Between Immigration Control and Human Rights Protection: The Ambiguities of Mexico´s Migration Policy. The Case of the "Beta Groups for Protection of Migrants".

Since at least 20 years, Mexico has constantly tried to adapt its border regime to the expectations of the United States on border enforcement politics. During the same period, the Mexican political agenda called special attention to programs promoting the human rights of migrants. And since almost 20 years back, Mexico's state unit "Beta Groups for Protection of Migrants" (Grupos Beta de Protección a Migrantes) has been patrolling the northern, and later also the southern Mexican border. Their aim: To protect the human rights and the well-being of all migrants, regardless of their migration status, and without enforcing migration law. With this profile, Beta Groups stand worldwide unique. Despite of this, to this date no profound analysis of this state unit has been made, nor have its place and role in contemporary Mexican migration policy been defined. This paper presents the central findings of a research study on the Beta Groups, that draws on field research in Mexico's northern and southern border zones, on interviews with main actors in the United States and Mexico, and an analysis of discursive material, such as publications, posters and folders of Beta Groups or of the responsible Mexican state authorities like the national Migration Institute or the Department of the Interior. So how do Beta Groups protect the human rights of all migrants on Mexican soil, as it is their defined goal? Understaffed and not properly supplied, the main daily routine of Beta Groups agents to day in its current 16 operational areas is to offer some help and service to migrants, e.g., giving basic information about the dangers of the clandestine border crossing, hand out water and food. Sometimes, Beta Agents engage in rescue operations of lost or wounded migrants in the deserts, canals, and mountains of the border zone. Working mostly unarmed, and staffed with only 160 agents nationwide, their capability to protect migrants against dangers such as assaults by criminals or extortion by corrupt Mexican police officers, is really limited. Its main role today as a state unit is mostly to serve as a publicly recognized evidence for a created Mexican self-image as a state that acts sensibly and actively in the field of protection of human rights, especially regarding its migration policy. This "double framed migracion policy" by the Mexican state, as I will call it, focuses at the same time on migration control, and human rights discourse and symbolic actions. Thereby this policy functions as an important legitimizing strategy to satisfy both domestic and foreign interests. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]