A global protection gap: Migrant insecurity in Mexico

Abstract

Over the last decade, Mexico has gone from being a major source of immigrants to an important transit and destination country for asylum seekers and migrants from Central and South America. When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018, he pledged to implement a migration policy that prioritized humanitarian protection and honored Mexico's international and national human rights commitments. To what extent have these goals been achieved? In this article, I rely on a variety of sources to document the widening gap between Mexico's legal and stated commitments to the protection of migrants' rights and their implementation. I argue that there are both external and domestic constraints that hinder the implementation of human rights commitments and contribute to the migrant protection gap in Mexico. First, Mexican migration and humanitarian goals are inevitably shaped by the pervasive asymmetry characterizing relations with the United States. Second, capacity problems and domestic political tensions have undermined the Mexican government's ability to protect the safety of migrants. Meanwhile, the Mexican case is useful to highlight the sometimes neglected but important role of transnational nongovernmental and international organizations in filling the protection gap by providing support to host country governments and offering complementary protection to migrants.