OPINION

PART 3

Third in a seven-part series

By ARIEL G. RUIZ SOTO

Shifts in flows of migrants across the Western Hemisphere since 2019 have underscored Mexico’s central role in regional migration management, cementing its new identity as a country of emigration, transit and destination. Where before these three migration pillars were understood separately, today they intersect and interact with each other, requiring simultaneous policy consideration.

Anchored in promoting safe, orderly and legal migration, Mexico’s migration policy framework under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration has sought to target the root causes of irregular migration and prioritize legal pathways from a human rights approach. But as irregular migration has increased, migration controls and enforcement have dominated new policy implementation throughout the country.

Looking forward, however, will require identifying how policies originally designed to address emigration from Mexico and immigration to Mexico can complement and amplify desired objectives of transit migration. These changes have uncovered institutional capacity and policy challenges that Mexico must face proactively and in collaboration with regional partners. Mexico is uniquely positioned to lead regional discussions and share lessons and experiences it has learned across recent policy changes.

To provide a comprehensive analysis of Mexico’s migration policy framework, this section succinctly details the state of emigration, transit migration and immigration in Mexico. The analysis matches challenges in return migration, enforcement capacity and refugee protection to these pillars. It concludes by providing a series of near- and mid-term recommendations for each pillar to establish a proactive set of policies that lay the foundation to address current and future migration trends.

Mexican Emigration and Return Migration

Mexican emigration today looks notably different than it did just five or 10 years ago. After falling consistently between fiscal year (FY) 2013 and FY 2019, irregular migration from Mexico to the United States increased sharply between FY 2019 and FY 2022 and appears to be decreasing in FY 2023. The increase is partially explained by pent-up migration demand and easing mobility restrictions after the height of the covid-19 pandemic. U.S. implementation of stricter penalties for unauthorized migration may have influenced the recent decrease. Additionally, rising violence and internal displacement in some Mexican states likely contributed to an increase in migration, especially of those traveling in families, while demographic changes and improvements in the Mexican economy may have reduced economic pressures to emigrate.

At the same time, every year more Mexicans are migrating through lawful pathways to the United States, continuing a decade-long trend. Although the number of temporary H-2 visas for agricultural and non-agricultural work issued to Mexican migrants grew steadily since FY 2010, issuances have risen significantly since 2020. No other nationality receives as many H-2 visas as do Mexicans. This increase in circular migration may be associated with the observed decrease in irregular Mexican migration, suggesting that as more migrants have access to lawful pathways, fewer are likely to migrate without authorization.

In addition to these changes in irregular and regular emigration, voluntary and involuntary return migration from Mexico to the United States has continued since 2008 after economic instability of the Great Recession sparked some migrants to return to Mexico. Since 2014, U.S. authorities have repatriated approximately 210,000 Mexican migrants annually across 12 established ports along the U.S.-Mexico border or to a set of airports in the country’s interior. Many of these migrants are returned within hours or days from entering the United States without authorization. However, others are deported from the U.S. interior after residing for years in the country. Others who return voluntarily to Mexico do so to reunite with family, including family members who have been deported from the United States.

The combination of these trends in the United States has resulted in a net decrease in the Mexican population through 2021. About 10.7 million Mexican immigrants resided in the United States in 2021 compared to 11.7 million in 2010. Although Mexicans are still the largest national group among the 45.3 million immigrants in the United States, they stopped being the top country of new migration flows in 2013. Approximately 5.2 mil- lion Mexican immigrants live in the United States without legal status, including about 468,000 Mexicans who are protected from deportation and have employment authorization as beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In Mexico, the fact that more Mexicans are returning than leaving the country has underscored the critical need for differentiated reception and reintegration services. The current administration overhauled reception and reintegration programs in 2021 when it established the Interinstitutional Strategy for Comprehensive Attention for Repatriated and Returned Mexican Families, aiming to coordinate existing services across a wide set of agencies. Beyond providing food and transportation assistance and basic health screenings and hygiene kits, however, the reach and efficacy of these services to reintegrate migrants into the communities over the long term is unclear. Often these reintegration services prioritize supporting migrants’ entry into the labor force through employment assistance or by providing seed funding for entrepreneurial projects, and rarely do they provide follow-up care or case management for mental health and social reintegration.

Transit Migration and Enforcement Capacity

Among the biggest challenges Mexico’s migration policy framework faces is adapting its institutional capacity to address the needs of an increasingly diverse population that transits the country — most but not all heading to the United States. Its migration enforcement apparatus has focused for decades on apprehending and repatriating irregular migrants from Northern Central America and has therefore struggled to respond to recent changes in migration flows. Since 2022, migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador account for less than half of apprehensions by Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM), outnumbered by apprehension of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan  and Cuban migrants. Most migrants come from Latin America and the Caribbean, but growing shares of them hail from countries much farther away, like China, India and Senegal.

To deter irregular migration, Mexico has implemented a series of policies since 2021 ranging from visa restrictions to accepting U.S. removals of non-Mexican citizens so far resulting in uneven outcomes. It imposed visa restrictions for migrants from Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela and required Colombians to pre-register for travel, which reduced irregular crossings for several months before increasing again. Moreover, Mexican authorities agreed for the first time to accept formal U.S. removals of Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in May 2023. Yet, only a small fraction of non-Central Americans apprehended by Mexican authorities or returned by U.S. authorities are repatriated from Mexico.

Rising numbers of children and families are also transiting through Mexico. To reduce the negative impacts on children, a reform of Mexico’s migration law in 2021 prohibits the detention of migrant children and their family members and instead requires that they be channeled to support centers under the purview of Mexico’s National System of Integral Development for the Family (DIF) while the Prosecutor Office for the Child and Adolescent Protection (PPNNA) determines the minor’s best interest. However, due to lack of funding and DIF shelter space, the implementation of these reforms has been underwhelming, and reports suggest that most children (primarily Central American) are still being detained and repatriated.

Not surprisingly, changes in volume  and composition of irregular migrants in Mexico have placed significant pressure on the limited INM capacity to hold and process them humanely. Across its 50 detention centers, INM has an estimated capacity to hold approximately 6,000 migrants at any time. Following a tragic fire that killed 39 migrants in a detention center in Ciudad Juárez, the INM closed 33 centers pending an investigation by the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH) to certify that their conditions meet required standards. The INM continues to operate 17 detention centers with a capacity to hold nearly 4,800 migrants, primarily located in Mexico City; Tapachula, Chiapas; Acayucan, Veracruz; and Villahermosa, Tabasco. But the INM cannot detain every migrant it apprehends — about 1,500 per day in 2023.

Intended to increase its operational capacity, Mexican policymakers in 2019 granted the INM authority to request operational support from the National Guard, garnering significant criticisms of abuse of force among immigrant organizations. The National Guard deployment has expanded the INM’s capacity to inspect and detain migrants at Mexico’s borders, across 90 interior checkpoints and along train routes. And, as of September 2023, the Mexican government deployed approximately 34,000 National Guard and military troops across three primary transit routes and at its borders.

Like the United States, Mexico is now redoubling efforts to improve regional cooperation and responsibility to better manage irregular migration, given its widening capacity challenges. So far, efforts have focused on increasing regional border controls, primarily in the Darien Gap, coupled with economic investment to address root causes of migration. Both long-term efforts require bolstering the regional institutions’ infrastructure and incorporating evaluation mechanisms to understand program effectiveness.

Immigration and Refugee Protection

Mexico is increasingly becoming a destination as a mixture of immigrants and asylum seekers settle, even if temporarily, in the country. Approximately 1.2 million immigrants lived in Mexico in 2020, accounting for 1 percent of the total population. Despite its small share, the immigrant population has grown by 20 percent since 2015.

But the widest pipeline of settlement in Mexico has been the asylum process. Stricter asylum restrictions in the United States and a perception of increased access to humanitarian policies in Mexico have raised some migrants’ interest in the latter. As a signatory of the Cartagena Declaration, for instance, Mexico can provide complementary protection to asylum seekers who flee generalized violence but do not meet the traditional eligibility requirements under the 1951 Convention. This has allowed many to find safety and refuge in parts of Mexico where they can make valuable contributions. Others have used the asylum process to regularize their status temporarily before trying to migrate to the United States.

In 2021, the  Mexican  Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar) received about 130,000 asylum applications, nearly twice as many as it received in 2019, ranking Mexico the third-largest in volume only after the United States and Germany. Mexico will likely rank third again in 2023 with a predicted 150,000 applications, according to Comar estimates.

While asylum seekers in Mexico increasingly hail from across the Western Hemisphere and beyond, Haitians (103,000), Hondurans (94,000) and Cubans (37,000) have consistently been the largest groups since 2021. Whether asylum seekers are granted protection — either recognized as refugees or granted complementary protection — depends largely on their nationality. Haitian asylum seekers, for example, receive protection at low rates (25 percent) compared to Venezuelans (92 percent).

Despite the dramatic increase in asylum requests, federal investment in Comar has fallen short of proposed budget requests and severely stymied its processing capacity. Its operations largely depend on supplemental funding and staffing provided by UNHCR Mexico, making its processing capacity unsustainable with only federal funding. Only about 30 percent of Comar’s 2023 budget of 166.4 million pesos (approximately $9.8 million) came from the federal government. Overwhelmed by the dramatic increase in applications, Comar resolved approximately 38,000 cases (29 percent) of the 130,000 submitted in 2021 and 18,000 cases (18 percent) of 100,000 in August 2023.

For immigrants and asylum seekers, like for Mexican returnees, existing institutional gaps mean most face significant structural and administrative barriers that hinder how they integrate into Mexican society.

For immigrants and asylum seekers, like for Mexican returnees, existing institutional gaps mean most face significant structural and administrative barriers that hinder how they integrate into Mexican society. Absent comprehensive government intervention, the responsibility for addressing their needs falls mainly on a strained network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

RECOMMENDATIONS

Recent changes in the volume and composition of regional migration today make it particularly timely and crucial for Mexico to consider reforming elements of its migration policy framework. The following short- and mid-term recommendations can help address existing policy gaps to proactively address future migration challenges:

Mexican Emigration and Return Migration

Expand the set of tools used by the Mexican consular network in the United States to provide migrants resources and information on mechanisms to regularize their immigration status.

Leverage the Mexican consular network to identify, report and assist in labor violations migrant workers experience inside and outside the H-2 program, including follow-up services if migrants return to Mexico.

Invest in and tailor new reintegration services for Mexicans who return involuntarily and voluntarily that address their comprehensive needs and promote access to these services in semi-urban and rural areas — in coordination with local NGOs.

Transit Migration and Enforcement Capacity

Raise funding for DIF and partner agencies to fully implement existing reforms that prioritize migrant children’s best interests and provide shelter to them and their families.

Expand the capacity and transparency of the INM to conduct enforcement operations humanely and professionally, especially during elevated migration flows, and prevent human rights violations.

Formalize existing agreements between the INM and Comcar to provide alternatives to detention for vulnerable migrants and consider new ones for migrants who do not pose security threats given the significant lack of detention capacity.

Immigration and Refugee Protection

Raise Comar’s federal budget to match the significant operational need to process the increasing number of asylum applications fairly and promptly, which can build migrants’ confidence in case resolution and outcomes.

Leverage existing regional instruments, like the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, to foster new lawful pathways across the region, starting by creating new labor programs with protections for migrants before they transit Mexico irregularly.

Invest in and establish a clear integration policy framework across federal, state and local governments that allows Mexico to capitalize on migrants’ significant potential socio-economic contributions by adopting best practices for Mexican returnees.

The above article is part of a seven-part series first published by the Wilson Center Mexico Institute and is being republished in Pulse News Mexico with express prior permission.