An interesting op ed appeared in the Washington Post (June 29, 2022) in response to the deaths of the 53 migrants trapped in a tractor trailer in San Antonio Texas. At least 27 of the migrant dead were Mexican, indicative of the resurgence of Mexican immigration to the United States following a ten year lull. This illustrates one of the central failures of the Lopez Obrador presidency. AMLO does not like immigration because he thinks that Mexicans should live in Mexico and he asserted that his government would create jobs (through expanding the rate of economic growth) which would diminish the economic push factors that had caused Mexicans to immigrate to Mexico, a process that largely corresponded with the breakdown of the PRI model of national development, but which also occurred in conjunction with high fertility rates among Mexican women during the middle decades of the 20th century. In other words, migration exploded in the context of demographic and the economic conjuncture associated with the onset of neoliberalism in the early 1980s. How to account for the deceleration of migration from 2008 to 2018. The key factors would seem to be declining birth rates and increasingly fortified borders, raising the cost of the migration during a period when the number of potential migrants was diminishing. The next puzzle is why the return to higher levels of migration from Mexico to the United States. The answer to that question is the general decomposition of the Mexican nation-state as a result of a new pattern of violence linked to the combined effects of extractivism, organized crime, and militarized security.
The author of this piece, Leon Krauze, writes that
When the government of President López Obrador began, we had 12 years of steadiness in the migratory flow from Mexico to the United States and now we are four or five times above that level,” Tonatiuh Guillén Lopez, who was the first director of migration policy for López Obrador, told me. “The government received a period of very low migration and will be leaving with very high numbers.”
The author then goes on to construct his explanation of the increased migrant flows which eventuated in the San Antonio tragedy: not enough economic growth, not enough suppression of organized crime and, indeed, organized crime, in the era of fortified borders, has largely transformed undocumented migration into human trafficking, possibly with the assistance of some corrupt members of the Customs and Border Partrol. The evidence for this simply shows that such patterns of corruption exist with respect to narco-trafficking, so why not in other areas of organized crime. Mexican authorities report a surge in human trafficking of 228% since 2020. How to account for the failure AMLO’s government suppress organized crime?
In the first place, it is misleading to think of understand the spike in human trafficking as governmental failure, as in the formulation, government promised X but now just the opposite has occurred. A better alternative would be to consider processes of state transformation in Mexico. The major components of this would be the disarticulation of the party state, the expansion of organized crime, the emergence of the corruption networks linking organized crime, security forces and the Mexican political class. There are similar processes of the state decomposition unfolding in Central America, which William I. Robinson has recently characterized in his article, “The Second Implosion of Central American”. One general point that would be made here is that both Mexico, Central America and Colombia are a part of what Greg Grandin has referred to as the U.S. dominated cone of insecurity associated with elevated levels of economic extraction (via mining, energy, tourist enclaves, etc) and the emergence of hybrid security regimes that link together organized crime and the police and the military. The new extractivism is a hybrid form of neoliberalism; it is neoliberalism operating in the context of a decomposing state.
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