The migrating state: Mexico, migrants, and transnational governance

Since the late 1980s, the Mexican government has been developing a program to assist and defend Mexican migrants that live north of Mexico's territorial borders. Unprecedented in scope and scale, the program has attempted to cultivate in migrants affinity for the Mexican homeland and strengthen the transnational social and economic ties that link migrants to Mexico. This project argues that Mexico's program of "acercamiento" with migrant communities is inextricably linked to Mexico's adoption of neoliberal governing rationalities, and that the government has deployed migration policy as a vehicle for reinventing the reason of state in Mexico. While engaging contemporary issues in political geography and globalization studies, this project explores the rhetorical dimensions of Mexico's outreach to migrants, including rhetoric's pivotal role in rescaling the institution of the Mexican state, in reimagining the governing relationship between the state and migratory subjects, and in disembedding concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and citizenship from their entrenchment in national territory and rearticulating them to transnational migrant flows.