This Essay examines the impact of foreign policy collaborations, leading up to the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, signed by twenty Western Hemisphere governments in 2022, on peoples' possibilities for migration and residence. Engaging Critical Legal Rhetoric and Rhetorical Historiography methodologies, this Essay examines the long history of foreign policy and interstate partnerships in the Americas to manage human migration in the region. We argue that foreign policy collaborations are yet another method to augment US power and influence in the region, limit possibilities for human migration northward, and completely remake the regional landscape of borders and nation-state sovereignty in the Americas. After outlining our methodology, our analysis begins with the collaborative response to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s and the rhetoric deployed to warrant the political arrangements. In Part II.B., we examine discourse and political arrangements from the period between 2014-2021 when more Central Americans, especially families and minors, began presenting at the US-Mexico border than Mexican migrants. Our final section considers the regional collaborations implemented since 2021 to manage and regulate movement from South America to North America. Reading the moments together, we see the development of a regional migration management infrastructure through foreign policy collaborations to shift human migration south, farther away from the US southern border, and to prevent individuals from reaching territories where they may be able to seek asylum and other forms of humanitarian immigration relief. To conclude, we discuss the implications of a regional migration management system and suggest a need to rethink what nation-state borders are, how they function, and how collaborating countries serve each other's goals.
