Beyond Cooperation: The Role of Origin Countries in Deportation Efforts, Evidence from Mexico (1942 to 1964)

For deportations to be carried out, host countries must secure inter-state cooperation with origin countries where they seek to deport noncitizens. However, origin countries may decide to cooperate or resist cooperation. This paper pushes the scholarship by exploring why some origin countries not only decide to cooperate but also become proactive actors in deportation efforts by encouraging and promoting the deportation of their citizens despite the economic and political costs. This paper unpacks this puzzle by analyzing why the Mexican government became a proactive actor in facilitating the deportation of its citizens from the 1940s to the 1960s. Drawing on state archival research in the U.S. and Mexico, I argue that the Mexican government became a proactive actor as a strategy to address its domestic challenges and to cultivate its diplomatic relations with the U.S. government and the benefits that came with such relation including the continuation of the Bracero Program, the largest guest worker program. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, this article provides an in-depth analysis on how Mexico, the country with the highest deportation flows in the Western Hemisphere, managed deportations during one of the largest U.S. removal operations. Second, by introducing the concept of proactiveness, it expands the field of migration diplomacy by unpacking the conditions that motivate origin countries to become proactive actors in deportation proceedings.