Marietta Messmer is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Her publications focus on the political and cultural relations between the U.S. and Latin America, Mexican and Central American migration to the U.S., violence in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, as well as theoretical debates on human rights, citizenship, integration, and minority rights. She is managing editor of the peer-reviewed book series Interamericana, devoted to publications on the literatures, cultures, and societies of North, Central and South America (Peter Lang Verlag) and serves as Vice President of the International American Studies Association (IASA) (since September 2019). Her book publications include several co-edited collections on inter-American political, social, and cultural relations, including, most recently, The International Turn in American Studies (2015, with Armin Paul Frank) and America: Justice, Conflict, War (2016, with Amanda Gilroy).
Her current research project examines the U.S.’s and the European Union’s ways of outsourcing and privatizing immigration control measures and the social, economic, legal, and ethical consequences this has for migrants and refugees as well as for transit countries like Mexico, Libya, and Turkey. Her central argument is that this extraterritorialization of (legal and political) borders facilitates the circumvention of basic human rights obligations and redefines the boundaries of state control as it simultaneously expands and disperses state power by increasing the government’s legal reach over vulnerable non-citizen populations even beyond national borders while at the same time decreasing the government’s direct liability and accountability.
Moreover, Messmer is interested in the ways in which the current U.S. immigration and refugee regime violates both U.S. national legal standards as well as international human rights obligations towards under-age migrants and refugees. Child migration raises many social, legal, and political questions that differ fundamentally from those raised by adult migrants and throws into striking relief the contradictions inherent in the U.S.’s immigration and refugee regime, which is primarily geared at adults, as well as the contradictory nature of family-related immigration policies that seemingly privilege family reunification while at the same time tearing apart mixed-status families or non-immediate relatives.
| Migration Reasearch Hub ID: 957 |
Expertise
Migration processes
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Migration drivers
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Migration forms
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Migration infrastructures
Migration consequences (for migrants, sending and receiving countries)
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Socio-cultural consequences
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Socio-economic consequences
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Transversal consequences
Migration governance
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Governance actors
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Immigrant policy and law
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Migration policy and law
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Governance processes
Disciplines
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Disciplines
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Subject Areas
Methods
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Either/Mixed
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Qualitative research
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Types of study
Geographies
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Scope
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UN Countries
Roles
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University of Groningen
University, Groningen, Netherlands
Associate Professor
Research
Children and Youth: Disadvantaged and Disenfranchised by the Current U.S. Immigration Regime
| Authors | Marietta Messmer |
| Year | 2018 |
| Journal Name | Review of International American Studies | Taxonomy | View Taxonomy Associations |
Outsourcing Immigration Control: A Comparison Between Current U.S. and EU Immigration Policy Measures
| Authors | Marietta Messmer |
| Year | 2016 |
| Book Title | (Im)migration Patterns: Displacement and Relocation in Contmporary America | Taxonomy | View Taxonomy Associations |
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