CRITICAL ASSESMENT OF IRREGULAR MIGRATION AS A RISK TO NATIONAL SECURITY

Abstract

The Mexican state is managing the massive flows created by the phenomenon of ‘migrant caravans’ under the national security mandate executing actions that are based on its supposed defense, as evinced by the active participation of the armed forces under the figure of the National Guard. Henceforth, the applicable regulatory frameworks are here analyzed in order to determine the duality of their provenance and setting: one related to the discourse of the unrestricted prevalence of Human Rights and the other one referring to the ‘security’ and ‘police’ nature of both the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM, National Immigration Institute) and migratory politics as a whole. This duality is perceived as contradictory, and exclusive, but above all diffuse, given the variety, opaqueness and ambiguity of the normative discourse related to the concept of security in Mexico. Henceforth, the article analyses the function of the concept of national security in immigration law and the elasticity of it to adapt to specific historical situations through the theory of encryption of power (Méndez and Sanín, 2012), taking into account that the object of analysis is placed among those that are unthinkable outside the modernity-coloniality symbiosis that articulates the said theory.