Towards Dignity and Security

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments. It also discusses the unaccompanied minors’ ‘crisis’ that erupted at the United States-Mexico border in the summer of 2014 and the political responses it triggered in the United States and Mexico. In its approach to Central American migration, the United States remains committed to a closed-door policy devoid of compassion, while Mexico oscillates between the rhetoric of humanitarianism, on the one hand, and surveillance and control practices, on the other. Within this context, migrants continue to experience extreme forms of precarity that produce emotional scars, mutilated bodies, and death. This chapter recognizes that in today’s world mobility will continue to be constrained. At the same time, it outlines a few alternatives that may make it possible to liberate Central American migrants’ mobility from extreme forms of precarity.