Edited by Kiran Banerjee and Craig Damian Smith, this anthology provides a uniquely trinational perspective on migration politics and policy in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It is the leading book-length work on the topic.

The first two chapters analyze all three cases in North America. While the United States is the dominant actor, and the dyadic exchanges with it involving Canada and Mexico are by far the largest, bringing all three cases into the same analytical frame yields surprising insights. As of 2019, Canada had a higher stock of Central American migrants than Mexico. Canada, famously multilateralist and entrepreneurial in promoting humanitarian norms, does not follow the usual pattern when it comes to migration and refugee issues in the Americas. Yet, an innovative chapter by Craig Damian Smith shows that Canadian policy toward migrant farm workers, who hail overwhelmingly from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, sharply restricts their rights. Fewer than 1% of resettled refugees to Canada are from Latin America and the Caribbean. Smith attributes this more restrictive and strategic Canadian approach to migration governance in the hemisphere to an effort to contain potentially large numbers of Latin American and Caribbean migrants and to a longstanding instrumental orientation toward Latin America focused on mining that predates Canada’s project of humanitarian branding.

The rest of the book consists of case studies of policies in single countries (Canadian migration governance, US refugee policy); analyses of US interactions with one of its neighbors (separate chapters on US-Canada and US-Mexico dynamics); comparisons of North America with Europe with respect to smart border programs, repertoires of expertise in managing and regulating migration, and development aid aimed at migration control in Central America and Africa, respectively. While most of the chapters take a top-down approach that analyzes national politics and bilateral interactions, three chapters examine practices from below—focusing on the experience of African migrants stranded in Mexico en route to the United States, on migrant advocacy in Canada and the United States, and on public opinion on migration in Canada. All of the chapters focus on the 21st century through to the early years of the Biden administration.

Most of the 26 authors are political scientists. Several hail from neighboring disciplines. Voices from all three countries are well represented. The 17 chapters show North America through a kaleidoscope rather than focusing on one argument, but several major themes emerge.

First, executive authority is a longstanding feature of Canadian and Mexican migration governance, and that is increasingly true of the United States as well—a shift that was taking place even before Trump’s second administration. In chapter five, Geoffrey Cameron and Shauna Labman show that executive discretion is a dominant feature of refugee resettlement in the United States and Canada. In the United States, that discretion enabled the Trump administration to gut refugee resettlement overnight in 2016 (as well as again in 2025, although this falls after the period discussed in the book). In Canada, executive discretion allowed the Trudeau administration to quickly move in the opposite direction to increase resettlement of Syrians in response to the Syrian civil war. The Canadian government was able to move so fast in part because its private sponsorship and hybrid public/private programs shift some of the costs of resettlement onto civil society. A chapter by Alise Coen, in turn, catalogues the many ways that the first Trump administration undermined refugee protection norms—including those of non-refoulement, non-detention of asylum seekers, non-penalization of refugees for evading border controls, and non-discrimination against refugees on grounds such as religion—and further reduced the US’s commitment to the shared international responsibility toward refugees. She suggests that as states converge on policies of tighter asylum restrictions and border externalization, variation will continue in the level of resettlement programming and funding of overseas refugee programs because they are more easily controlled by the executive branch.

A second feature of migration governance in the region, which is partly derived from the high degree of executive discretion, is extensive policy interaction outside of consolidated institutions. Even the US-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement—which came into effect in 2004 to reduce access to asylum by certain types of migrants who passed through the other country—is not embedded in a highly developed regime like the EU’s Dublin System and the two European supranational courts. The result, argues Kiran Banerjee, is that it has been more difficult to challenge the legal fiction that access to asylum is equally protected in the United States. This point could be further developed to show that the argument that liberal states accept more immigration than their publics want because national and supranational courts act as constraints on executive action is primarily derived from European cases, rather than North American ones.

In their chapter on US and Canadian border security arrangements, Rey Koslowski and Geoff Leckey also focus on the problem of executive discretion, albeit in a less centralized fashion. They draw on Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s concept of “transgovernmental relations” as “sets of direct interactions among sub-units of different governments that are not controlled or closely guided by the policies of the cabinets of chief executives of those governments” to show how border agencies coordinate their actions at the subnational level, often without explicit direction from above (p. 115). Relatedly, Ruben Zaiotti’s chapter on smart borders and traveler screening programs shows how government experts share ideas and strategies for border management—forms of collaboration that travel in both directions across the Atlantic to shape national programs outside of formal state-to-state agreements.

The transgovernmental quality of these interactions becomes clear when extending the scope of study from migration, which generally implies long-term movement and settlement, to the more capacious notion of mobility. Migration is increasingly treated as a security threat in public discourse, even though the small number of international terrorists who cross borders are much more likely to enter as visitors, usually tourists. Attention to other forms of mobility yields insights that could be further expanded. For example, the prescreening of cargo containers by US agents in Canada and Canadian agents in the United States is symmetrical, unlike the pre-screening of air passengers, which only takes place by US agents in Canada. What accounts for this difference?

Attending to broader forms of mobility beyond permanent immigrants arriving through Canada’s famous points system, Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos and Zack Taylor argue, reveals a quiet transformation in the country’s border regime. The share of Canadian immigration made up of temporary workers with fewer rights has increased dramatically in recent years. All of Canada’s provincial governments, not just Quebec, now play a major role in selecting temporary migrants, and colleges, universities, and employers are hiring increasing numbers of international student graduates.

This edited collection shows how, in all three countries, the dominant role of the executive in determining migration policy means that such a policy regime can change quickly in ways that reverberate outward, especially in the case of the US hegemon. North American migration governance is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable as a result. For example, the first Trump presidency’s Remain in Mexico Program sent 78,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico to await a hearing in the United States and carried out nearly three million Title 42 expulsions—whereby an individual is expelled for putatively public health reasons. Most of those expulsions also sent migrants to Mexico, undermining its sovereignty, as Luicy Pedroza and Isabel Gil-Everaert lay out in chapter two. Given the sensitivity of US meddling, the Mexican government has resolved “conflicting demands and requirements by resorting to nontransparent and uncontrolled policy responses” (p. 59). As Mexico has increasingly become a blocked mass transit site for migrants from Latin America and countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, it has quickly become a major country of asylum in its own right.

This book is an excellent summary of migration governance issues in North America. One hopes that it will set the agenda for more systematic comparative research of the United States, Canada, and Mexico as an interactive border system by highlighting the similarities and differences over time across the three country cases. Its emphasis on executive discretion also travels well into the second Trump presidency. The extent to which informal cooperation between these North American states and subnational agencies continues along the lines described in this text will await future research.