Deported and repatriated: re-documentation and citizenship in Mexico

The term repatriation, which has guided Mexican deportation policy for Mexican migrants by force or will, concerns the return and reintegration of Mexican people and their children whose place of residence was in the United States in an irregular migration status (^{Alanís, 2007}).³ Repatriation policy of Mexicans from U.S. territory was shaped in the early 20th century in the middle of the post revolution period. The first programs or official channels of Mexican repatriation were founded during the Great Depression in the United States (^{Guerin-Gonzáles, 1985}). During the Bracero Program (1942-1964) the repatriations issue ceased to be the spotlight for implementation of programs and blended into the discourse of post revolution nationalism. The nationalist tone of repatriations began to fade after the year 2000 (^{Délano, 2014}), when remittances had become a source of foreign exchange revenue of utmost importance for national economy.

The National Institute for Migration (Instituto Nacional de Migración, INM) was created in Mexico during the last decade of the 20th century and, in 1998 the Citizenship Act was passed, which allowed double nationality. In the United States, the new notion of anti-terrorism security and the economic crisis in 2008 featured the new wave of deportations, reaching almost four million in a decade (^{UPM, 2018}), and so the revival of repatriation. In 2007 the Repatriation Program, subordinate to the INM, was created. In 2012, the Human Repatriation Program (Programa de Repatriación Humana, PRH) resumed the widespread official discourse of human rights, following the agreements signed internationally. A significant turn of PRH was the interest to identify Mexican deportees, possibly in the light of the vast presence of based and in-transit Central American migrants.

A detailed examination of the processes that has defined identity assignation in Mexico shows the development both in the identity arrangements and mechanisms, and the security levels and increased requirements to obtain them, keeping pace with migration policy development. The birth certificate and voter credentials are the most important identification arrangements which are given only to Mexicans by birth. These are the main requested documents to returnees in their process of reintegration, although there are other documents, like the Unique Population Registry Key (Clave Única de Registro de Población, CURP) (^{Jacobo, 2017}; ^{Escobar, Lowell y Martin, 2013}).

While throughout the history the registration system of population has been upgraded with the digitalization of birth certificates, for example, the incidence of under registration remains significant. On the one hand, not all birth certificates are digitalized nationwide. On the other, there is the case of returned people and deportees who are unaware of their place of registry, those who were not registered in Mexico or the ones registered in another country, for the most part in the United States (^{INEGI & UNICEF, 2018}), and for the people who cannot access their birth certificate easily after deportation. They have been named ‘double undocumented’ (^{Selee, 2014}).

Similarly, the access to voting credentials is a complex and difficult process. It has been documented that over the past decades a significant proportion of deportees who enter by any INM repatriation module, lack of identity papers that prove their Mexican citizenship. Even if the Nationality Act (^{Ley de Nacionalidad,1998, Art. 3}) establishes the birth certificate as a certifying document for the nationality, it is common that deportees do not carry it with them.

Graphic 1 shows that between 2010 and 2013, more than half of the population returned by immigration authorities from the United States did not have the INE,⁴ and that this proportion increased substantially in the subsequent years. Between 2014 and 2017, when it was inquired whether they were carrying it, more than two thirds gave a negative reply. Afterwards, between 2018 and 2019 the data showed an increase in the percentage bringing back the trend of previous years. Likewise, regarding the birth certificate, it is noted that between the years 2010 and 2013 almost a third did not have it. In 2016 the percentage of those who were not carrying it at the time of deportation nearly doubled. This trend increased even more between 2017 and 2019. Changing the survey question goes to the heart of our argument, as the consequences on people’s experience regarding assimilation in Mexico are potentially different as they own or carry said documents.

Source: ^{El Colegio de la Frontera Norte et al. (2016)}.

Graphic 1. Identity document holding in the flow of people with a residence of one year or longer, deported by the US authorities (%) * Note: The question was modified. From 2010 to 2013 it was ‘Do you have the following documents?’ and since 2014 is ‘Do you bring with you the following documents?’  

This scenario enables understanding of the importance of the certificate of presumption of Mexican nationality granted by the PRH⁵ (acronym in Spanish for Human Repatriation Program) for deportees upon entering Mexico. By law, migrating to the United States does not mean losing the Mexican citizenship by birth.⁶ However, the latter seems to have dissociated in practice the longer the period of residence in the United States. It could even be argued that with the current mobility control policies, identity document holding is indeed a requisite. Not only for the access to basic rights but also for the free mobility in Mexican territory which, in terms of human rights, should be protected by the State. Yet at the same time, it must be acknowledged that document holding does not fully guarantee the recognition and full exercise of citizenship since this is driven by a complex framework of ‘fragile’ structural and subjective elements for returnees ranging from the normative to the procedural and pragmatic ones.

Obtaining documents to live: mechanisms and agents

The different ways to achieve documentation are varied and related to the human and social capitals they acquired while living in the United States. But, even for this sector of repatriated, redocumentation is not an easy process upon the arrival to the INM port of entry but rather an essential dispute where employment stakeholders, supporting human mobility infrastructure in the arrival city and social networks take part.

Once in Mexican territory, the repatriated enter a tunnel of what ^{Lipsky (1999)} calls the street-level bureaucracy, performed by specific individuals who interact directly with citizens, and who have discretion for the exercise of rights (^{Lipsky, 1999}). The repatriated (14) who obtained their identity documents did so with the combined support of employers, relatives, and civil society organizations. In the following, the role of said agents and the response of the study population are analyzed.

Employers as documentation providers

Tijuana is an economically dynamic city; its municipality has the highest gross domestic product (GDP) in Baja California state and relatively higher salaries than in the rest of the country (^{Coubès and Silva, 2012}). Tijuana’s border vicinity makes it a strategic place for the operation of enterprises in several economic sectors (commercial, financial, and service).

The role of maquiladora and call center employers in the repatriated migrant’s documentation process is so in that they have acquired workforce from them in said economic sectors. Specifically, in this high-technology communication industry, the call centers, have turned their attention to the repatriated having weighed their bilingual skills and their closeness to American culture (^{Hualde, Jurado and Tolentino, 2015}). In 2015, according to Jorge Oros, president of Baja California (BC) Call Centers Cluster, there were 12,000 workstations in the state; 8,000 of these in Tijuana (^{Caballero, 2015}). Oros also explains that in 2016 there were 54 enterprises in the sector in Baja California that employed 18,000 people approximately (^{Uniradio Informa, 2016}). Tijuana ranked fourth place nationally (15% national labor supply), just behind Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara (^{Caballero, 2015}).

Some call centers and maquiladoras have incorporated as part of the human resources department tasks the support for identity document (INE) management for those with the required expertise and knowledge for the company and its benefit.⁷ Pedro’s case serves as an example of the company’s role in the repatriate’s process of documentation.

Pedro had the Mexican birth certificate at the time of his deportation but did not have the voter card since he arrived in the United States at the age of 2. Pedro was deported into Tijuana in 2010 at the age of 41. In that same port of entry where he was received, he was given information about a call center looking for repatriated bilingual people: “just after crossing I was offered a position -do you speak English? there are jobs which can make use of this and that. As you cross La Línea, they give you food, they give you…. they run tests on you, they give you… well, stuff like that. They give you service. And I fetched the numbers [of possible companies], and well, I called and went for an interview” (Pedro, in-person communication, March 8 2017). In the first few days after arrival, he stayed at the Casa del Migrante and he approached the company, where he was given information on how to obtain his documentation and he was issued letters of extension to get them. Meanwhile, he received computer training. In accordance with his story, this was the process:

… [in the repatriation module] they gave me a leaflet of the call center; it didn’t say the name, like Mac Foundation or something like that, so I didn’t go to the interviews, and they told me: “no, you can’t. You have to get your documents”. I left there at the time of the elections [Mexican], so, I couldn’t get my ID. I kept waiting. It took me some time, but I finally got it… I started to work so I could get the document. At the beginning I went [to the soup kitchen] and I met people who helped me with the signatures to get it, but while I was waiting for the ID, I started going to the computers, computer classes, because I didn’t know anything about that. That was in Second St and Ocampo. They give us classes. It partly depends on the call center and partly on the Salesian priest… uhm… something like that, right there, upstairs. So, it means the help comes from these two (Pedro, in-person communication, March 8, 2017).

This was also the case of other deportees, like Javier, who crossed with his parents to the United States when he was 3. He got a residence permit through them and was deported in 2011 at the age of 31. So, when arrived in Mexico, he did not have the INE (formerly IFE) ID. Just like Pedro, upon the arrival in the Mexican port of entry, Javier was referred to a call center by the Mexican migration authority on account of his bilingualism. However, he could not process the Voter card because the presidential elections were drawing close. Although the company had already anticipated this with an alternate mechanism: the Postal identity card, that the Postal Service office issues for remittances collection.⁸

The other problem was that I didn’t have the Voter card, the INE. And as I was deported in voting period in May 2012, no IDs were being processed by the National Electoral Institute by that time, until after the elections […] I don’t remember well who mentioned Telvista: “Go to Telvista, bilingual people go there”; perfect. I’ll see what happens. Two months [later] upon my arrival, I arrived at Telvista. I told them what was going on with my ID and they told me -Don’t worry. Go to the Post office. There they’ll give you a sort of card with your picture, and we accept that as a temporary ID. Perfect, that was what I did, and I started to work in Telvista (Javier, in-person communication, March 8 2017).

Javier Works at Telvista now, the largest and oldest call center in Tijuana, launched in the late nineties as a Teléfonos de México (Telmex) branch. People who start the repatriation process begin to grasp the rough track of the documentation process in practice.

A possible conclusion is that employment agents’ intermediation is sufficient only to continue with the documentation process together with social and human capitals of the repatriated (level of education, bilingualism, and financial and emotional support structures). However, this intermediation is necessary for providing the repatriated with information and resources to deal with the state’s bureaucracy. In this way, the labor market seems to extend its tentacles to selectively supply itself of labor force, even of the most vulnerable sectors, and setting out the terms of re-documentation and re-citizenship.

Family networks as facilitators

Another access to the documents of identity is through family, either with resources given by the family to pay for procedures or transportation, providing orientation on the bureaucratic maze, or by testifying identity, given that processing certain documents, the INE for example, requires a minimum period of residence and providing witnesses, who are relatives most of the times. Given the lack of institutional flexibility for the documentation, not having family support can become another disadvantage.

The importance of the networks can be found in the cases of Salvador and Gonzalo. In the first case, Salvador found it easy to obtain his documents thanks to his mother, who had returned before him. She had already inquired all the steps and requisites needed in her hometown, Veracruz. In the second case, Gonzalo, born in Tijuana, migrated at 8 years old and deported at 55, had his wife’s support. She resided in San Diego, California, and traveled constantly in order to support him and to testify so he could obtain his INE. Regarding witnesses, as well as time of residence, there are concepts of community citizenship which are worth analyzing. Having a witness implies the establishment of trust links in specific communities to get someone to testify to someone’s identity. Time of residence implies domiciled citizenship, which is verified with a domiciled public services receipt (electricity, telephone, etcetera).

Nevertheless, as shown by ^{Del Real (2019)}, family ties are susceptible to stigma due to the discourse on criminalization of immigrants and deportation by their relatives, therefore trust and community compromise can weaken. Soledad’s case shows a complex and hampered process, first in the documentation and then in the social integration in Tijuana.

Soledad crossed the USA border at 3 with her parents and was deported in 2010 at 24 years old. After that, she had several difficulties to access official documentation in Mexico due to the expiration of her birth certificate, and not having certificate of studies, requiring her to turn to her distant relatives for testification. Soledad described her relatives’ refusal to act as witnesses because they considered her as a failure, or because their suspicion that she had done something wrong in the United States. The only identification she obtained was the temporary ID given by the Mexican Post Office, however, she was not able to obtain the INE. For this reason, she spent two years working as a vendor in a street market in the city until her parents acted as witnesses, after arriving in Tijuana following their deportation from the United States.

This case makes it clear that having family networks is not enough and proves that these networks have to be solid and based on principles of trust and commitment. The suspicion about her identity and her family’s refusal to give evidence of it can be linked to the stigma of failure or bad behavior that hangs over the repatriates (^{Albicker y Velasco, 2016}).

The documentation can be analyzed as a state control mechanism, but at the same time it provides access to the rights and benefits that define citizenship as a state-managed process (^Torpey,1998), rooted in community relations. The experience of deported migrants shows a zigzagging trajectory in this process of documentation and construction of the legal identity when going back to Mexico.

Religious and civil society organizations

Tijuana has an extensive hospitality infrastructure for migrants, deportees, asylum seekers and homeless people. Such infrastructure has been transformed simultaneously with the changes in migratory flows and border fluidity. The services and support they offer are accommodation, food and some related to legal advice and job placement. Its religious affiliation is diverse: Catholic, Protestant and more recently, secular. In 2019, 30 shelters managed by religious and civil society organizations were registered, and for the first time a Mexican government shelter for the caravans of Central Americans that arrived in the city between 2018 and 2019 (^{Coubès, Velasco and Contreras, 2020}).

Some cases exemplify the role of religious and secular organizations in processing their identity documents in the city. On the one hand, there is the case of Gustavo, deported in 2017, who worked as a security guard in a company in the city of Tijuana. He participated in the training project of the organization Espacio Migrante, where he received support to process his birth certificate and INE. On the other hand, Rafael managed to obtain his documents to work at a call center through the community soup kitchen Padre Chava, as described by Pedro. Some shelters have agreements with call centers or maquiladoras to train and incorporate people who meet certain requirements, such as proficiency in English.

The role of hospitality agents has two somewhat contradictory lines of analysis. The first is that these organizations are key to governance processes, since they function as agents of access to citizenship rights at different levels, local and national. The second one is that by virtue of Marshall's point (1950), welfare separates citizens from noncitizens through stigma, placing the deportee not as a repatriate, but as an outcast, metaphorically speaking. Public welfare separates the community of the citizens from the outcasts of society (^{Marshall, 1950}), in such a way that civil society organizations are also classifying devices, directly or indirectly, as well as actors within the State system. Both analytical lines can be understood within the broad framework of the legitimacy of the authority of the State in daily practices of government agencies, labor market and agents of civil society, as pointed out by ^{Sharma and Gupta (2006)}.

Living without documents in Mexico

The repatriates who did not have their documents at the time of the interview had an average repatriation time of four years. In general, these people had migrated to the United States at an older age, and some of them had acquired an addiction during their residence in that country. Something common among these cases is that no accumulation of human or social capital was observed throughout their migratory path until their return, but rather they seemed to experience a deterioration of their capitals, such as health. The reasons why they did not have documents were that they had lost them in the middle of an itinerant life since their arrival in Mexico, or because they did not have a birth certificate as they had been registered in another state of the Mexican Republic, which prevented them from obtaining any possible documentation (Table 1).

Each of these reasons obeys precarious and mobile living conditions, marked by ignorance of state procedures. Alba, an activist who supports deportees to obtain their identity documentation through her organization, states that the main difficulties for a person to achieve this requirement, even with her help, are: that their birth certificate is not discharged; that it has an error and that the only option is to go to the state of origin to correct it; that they lose their deportation or voluntary departure letter (since many throw it away or lose it); that they do not have proof of address and/or witnesses; and that they do not have timely information.

Among the people interviewed with long stays in the United States, with or without documents, there is a lack of knowledge of the support programs for processing their documentation. In 2017, the Mexican government launched the plan called Get your birth certificate online, in which anyone could obtain their CURP⁹ and their birth certificate. However, the plan was not relevant for the deportees since it requires having a Mexican credit card to make the payment online. In addition, it presented difficulties for those who are not proficient in the use of electronic systems and media, which usually occurs in older deportees.

Added to the above mentioned, there is the discretion of the counter officials, who in some cases makes the processes easy, while in others makes them difficult, as well as the lack of institutional coordination throughout the country in the field of documentation of mobile populations due to the regional inequalities that have been created in the attempts to establish federalism in Mexico (^{Ortega, 2013}).

The role of the street-level bureaucracy becomes evident in these processes by limiting access to the basic right of identity. Once again, the relationship with the State is established in daily interaction with local officials, public servants, who are called for greater efficiency and sensitivity, whose role has an impact on the lives of individuals. The challenge of re-citizenship is well framed by ^{Glenn (2000)}, who points out the urgency of fluently installing in states bureaucracies the de facto recognition of citizenship rights in relation to a specific State and the human rights established by international conventions.

Absence of social networks

José’s case shows the bureaucratic maze that must be overcome to obtain the documents for repatriation to Mexico in the case of individuals with no solid support networks in their city or country. José migrated to California as a child from the state of Durango, Mexico. He was deported in 2017, at that time his birth certificate was not registered in the electronic system of the Civil Registration of the city of Durango. Since he did not have anyone in that state who could support him, he had to resort to Alba, who explains:

[…] they told us that it did not appear, so they gave us a certificate of non- existence in Durango, Durango. With the support of the Baja California State Human Rights Commission, we began the process to obtain the birth certificate from the Civil Registration, but they asked for documents such as baptism certificate, birth certificates of his children, academic documents. But José did not go to school, he did not have contact with his relatives in the United States (they do not answer him and do not want to know about him), and he did not have any Mexican document, because he emigrated when he was very little. We had to begin a process for a certificate of non-existence also in Baja California, a long process in which it is verified in each municipality that such certificate does not exist. When they finally granted it, we went back to the Civil Registration and were requested additional documents, which he does not have (it seemed that we were where we started after months of waiting). José continues to be undocumented in his own country and cannot find a stable job or have benefits (Alba, in-person communication, August 15, 2017).

Activists point out that the deportee is commonly unaware of the place where the birth registration was carried out, especially when it comes to people who lived in the United States for long periods of time. All this responds to the complexity of the bureaucratic mechanisms, the disconnection and lack of synchronization between the levels and agencies of the Mexican government, which represents an obstacle in the streamlining of administrative procedures for the access to services. Added to the lack of networks is the effect of the link between of the absence of documents and the exercise of other rights, such as access to work and housing. Once again, we see how the complexity of the bureaucratic network is keeping the lives of those who, after being deported, must find ways to survive in the city. Thus, the way in which daily life is affected by means of legal processes, as suggested by ^{Menjívar (2006)}, places in a liminal legality those who, even when they were born in Mexico, face long bureaucratic processes that can become endless and produce states of extreme exclusion.

Absence of a fixed address

In the case of those who do not have identity documents, besides referring to work, they point out the difficulties in achieving an autonomous and stable residence (leaving the shelters). Among the repatriates that remain at the border, there is high roaming. The absence of a fixed address becomes an obstacle in the exercise of citizenship. One of the requirements for requesting documents is to have an address that is legally registered in such documents, and although there are organizations or agencies that provide their addresses to meet this requirement, being the volume of the population without a fixed address so high in the city, the organizations’ possible actions are reduced considerably.

According to the importance of domiciliation (^{Tilly, 1978}), these findings can be understood as an element of population control, of collecting public taxes for the State and for the definition of citizenship. Those who do not have a fixed residence are excluded from this framework, but at the same time they violate this principle of fixed citizenship in residential terms. Not having a fixed address places deportees in a spiral of precariousness, since not having documents prevents them from accessing other identity documents and at the same time, not having identity documents prevents them from having an autonomous and fixed residence. In addition, it exposes them to the action of urban vigilance agents, such as the local police, who consider vagrancy an administrative offense and therefore nurture their efficiency statistics, fed by the arrests of itinerant people.

Daniel’s case, born in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, illustrates the difficulties in obtaining Mexican documents due to not having a home. At the age of 13 he migrated to the United States, he was deported in 2014, at the age of 26. In Tijuana, he had the support of his sister, but lost it as a result of drug use started in the United States. He lives in constant roaming in the city, sleeping on the street and going to the public dining rooms of civil organizations. In November 2016, he was an assistant at a piñata store in Tijuana. For Daniel, “the papers are impossible, because, for example, imagine that I have to get my birth certificate, but you need an address, and not just anyone will lend you their documents [proofs] or go with you [as a witness]” (Daniel, in-person communitation, August 5, 2017).

Daniel represents the case of some repatriates who have worn out their social relationships due to drug use, such as his sister's, and who experience a process of loss of capital rather than accumulation and transfer, as in the opposite case of deportees who join call centers (^{Albicker and Velasco, 2016})

Roaming is linked to precariousness. Documentation procedures have a cost that not everyone can pay, and for those who do not have a home, after being homeless they might perceive that their life has not changed, even if they have a birth certificate. The life of repatriates living on the street takes place in a continuous and progressive deterioration of their conditions, exacerbating the precariousness with which they have returned, deepening it through the mechanisms that exclude and limit them. The hypothesis of the chaining and accumulation of precariousness is completed with the idea of the fragility of the apparent documented life.

The loss of documents offers a window to analyze the violent edge of roaming as a returnee. Porfirio’s case shows the situation of a sector of deportees who repeatedly lose their identity documents after the continuous disputes of life on the street and in shelters. After living in the United States for 12 years, working in agriculture and as a cargo transport driver, he was arrested for transporting drugs and sent to jail. He was eventually deported at Tijuana border crossing.

Porfirio says that after his deportation he managed to get his documents because he had a copy of his birth certificate, which he had to update in order to get his INE in Tijuana. But in his continuous mobility in the city, between the shelters and the street, his belongings were stolen, including his documents: “I had my ID [INE], they gave me a putiza [beating] and they took it from me. I got it stolen in the [northern] zone. The thugs, they took my money, papers, everything. They left me with nothing. About […] a year ago, and from then I got another ID” (Porfirio, in-person communication, February 19, 2017). Porfirio obtained his ID again but lost it once more in another situation of street violence. This case shows us that having documents is not a stable condition, in which a set of factors and agents that are concatenated participate to deepen the fragility and precariousness of the repatriates in this condition.

Documentation and national feeling

Among those interviewed with no Mexican documents, there seems to be an awareness of the importance of having them as a fundamental aspect in their reintegration process in Mexico. Their recognition as Mexicans makes them feel that even without documents, they are right-holders. Not only does having documents have a functional dimension, but also a subjective one. That of recognition and belonging, which can vary according to the age at which they arrived in the United States (^{Sarabia, 2017}). That is, for those who migrated younger, the perception of having or not having Mexican documents is disassociated from the idea of belonging, in any case there is a recognition of their origin, but also the permanent internal conundrum: “where am I from?”, given that their first years of life until adolescence were lived without legal recognition by the State. Apparently, these people experience the dislocation between their national identity and their state identity, as proposed by ^{Sarabia (2017)}.

Meanwhile, for those who migrated at and older age, despite the desire to return to the United States in most cases, the awareness of being Mexican is present, which seems unequivocal by granting them the certainty of their identity, and therefore, of the natural right to possess their documents.

The design of bureaucratic and administrative processes, added to each individual’s conditions, are mechanisms that generate exclusion and inequalities among deportees who cross the border on their return to Mexico. By being excluded from citizenship, individuals are less deserving of state protection and have limited access to social benefits. Therefore, one must learn to live like this; without national identity documents and creating strategies to survive as an undocumented Mexican.