Mexican Asylum Research Articles

Envisioning a world without prisons: group concept mapping as a collective strategy for justice and dignity

ABSTRACTPeople with lived experiences of violence have minimal opportunities to address policies that affect them, which poses challenges to producing relevant results beyond academia. In this paper, we ask: in what ways can groups formulate a collective plan to address policy decisions that harm them? We used a framework called group concept mapping (GCM) with Central American and Mexican asylum seekers (named Migrantes Unidos), who are committed to ending the use of ankle monitors and other forms of detention in immigration enforcement. They identified distinct actions and group values, providing mutual support to each other, developing leadership skills, and receiving strength and knowledge to navigate the immigration system as top priorities. Our field work also showed how GCM participation led to actual subsequent political activism. Our results uncover new attitudes and ideas that add more depth to immigrant political behavior and advocacy. While our results demonstrate that GCM is a useful method to center voices of impacted community members’ ideas for change, we also argued that academics and their partners must value reciprocity regardless of the method or framework chosen to answer empirical questions.

Durable Displacement and the Protracted Search for Solutions: Promising Programs and Strategies

In March 2022, the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) released a request for papers (RFP) for a special issue of its Journal on Migration and Human Security (JMHS), devoted to identifying solutions to situations of protracted displacement. The co-editors selected 10 papers for this special issue by authors from a dozen countries, including two refugees. The papers cover several large populations in protracted displacement, as well as other less-publicized groups. The former include: Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh; Internally displaced persons (IDPs) living on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan; Afghans in Pakistan since the 1970s; Syrians in Turkey since 2011; Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Sudanese, Somali, and Iranian refugees in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon; IDPs and Venezuelan migrants in Colombia; Somali refugees in Ethiopia and Kenya; Central Americans seeking protection in Mexico and the United States; and IDPs in Northern Mexico who have been displaced and stranded due to violence, deportation, and US and Mexican asylum policies. This paper introduces and integrates the themes and recommendations from this special issue. Section 1 provides a short overview of the scope, growth, and consequences of protracted displacement. Section 2 situates this phenomenon in a legal context and examines traditional and complementary solutions to displacement. Section 3 outlines topline findings, recommendations, and cross-cutting themes from the special issue. Section 4 offers conclusions and final reflections.

México en el Cono Sur: asilo diplomático y lecciones de su práctica en los años setenta

For the traditional Mexican asylum policy, the 1970s proved significant by confrontation with other realities. They were also significant because of the challenges that diplomacy had to overcome with the existing instrument (Convention on Diplomatic Asylum of 1954). They were also significant because of the various perceptions of risk of the protection applicants, as well as for the particular interests of the Mexican State regarding its peers in Southern Latin America. An approach to the experiences of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay makes it possible to observe considerations and variables presented to the same asylum State, Mexico, from political realities that appeared similar and simultaneous but that were not so according to the facts.From writing the history of its distinctive aspects, the article observes some core issues of the norm regulated in 1954. From this observation, it will be possible to determine ways of interpretation and its application. This journey will lead to a possible explanation of the tensions between the norm and the facts of the asylum, highlighting that the former did not fit the circumstances in which it was applied. The final reflection is potentially useful in the light of a new and diverse present, where protagonists in the decision making are located, both in the (re)elaboration of the inter-American legal instruments as in the national ones. But these experiences should not be ignored in the formation of the diplomatic corps of the various chancelleries.

Understanding the Rise of Mexican Migration to Canada

This article shows that the number of people seeking asylum in Canada from Mexico continues and has increased at an exponential rate. Canada has become a favorite destination for Mexican asylum seekers while Canada accepts their claims at an alarmingly low rate compared to those from other nations. We argue that the reason Mexicans choose Canada to claim refugee status is due to Canada’s long history of open immigration policies and especially its economic and temporary labor agreements. These policies give the impression to Mexicans that they are welcome in Canada. This proved to be untrue when Canada changed its immigration and refugee policies in response, specifically, to the overwhelming number of Mexican refugee claims.

Mexican asylum during the spanish civil war: a mission carried out by three mexican diplomats (1834-1940)

Este artículo se refiere a la diplomacia mexicana en el periodo entreguerras comouna etapa caracterizada por una actitud de solidaridad y cooperación del EstadoMexicano y sus representantes. Ejemplo de esta actitud fue la política de asilo porparte del gobierno mexicano tras la Guerra Civil Española, que resulto en la recepciónde 20,000 refugiados españoles en territorio mexicano y la protecciónmiles de españoles en territorio francés. Por lo tanto, tras considerar la relevanciade la diplomacia mexicana durante este periodo, la presente investigación se detuvoa cuestionarse cual fue la incidencia que tuvieron los diplomáticos en lasdecisiones de política exterior relacionadas al asilo español. Mediante el estudiode cartas y telegramas entre el jefe de Estado y los diplomáticos, así como extractosde historia oral y resultados históricos se realizo un análisis cualitativo queconfirma que los diplomáticos en cuestión condicionaron las decisiones de políticaexterior e hicieron posible la acogida y protección de miles de españoles quehuyeron de su hogar en busca de libertad.

Gendered Violence and Indigenous Mexican Asylum Seekers: Expert Witnessing as Ethnographic Engagement

The intertwined theoretical contributions of this article are: 1) how to interpret the lives of indigenous women asylum seekers in relation to structural vulnerability in western Oaxaca, Mexico, and in the asylum seeking process in the US, and 2) why expert witnessing should be considered as a form of ethnographic engagement. My discussion entails a detailed analysis of the cases of two female Triqui asylum seekers and their connections with local, regional, and larger state and economic structures and narratives of militarized gender violence. Finally, I discuss the ways that ethnographies as expert objects and expert witness reports harness both evidence and narrative through an interpretive framework.

Living Outside the Gender Box in Mexico: Testimony of Transgender Mexican Asylum Seekers.

To explore preimmigration experiences of violence and postimmigration health status in male-to-female transgender individuals (n = 45) from Mexico applying for asylum in the United States. We used a document review process to examine asylum declarations and psychological evaluations of transgender Mexican asylum seekers in the United States from 2012. We coded documents in 2013 and 2014 using NVivo, a multidisciplinary team reviewed them, and then we analyzed them for themes. Mexican transgender asylum applicants experienced pervasive verbal, physical, and sexual abuse from multiple sources, including family, school, community, and police. Applicants also experienced discrimination in school and in the workplace. Applicants immigrated to the United States to escape persistent assaults and threats to their life. Applicants suffered health and psychological effects from their experiences in Mexico that affected opportunities in the United States for employment, education, and social inclusion. Additional social protections for transgender individuals and antidiscrimination measures in Mexican schools and workplaces are warranted as are increased mental health assessment and treatment, job training, and education services for asylum seekers in the United States.

The Endriago subject and the dislocation of state attribution in human rights discourse: the case of Mexican asylum claims in Canada

Mexico is arguably immersed in an unprecedented wave of violence in which drug cartels and law enforcement officials at times work together in cases of forced disappearance, kidnapping, execution, torture, persecution and other atrocities considered violations of the most basic human rights, including the right to life and to physical integrity. However, these atrocities are only classified as human rights violations if they can be unequivocally attributed to the state; this is not always possible. Using Foucault’s idea of governmentality and Valencia’s concept of the Endriago as a subjectivity emerging from the specific governmentalisation of the Mexican state, this article examines how hybrid agents in Mexico – law enforcement officials working for criminal gangs or criminals working for the state – serve to subvert common understandings of attribution and responsibility in the state-centric discourse of human rights in general, and of the right of asylum in the specific case of Canada, a country to which thousands of Mexicans have fled.

Problems Faced by Mexican Asylum Seekers in the United States

Violence in Mexico rose sharply in response to President Felipe Calderón's military campaign against drug cartels which began in late 2006. As a consequence, the number of Mexicans who have sought asylum in the United States has grown significantly. In 2013, Mexicans made up the second largest group of defensive asylum seekers (those in removal proceedings) in the United States, behind only China (EOIR 2014b). Yet between 2008 and 2013, the grant rate for Mexican asylum seekers in immigration court fell from 23 percent to nine percent (EOIR 2013, 2014b). This paper examines—from the perspective of an attorney who represented Mexican asylum seekers on the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas—the reasons for low asylum approval rates for Mexicans despite high levels of violence in and flight from Mexico from 2008 to 2013. It details the obstacles faced by Mexican asylum seekers along the US-Mexico border, including placement in removal proceedings, detention, evidentiary issues, narrow legal standards, and (effectively) judicial notice of country conditions in Mexico. The paper recommends that asylum seekers at the border be placed in affirmative proceedings (before immigration officials), making them eligible for bond. It also proposes increased oversight of immigration judges.

The Politics of Death and Asylum Discourse

In 2006, Mexico’s then-president Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking. The human toll included the loss of over 95,000 lives, the forced disappearance of more than 27,000 people, and the displacement of 2 percent of the Mexican population. This article offers an explanation of how persecution and exile are specific effects of the governmentalization of the Mexican state. This governmentalization includes the shared use, by criminals and authorities, of techniques for dominating the population and controlling the conduct of citizens through the practices of death, that is, by necropolitics. The article goes on to discuss how the objectives, rationality, and governmentalization of the state serve to dislocate concepts of the legal discourse of asylum in such a way that its truth politics exclude Mexican asylum seekers, thereby constituting American migration biopolitics from the periphery.

セクシュアリティとトラウマの動員

Recently, the situation for queer asylees, who have been or could be persecuted on account of their non-normative sexuality, sexual identity or sexual orientation in their countries of origin, has been drawing attention as an important human rights issue. Based on interview data, this paper argues that queer Mexican asylum seekers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States may constitute a specific group in the asylum-migration nexus, and it examines how the members of this group become asylees. Discussing the narrative construction in part of the asylum application process, the paper aims to discover the nuanced reality and meaning of asylum for those asylees who have trans-national mobility and mixed motives in moving. In this legal process, a representation of non-normative gender performance as a fixed sexual identity and a traumatized body can be seen as a valid reason for qualifying for asylum.

Problems Faced by Mexican Asylum Seekers in the United States

Violence in Mexico rose sharply in response to President Felipe Calderon's military campaign against drug cartels which began in late 2006. As a consequence, the number of Mexicans who have sought ...

Mexican Asylum Seekers to Canada: The Door Closes

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsPatricia M. MartinPatricia Martin is Associate professor of Geography at the Université de Montréal. She is currently conducting research on various forms of social and political violence in Oaxaca.Annie LapalmeAnnie Lapalme is completing a master’s thesis in geography at the Université de Montréal that focuses on Mexican asylum seekers in Canada. She is a member of migrant justice advocacy groups in Montreal.