A Discussion with Javier Urbano, Professor at the Ibero-American University, Mexico City, Mexico

With: Javier Urbano Berkley Center Profile

June 27, 2016

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship, in June 2016 student Carolyn Vilter interviewed Javier Urbano, a professor and previous director of the Migration Issues Program at Universidad Iberoamericana (IBERO) in Mexico City, Mexico. In this interview, Urbano discusses Mexico’s public policy regarding migration, the role civil society plays in supporting Central American migrants, and the need to alter systems of global development in response to international displacement.
Why does this issue interest you?

Because I was a migrant. This is a reason; the first one. The second, because in 1991, one of my professors took us on a trip along the migrant path, and I had the opportunity to learn how migrants traveled before the train was a theme. At this time, Mexico didn’t have any public policy on immigration, not for Mexican migration and not for Central American migration. Nothing.

How would you describe the changes that have taken place in government policy since then?

The changes…look, to talk about changes, there’d have to be something to change. There’s nothing to change in Mexico. In Mexico, we only just have immigration law. It’s like there’s no change to report because there’s no frame of reference. What I can tell you about what we have today is that it’s a disaster. The government says that it does a lot for migrants—it repeats that all the time
—and it thinks that signing agreements and international conventions counts as having done a lot. Signing a law? We’ve done a lot.

The way the government views migration is a serious problem. They’re viewing it with the perspective that, if a Mexican migrant leaves the country, here’s hoping that they don’t come back. As for Central American migration, the government thinks primarily that, since they’re foreigners, I don’t have any obligation—even though the constitution says Mexico does have responsibilities to foreigners. But in reality, that doesn’t play out; it’s a lie.

Why is it this way? It’s like this: you make a very pretty law, with very good intentions, but you have a problem—the local authority, the municipal police, isn’t prepared, don’t know about the law, is corrupt, has a very low salary, and the money they can take off a migrant could be equivalent to an entire week’s pay. The problem is poor, ill-paid, corrupt, and underprepared police. They don’t understand, they can’t apply, and they don’t want to follow the law. They’re not equipped to—there’s no form of training for them. So migrants are simply a business opportunity. They become a way for you to pay your bills. 

And there aren’t consequences?

No, because of rampant impunity. Imagine this: for every 100 crimes committed in this country, fully 90 go unpunished. It’s absolutely impossible to efficiently apply the law. It’s not possible. But the government, what does the government say? We’re passing lots of laws, we’re signing lots of decrees, we’re writing lots of reforms, we’re open to the eyes of the world
but when the world really looks, it’s a disaster. It’s terrible what’s happening here.

When the government makes a law or signs an agreement, are there concrete efforts to create trainings or otherwise translate law into reality?
 
No. Perhaps they try, but they never achieve it. I want to be very clear about this. If there’s ever any attempt, it always fails. When you pass a law in the Mexican legislature, translation of this law to state and municipal levels takes a long time, and when it’s finally applied, it’s already obsolete. One change that’s taken place is that migration is no longer classified as a crime in Mexico. It’s a civil offense. You can only receive a fine, nothing more. This was changed about five years ago.

Now, you can defend migrants. Before, if you aided a migrant, they would accuse you of trafficking. Before the change in law, there were many people in jail for defending migrants, just for protecting them. Giving them food. But they no longer go to jail
—now we have laws that defend us. I’m a defender of migrants, and now I can defend myself. I was in Chiapas two months ago, and the police accused me of trafficking, and I said, “I’m advocating for migrants!” I put the new law in front of the judge. “Send me to jail! I’ll only say that tomorrow, there will be a national scandal, because you’re putting an advocate from the Universidad Iberoamericana in jail, and this university will respond!” Suddenly the judge says, “You’re right—it’s not a crime.” So I asked him, “Did you really not know that our national immigration law doesn’t classify advocacy as a crime anymore?” And he said, “Look, I hadn’t realized.” Take in how serious that is.

So, I repeat to you my diagnostic that it has fundamentally to do with the fact that in Mexico, many laws are made, many agreements are signed, but then they don’t work. They have no effect. In the end, the only thing you’re going to see here in Mexico is something the world should recognize about Mexico: we have the biggest humanitarian response system in the world. We have 70 shelters, we have soup kitchens, centers of attention, and we have close to 5,000 people doing aid work, volunteering, legal aid, healthcare, everything. But all of this is civil society. It’s not the government.

How can we fix these problems? It’s an enormous question.

The 100 million-dollar question. Look, my first answer is going to be a little ironic: to solve this, you’d have to change the system of global development. There’s no other way. You have to understand that that is the underlying cause of it all. If there are excluded people in this world, it’s because there’s an economic system that excludes people from any benefit. You’d have to change our neoliberal system.

As this isn’t going to happen, well, there’s something I always say: one thing is the ideal, another is the desirable, and another is the possible. I think the ideal would be to solve immigration; in the current system it doesn’t have a solution. Second option: the desirable would be to have an international space dedicated to protecting these people. No one wants it. The only countries that have signed the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families are the sending countries. Not a single receiving country has signed. And it’s not worth anything if the rich countries, the receivers, don’t sign. So it’s a cruel joke, to think that an agreement like this will protect you. The desirable would be for all to sign and for all to have equal obligations. The reality is that it doesn’t matter to anyone.

So, the third option: the only possibility that we have in the current international system is to have agreements at the regional level between countries of origin and countries of transit to allow them to better pressure receiving countries. But there’s a very serious problem: these types of agreements don’t exist. Mexico doesn’t care what happens in Central America. In dialogue they say they do, but the truth is that they don’t. But true regional collaboration is the only possibility we have. The second possible step is to create a new narrative of migration
a new image. For the United States, for the EU, for Australia, for Canada, the concept of the migrant continues to be that of a risk, a danger, a burden, or even a threat. Migration isn’t solved; it’s managed. We have to administer it, to govern it, but stop it? No. If we could stop it, the world would end, because the entire world was born out of migration. There’s no single country that doesn’t have foreigners, and this enriches countries greatly. So we have a grave problem of ignorance. We all have a very poor memory.

It seems like you have a pessimistic attitude
like you’ve seen the realities of the issue and you feel as if we can’t ever achieve the ideal or even the desirable outcomes. Have you always felt this way?

No, I’m actually very positive. That’s why I continue in this. If I were negative, I would have renounced this work a long time ago. I conceive of myself as a species of informed optimist. I’m frustrated all the time, and this frustration comes from what I see every day. We don’t achieve everything we would like to, but we have enough hope to continue working, and hope that every time there will be fewer people raped, or disappeared, or killed in the process of migration. My attitude is very pessimistic when it comes to states and governments. But I’m very positive about civil society. I’m very positive, because I believe that a large part of the things Mexico has changed has to do with the pressure that Mexican civil society has created.

At the end of the day, the government establishes public policy, and they see those of us who work with migrants as enemies. Because every time we do something, it’s a form of criticism of the government: as if we’re saying, “Since the government doesn’t know how to do it, I have to do it myself.” So they say, “Simply by doing something, you’re saying that I, the government, doesn’t know how to do it.” This should be very clear: that if we don’t reflect on our position as civil society, as academics, as investigators, the government will say that we’re doing our work just to bother them. That’s my understanding of the situation.

Has this situation changed over the time you’ve been working on migration issues?

Yes, well, the first thing that’s changed with respect to migration in Mexico is that there now exist people who are studying the issue well. This in and of itself is a significant improvement. The fact that there is a master’s in migration studies [at IBERO], truly, I tell you, constitutes a change. We begin the first generation of students in August. There are many universities involved in migration issues now, but without much preparation. This university does have the authority to direct a migration studies masters, because those of us who direct it have worked [en el campo]
we’ve attended to migrants with our own hands, we’ve [pasado] many risks to attend to migrants, and we’ve done research over two decades. This gives us the authority to say that we can create a very good [capacitación] in our masters students. But this university is a rare case, and that’s because it’s a private universityperhaps the most expensive one in the country.

The ironies of this university are that, first, it’s a Jesuit university; second, one of our objectives is to focus on refugees. Rarely do migration researchers in Mexico do fieldwork. Because the level of difficulty involved in working with migrants in the field is high and involves risks. So researchers rarely do it. So when we endeavor to prepare people, it would be easy to prepare them with a book about theory, and a book about public policy, but we don’t want that. We want them to know lots of theory, and know lots of public policy, but we also want them to see. To see the realities. So one of our plans for the masters is for students to go to shelters, to go to civil society, to speak with migrants themselves, to exchange points of view, to say, “You, migrant, how can I be useful to you?” And through this, specialists will come out much better prepared.

The only person who can tell us what migration is like is the migrant. They’re the only one who can say. We can imagine whatever you want, but the reality is that, if we don’t listen to their voices, we’re committing a grave error, and doing the same thing the world does: excluding them. Universities conduct research, but without migrants’ participation. So what we do here is different. Many migrants come here. We have a [casa de migrantes] some 20 minutes from here, and we always bring migrants here to classes, so that they can tell us what happened to them. And I’m telling you, the impact that they have on students is marvelous
—they’re teachers. Because they tell you, to your face, “They hit me, I was raped, I was kidnapped, a police officer hit me, they took my money,” how they travel by train, the dangers, everything. In general, you don’t believe it from a professor, but when you hear it directly from someone’s mouth, you learn much more than you would from a teacher or a book. So this is what we want from our masters—that it not be for elites, but rather prepare people with the knowledge to work directly with migrants.

How would you describe the general attitude in Mexico surrounding migrants and migration?

In the United States, we have a concept of Mexico as a sending country alone, but the reality is that it’s a country of transit, too. I understand that, because here in Mexico we also have a very limited understanding of the United States. In reality, it’s important to recognize that, as countries and as individuals, we don’t know each other. And this means that we end up with ideas, or suspicions, or stereotypes. This is normal between nations, and it shouldn’t surprise us. The problem is when we let ourselves live all the time with these stereotypes. But, what does Mexico think about migration? Nothing. It’s not an issue. It’s never been an issue on the public agenda. Never. Mexican migration to the US doesn’t interest anyone. It’s simply a theme of academics, researchers, or civil society. But not elsewhere. Why? Because it’s become normal.

At the beginning of the previous century, Mexicans who migrated were considered traitors, and it was said that they’d make the United States stronger and betray Mexico. After the Second World War, the Bracero Program changed the perception a little, because it was an era of cooperation and migration was understood as being useful. Next, Vicente Fox defined migrants as heroes, going to fight for their families in another country. So public opinion on migration isn’t an issue, isn’t a debate. Because we have more than a century of migration to the United States, and it’s understood as natural.
Opens in a new window