Book Talk | Irvin Ibargüen | Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940–1980

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, February 4 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Irvin Ibargüen. He will discuss his book, Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940–1980, with Cristina Beltran and Natasha Iskander.

Irvin Ibarguen is an assistant professor of history at NYU, focused on Latino migrations. His book, Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940–1980 is a pioneering analysis of Mexico’s efforts to curb the outflow of its citizens to the United States. It spotlights the miscalculation of Mexican authorities, who believed they could restrain migration at will—particularly when it provoked social chaos, drained the domestic labor pool, or produced egregious cases of migrant abuse. Mexico’s counter-migratory policies, both those based on coercion and incentives, repeatedly collapsed. Mexican migrants resisted restrictions, U.S. authorities refused to cooperate, and Mexican officials ultimately lacked resolve. As the migration swelled, it slipped beyond Mexico’s control. What was once seen as a looming source of disorder, depletion, and disgrace became naturalized as an irreversible fact of national life.

Cristina Beltrán, Ph.D., works at the intersection of Latinx politics and political theory. She is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. She is the author of Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2010). From 2019-2024 she was co-editor of the journal Theory & Event. Her next book, Racial Sensations: Essays on Latinos and the Multiracial Politics of Conservatism is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Natasha N. Iskander is the James Weldon Johnson Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, New York University where she conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, infrastructure, and worker rights, with more than 40 articles and book chapters on these topics.  Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin. It received the International Studies Association – Distinguished Book Award in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration Track and was a Social Science Research Council—Featured Publication. Her most recent book, Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to define political personhood, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change. It received the 2022 American Sociological Association — Sociology of Development Best Book Award, the 2022 American Sociological Association — Labor and Labor Movements Best Book Award, and the 2022 American Collegiate Schools of Planning John Friedmann Book Award. Her current project focuses on concrete — the second most used substance on the planet (second only to water) and responsible for close to a tenth of all carbon dioxide emissions globally — as a material lens to examine the relationship between climate change, migration, urbanization, and the future of work.