Emigrant Claims and Consular Protection Services: An Analysis of Mexico's Department of Protection Administrative Data 2010-2015 [thesis]

Ricardo David Martinez-Schuldt
2019
The three empirical research papers that comprise this dissertation examine different forms of variation in the socio-legal support Mexico delivered -- via its consular network -- to its diaspora residing in the United States (between 2010 and 2015). Mexican migrants and governmental officials in the United States are embedded in local-level contexts characterized by diverse demographic, economic, political, and social environments. Drawing on the migrant incorporation literature and previous
more » ... search on the intermediary role of consulates in emigrant integration, I argue that these heterogeneous contexts of reception differentially shape the Mexican state's cross-border support of emigrants. Each paper, analyzes information collected through an administrative database, or the Sistema Integral de Protección Consular (SIPC), utilized by the Mexican state to maintain record of the consultations that consular officials across each of Mexico's 50 consulates provided to migrants for the purposes of resolving claims related to family, labor, human rights, or other issues. In Chapter One, I investigate the associations between the demographic, economic, political, and social characteristics of the consulates' administrative districts, which are clusters of U.S. counties, and the frequency of socio-legal consultations provided by officials across the SIPC's six categories of cases: administrative, civil, human rights, labor, migratory, and penal. I combined information obtained through the SIPC with data from a variety of sources, such as the American Community Survey (ACS) or the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), to construct a longitudinal dataset. I employed fixed-effects regression models to assess which consulate district characteristics were most relevant to structuring the frequency with which consular officials provide support to emigrants across the different categories of issues. In Chapter Two, I explore how the tangible support consular officials offered to labor claimants varied across three [...]
doi:10.17615/pwwr-qy96 fatcat:qktx7hk2czekbiqe5l2bvuvooa