The Policy of “No Policy”: Access to Rights and Dread in the Settlement Experience of Honduran Immigrants in Mexico City.

Based on a previous socio-emotional analysis of the settlement of Hondurans in Mexico City, the aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of Mexican immigration policy on the experiences of dread in the access to rights of these immigrants. First, we present the main elements of the biographical method, interviews and analytical framework used to analyze the narratives of the eight Hondurans immigrants interviewed. Next, we highlight the access to rights as a central interaction of the immigrant’s settlement experience. In addition, we define it as an interaction shaped by a set of situational conditions of power, status and agency, which are consequences of the policy and institutional arrangements associated with the incorporation models (Soysal, 1994). Furthermore, we define emotions as a lens to examine these situational conditions, which offer insights into the positionality and the logic of agency of the actors involved (Barbalet, 1998). Subsequently, we describe the Mexican model of incorporation as overshadowed by the primacy of border control, recurrent violence, absence of a transversal policy of immigrant incorporation, and lack of accountability in the actions of governmental officials. We briefly present the settlement experiences of the Honduran interviewees, highlighting dread as a recurrent emotion in the interaction with governmental officials. We present an example in which we detail the emergence of dread, describing the conditions of verticalized power and the scenarios of humiliation that characterize them. We then analyze the configuration of these scenarios as a consequence of the management model described above. In the final part, we discuss the impact that the Mexican model of incorporation has on immigrants´ lives and settlement experiences. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of analyzing situational conditions and emotions, during interactions of access to rights, in order to improve the evaluation of immigration policies and models.