is useful to highlight how Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as discussed in the second section of this article, has embraced a rhetoric with respect to migration that has come to be positioned as diametrically opposed to that seen in the United States, particularly with Donald Trump. In fact, AMLO has put forward a narrative of acceptability and solidarity with respect to migrants, relying on an emancipatory and unified Latin American vision, which has impacted Mexican society. This article does not analyze the migration practice of Mexican institutions, but rather highlights how Mexican society reacted to the anti-immigrant narrative, spread by Donald Trump, with strong solidarity to the migrants arriving in Mexican territory. This aspect is intended to be proposed here as one of the main reasons that motivate Guatemalans to stay in Mexico instead of heading to the United States. The contribution of Guatemalan labor, often low cost and informal, is one of those advantages that AMLO and Mexican migration authorities perceive in allowing this continuous border crossing between Mexico and Guatemala. It must also be assumed, however, that the cross-border migratory movement from Guatemala to Mexico has its roots in the past, when Mexico's annexation of previously Guatemalan territories, such as the state of Chiapas, did not restrict movements at the border, but rather increased the connection between Guatemala and Mexico. And that is why the third part of this article discusses a very particular condition encountered by Guatemalans upon emigrating, either definitively or temporally, to the southern states of Mexico. Guatemalans may not necessarily feel the condition of being migrants when they are in southern Mexico, where the shared language, way of life, and reliance on the informal economy effectively allow them to not completely alienate their habits once they migrate. In addition, socially important actors in the region, such as the Catholic Church, are relevant for solidarity with migrants, as well as social groups such as Las Patronas that spontaneously organize activities in support of migrants who are in Mexico. Mexican institutions themselves take part in facilitating the intra-South migration movement from Guatemala to Mexico. In this regard, the case that has been analyzed in this article is the so-called Regional Visitor's Card, or TVR for its acronyms in Spanish. This disposition implemented by the National Migration Institute of Mexico, was seen here as one of the incentives for migration from Guatemala to Mexico. While certain bureaucratic initiatives implemented by Mexican authorities would serve to fulfill US demands regarding the increase of migration control in the southern border, the permissiveness to have Guatemalans establish themselves in Mexico benefits Mexican authorities as much as migrants. The Remain in Mexico Protocol, signed by the governments of the United States and Mexico, and its points that were described in the article, has itself had a major effect in the deviation of the Guatemalan migration movement. Lastly, although no specific quantitative or numerical evidence is available to determine whether, in the Guatemalan case, the intra-South migratory movement from Guatemala to Mexico is higher or lower than the South-North migration to the United States, in the final remarks of this article it is concluded that there has been a reiteration in this migratory choice, to stay in Mexico, by Guatemalan migrants. And in this regard, the continuation of migration restrictions in the US during both the Trump and Joe Biden administrations is meant to be proposed here as a cause of a future continuation of the intra-South migration movement from Guatemala to Mexico.