Mexico's "Humanitarian Visa" and Undocumented Central American Families

Background and Purpose:

Responding to the 2014 surge of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving at the US-Mexico border, following pressure from the United States, Mexico announced an immigration enforcement initiative known as "Plan Frontera Sur." Through this initiative, the United States has exported and extended the violence of immigration enforcement, so prevalent along the US-Mexico border, south through Mexico. While such "border externalization," or the transnational restructuring of bordering practices beyond national boundary lines, has generated increasingly precarious conditions for families migrating undocumented through southern Mexico, this paper complicates the idea of border externalization as essentially exclusionary. Through an examination of Mexico’s “humanitarian visa,” which allows individual to regularize their migration status if they are victims of a crime while migrating through Mexico, I discuss how entanglements of both exclusion and inclusion are integral to frameworks of border externalization across the globe and the implications of such entanglements for care workers. 

Methods:

Findings are drawn from 14 months of ethnographic research (8 hours a day, 4-6 days a week) in and around various migrant shelters throughout southern and central Mexico between June 2014 and May 2016.  As a shelter volunteer, I have conducted intake interviews, accompanied migrants through the application process for humanitarian visas, participated in team meetings and trainings with shelter workers, and assisted with day-to-day shelter operations. In addition to semi-structured interviews with migrants, shelter workers, and transit community residents, I also followed 5 migrants long-term beyond shelters, both in-person and remotely, as they continued north, returned south, and/or settled within Mexico.

Findings:

Within a framework of border externalization, I conceptualize Mexico’s humanitarian visa as a “temporal border” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 131) that regulates the time and speed of migration for Central American migrants. As transiting undocumented through Mexico has become increasingly difficult, more and more migrants view the “humanitarian visa” as a reasonable mechanism for moving more safely through Mexico. Accordingly, in addition to navigating militarized territorial boundaries and exploitative smuggling networks, migrant survivors of violence in Mexico who decide to seek out a humanitarian visa suffer another kind of border. Migrants navigate lengthy processing times, contradictory bureaucratic and legal requirements, and the pressures associated with both relying on and supporting family members who remain back home or are living in the United States. The humanitarian visa process also presents challenges for care workers accompanying migrant survivors, who seek long-term legal justice while also respecting migrant survivors’ immediate needs, which often involves dropping the prosecution of offenders when migrants continue north.

Conclusions and Implications:

This paper points to how mechanisms of migrant inclusion, characterized by Mexico’s humanitarian visa, exist along a continuum with exclusionary immigration enforcement practices, characterized by “Plan Frontera Sur,” within a broader border externalization trends across the globe.  Recognizing how humanitarian forms of migrant inclusion entangle with exclusionary frameworks is crucial for social work practitioners, policymakers, and care workers, both domestically and internationally, as they balance broad-based social justice and the immediate needs of families fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries.