Executive Summary Anti-immigrant rhetoric and constricting avenues for asylum in the United States, amid continuing high rates of poverty, environmental crisis, and violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, have led many migrants from these countries to remain in Mexico. Yet despite opportunities for humanitarian relief in Mexico, since the early 2000s the Mexican government, under growing pressure from the United States, has pursued enforcement-first initiatives to stem northward migration from Central America. In July 2014, Mexico introduced the Southern Border Program (SBP) with support from the United States. The SBP dramatically expanded Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts, especially in its southern border states, leading to rising deportations. Far from reducing migration or migrant smuggling, these policies have trapped migrants for longer in Mexico, made them increasingly susceptible to crimes by a wide range of state and nonstate actors, and exacerbated risk along the entire migrant trail. In recognition of rising crimes against migrants and heeding calls from civil society to protect migrant rights, Mexico’s 2011 revision to its Migration Law expanded legal avenues for granting humanitarian protection to migrants who are victims of crimes in Mexico, including the provision of a one-year humanitarian visa so that migrants can collaborate with the prosecutor’s office in the investigation of crimes committed against them. The new humanitarian visa laws were a significant achievement and represent a victory by civil society keen on protecting migrants as they travel through Mexico. The wider atmosphere of impunity, however, alongside the Mexican government’s prioritization of detaining and deporting migrants, facilitates abuses, obscures transparent accounting of crimes, and limits access to justice. In practice, the laws are not achieving their intended outcomes. They also fail to recognize how Mexico’s securitized migration policies subject migrants to risk throughout their journeys, including at border checkpoints between Guatemala and Honduras, along critical transit corridors in Guatemala, and on the Guatemalan side of Mexico’s southern border. In this article, we examine a novel set of data from migrant shelters — 16 qualitative interviews with migrants and nine with staff and advocates in the Mexico–Guatemala border region, as well as 118 complaints of abuses committed along migrants’ journeys — informally filed by migrants at a shelter on the Guatemalan side of the border, and an additional eight complaints filed at a shelter on the Mexican side of the border. We document and analyze the nature, location, and perpetrators of these alleged abuses, using a framework of “compassionate repression” (Fassin 2012) to examine the obstacles that migrants encounter in denouncing abuses and seeking protection. We contend that while humanitarian visas can provide necessary protection for abuses committed in Mexico, they are limited by their temporary nature, by being nested within a migration system that prioritizes migrant removal, and because they recognize only crimes that occur in Mexico. The paradox between humanitarian concerns and repressive migration governance in a context of high impunity shapes institutional and practical obstacles to reporting crimes, receiving visas, and accessing justice. In this context, a variety of actors recognize that they can exploit and profit from migrants’ lack of mobility, legal vulnerability, and uncertain access to protection, leading to a commodification of access to humanitarian protection along the route.
A panel at the 2007 meetings of the American Anthropological Association examined the working lives of illicit and informal entrepreneurs living in “the gaps” or “shadows” of neoliberal globalization. Panelists challenged dichotomies such as informal/formal and legal/illegal by examining the everyday practices of workers in diverse settings. Emphasis was placed on entrepreneurs’ efforts to legitimate their activities and identities to themselves and others.
Drawing from the scholarship on states and illegal practices and the author's fieldwork at the Mexico-Guatemala border, this article posits new directions in the study of legitimacy, legality, and morality in borderlands. By making illegality central, the article reveals the politics and power dynamics that shape how people differentially experience the law. The article uses illegality as a theoretical lens to reexamine what constitute worthy subjects of research and standards for ethical and methodological practice.
Illegal Anthropology: An IntroductionIn "States and Illegal Practices," Josiah McC. Heyman and Alan Smart (1999) illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the state and illegal practices, arguing that their interrelationship offers "important terrain for studying the complexity of power and 'common sense'" (7). Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (2005) contribute to this discussion by highlighting distinctions between the social (licit) and political (legal) construction of legitimacy. Carolyn Nordstrom (2007) further reminds scholars that such distinctions are never static, as the legal and illegal overlap and merge in everyday practice. This symposium builds on such scholarship by examining how dominant legal discourse (often guaranteed by, but not exclusively articulated by, states) "illegalizes" particular people and practices, excluding them from the moral-legal community and rendering them available for criminalization, marginalization, exploitation, and even dehumanization. We therefore define "illegalization" as a sociopolitical process that serves to uphold particular relations of power and delegitimize others (see Gomberg-Muñoz 2011).Many scholars and activists now eschew the term "illegal" for its negative associations. However, we make "illegality" a principal topic of investigation in order to denaturalize and critique legality, reveal the term's sociopolitical construction, and lay bare the profound implications that "illegalization" has on individual lives (Bacon 2008). As a powerful index of social, political, and economic inequality, we insist that "illegality" and "illegalization" be investigated not in opposition to, but alongside studies of the state, power, ethics, and the law. In this symposium, therefore, we examine the effects of the distinctions between legality and illegality and what illegality as a social, subjective (Willen 2007), political, and spatial category produces when, as Nicholas De Genova (2004) puts it, "there is [often] nothing matter-of-fact about . . . illegality" (161).Each contribution interrogates the processes through which legal categories and attendant power relations are solidified rather than taking for granted the authoritative status of the state and the rule of law. Legality is not a stable set of rules and norms, but rather, as Peggy Levitt (2001) notes, the "meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that we think of as [legitimate], no matter who uses them or what their goals may be" (112; see also Ewick and Silbey 1998). In this symposium we examine how subjects come to understand practices as right or wrong regardless of, and perhaps in spite of, formal legal classifications, and draw attention to how people engage with, and position themselves in relation to, the law. We attend to how they imagine law should work, and how people craft notions of justice that may parallel, contradict, evade, or reinforce official divides between legal and illegal practices. We illustrate how legal orders institutionalize assumptions justifying societal ...
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