Decrypting Asylum Legal Regimes The Politics of Mobility in the Americas

Cutting-edge legal analysis reveals how Mexico's migration and asylum regime "encrypts" rights, restricting access for forced migrants through security-driven legal and bureaucratic mechanisms.

In this rigorous study, Luisa Gabriela Morales Vega examines the legal and political structures governing migration in Mexico, demonstrating how they systematically limit access to fundamental rights for people experiencing human mobility. Focusing on the US-Mexico migration corridor, the book analyses immigration control practices, detention systems, expulsion mechanisms, and asylum procedures, showing how these are shaped by historical, racial, and colonial dynamics.

Drawing on the theory of the encryption of power, Morales Vega introduces the concept of the "Hidden People" as a key analytical category to explain how migrants and asylum seekers are produced as legally marginal subjects. Through close engagement with legal frameworks, government decisions, and policy developments, the study reveals how widely used categories such as citizenship, residency, humanitarianism, and security operate as unstable and often empty signifiers.

By bringing together legal analysis and decolonial critique, the book challenges established interpretations of migration law and exposes the deeper socio-political forces structuring contemporary migration regimes. It offers a distinctive framework for understanding how rights are mediated, restricted, and rendered inaccessible within current systems of migration governance.