Search results

Purpose: This chapter analyzes the policies of immigration control implemented in Mexico in 2014 to deter the migration of Central Americans to the United States, and their impact on Central American youth migrants.

Methods: This chapter draws from three pools of data: (1) participant observation and interviews conducted with minor migrants in Mexico from 2015 to 2019; (2) Mexican and US government data on detentions and deportations of Central American minor migrants; and (3) publicly available information on Mexican and Guatemalan government programs and media campaigns targeted at addressing the migration of Central American minor migrants.

Findings: This chapter posits that the policies of migrant detention and deportation implemented in Mexico in 2014 turned the entire country into a borderland for Central Americans. These policies expanded the areas of migrant surveillance, detention, and deportation beyond Mexico’s traditional border regions, which, in turn, made youth migrants’ journeys through Mexico more precarious and prone to violence.

Research implications: This chapter examines the impact of immigration and border control policies implemented in Mexico and anti-immigration propaganda on Central American youth, and it demonstrates how Mexico has been converted into an expanded US border territory in an attempt to prevent migrants from reaching the United States’ physical borderland.

Value: This chapter analyzes the impact of US-led detention and deportation policies aimed at Central American migrants throughout Mexico, rather than just in the traditional border regions. These relatively novel policies are at the forefront of immigration control and warrant special attention.

Globalization of the media communications progressed rapidly during the twentieth century thanks to innumerable innovation within information technologies particularly communications satellites, digitalization and advances in computer technology. Today we can utilize new communication systems that allow a worldwide distribution of messages from one place to another. In the middle of the global development of mass media we can find many children and young people. With their engaging, interactive properties, the new digital media are suggested to have more impact on how children grow and learn, what they value, and ultimately who they become than any other medium that has come before (Montgomery, 2002). New media technology influences the life and culture of young people. What is the nature of the content in it and whose values and judgments does it represent is a fatal question for educational researchers today.