Regulating immigration requires lawmakers to reach beyond a unilateral "gatekeeping" strategy defined by efforts to stop migration through law enforcement and economic coercion. In their contributions to the policy debate, scholars increasingly have emphasized the importance of addressing labor and illegal migration through bilateral and transnational frameworks—through accords that would recognize the interdependence of the United States and Mexico and engage our neighbor to the south directly through joint efforts to channel migratory flows.
In this Essay, I seek to contribute to this strand of commentary by identifying the existing mechanisms of transnationalism and offering initial suggestions for their development, in the interest of building institutional capacity for meaningful bilateralism. These mechanisms consist of international diplomatic and information-sharing networks, cooperative ventures between administrative officials on both sides of the border, and transnational civil society networks developed to serve the needs of Mexican migrants. The cross-border administrative law space these forms of organization create is occupied not just by international entities, but also by entanglements between the domestic institutions of the United States and Mexico. In assessing these networks, I emphasize that bilateralism should be shaped to promote burden-sharing, or to ensure that both sides of the bilateral relationship reap benefits and bear costs, in rough proportion.
