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Beyond Cooperation: The Role of Origin Countries in Deportation Efforts, Evidence from Mexico (1942 to 1964)

by Guadalupe Chavez

Submission summary

Authors (as registered SciPost users): Guadalupe Chavez
Submission information
Preprint Link: scipost_202412_00015v1  (pdf)
Date submitted: 2024-12-09 18:14
Submitted by: Chavez, Guadalupe
Submitted to: Migration Politics
Ontological classification
Academic field: Political Science
Specialties:
  • Migration Politics

Abstract

For deportations to be carried out, host countries must secure inter-state cooperation with origin countries where they seek to deport noncitizens. However, origin countries may decide to cooperate or resist cooperation. This paper pushes the scholarship by exploring why some origin countries are willing to go beyond cooperation in readmission processes and also become proactive actors by encouraging and promoting the deportation of their citizens despite the economic and political costs. This paper unpacks this puzzle by analyzing why the Mexican government became a proactive actor in facilitating the deportation of its citizens from the 1940s to the 1960s. Through examining over six hundred pieces of archival data from the U.S and Mexican national archives, I argue that Mexico became a proactive actor as a strategy for addressing its domestic concerns at the regional and local level and for cultivating its diplomatic relationship with the U.S government and the benefits that came with such relation including the continuation of the Bracero Program, the largest guest worker program, which for Mexico was crucial for offsetting unemployment pressures and stimulating development. This paper advances the scholarship in two ways: the paper provides insights into how Mexico, a country with the highest flows of deportation in the Western Hemisphere, has managed influxes of deportations and how origin countries shape the deportation efforts of host countries.

Current status:
In refereeing

Reports on this Submission

Report #1 by Anonymous (Referee 1) on 2025-1-14 (Invited Report)

Strengths

This is a terrific paper. I truly enjoyed it. I would recommend the author to read page 109 of Acosta the National versus the foreigner (2018, CUP) where the author argues that "Latin Americans strategically banded together to oppose any possible restrictions that the USA may have suggested against their own nationals" in the early 20th century. This is also analysed by Fitzgerald and Cook Martin in their 2014 book culling the masses, around p. 76. I wonder whether the author would be able to explain a bit further in one or two paragraphs how Mexico, and to what extent, changed a previous position opposing discrimination of their own nationals in the US. I think the author clearly explains the motivations and concerns about the bracero program and also how businesses in Mexico needed workers, but again it would be interesting to see a bit more, even if very briefly, about how this changed a previous political position in the past or not.
As a lawyer, I find it interesting that Mexico supported the Universal Declaration of Human Rights where, one of the rights enshrined is the right to leave your own country. This might be outside the scope of the paper but was there any discussion at legal level about how not allowing nationals to leave the Mexican territory breached this fundamental right?
Is there anything to say in the conclusion about how the past shows us lessons, if any, for the current situation, notably now that we have two new presidents in both countries and, possibly, a difficult future relationship regarding expulsions?

Report

Please see above.

Recommendation

Publish (easily meets expectations and criteria for this Journal; among top 50%)

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