Regional responses to transnational migration in North and Central America

This paper analyses the manifestations of and contestations to the
migration management paradigm in North and Central America. I pay special
attention to the understudied Central American Isthmus countries. I argue that
migration management is not only an important response to increasing transnational
migration but it also shapes the institutional arrangements of a new regional mobility
regime. This regime is characterised by multilateralisation and tends to establish new
forms of social control on mobile populations. Informed by studies of neoliberal
governmentality and international government, recent research has criticised the
concept of migration management as marked by a depoliticising language that tends
to ‘teach’ technocratic western standards of migration governance to the countries
and former ‘imperial subjects’ of the global South. Somewhat neglected in this recent
wave of critical research, however, has been the interest expressed by the countries
of the global South in adopting this migration management paradigm. I argue that
Costa Rica is an appropriate case to demonstrate such interests. A second omission
in recent research is a failure to reveal contestations to migration management
discourses and practices. I claim that it is predominantly the strategies of ‘escape’ of
migrants and local border societies that challenge migration management and force
its actors to adopt flexible strategies of control. I draw on the multi-level and multiactor
framework of ethnographic regime analysis in order to analyse both the
institutional arrangements of migration management and the actors, practices and
strategies of what I call the ‘power of migration’. In doing so I focus empirically on the
Regional Conference on Migration in North and Central America (RCM), the new
migration law in Costa Rica as well as the dynamics at the Costa Rican northern
border region. I show that migration management can be analysed as part of broader
social and state transformation processes of the Central American countries and is
therefore a contested field.