Contemporary migrations and the processes of human mobility occurring in the first decades of the 21st century have put under the microscope the norms of international law, States’ own norms and management of their borders and migrant groups, and the rights of people/ human rights. The call for papers for this monograph specified the central themes of global migration governance and sovereign migration legislation, voluntary and forced migrations, human mobility and human rights, and the right to asylum and refuge.

The articles presented in this edition of Revista IUS put into perspective the debates around the international regimes for migration and refuge since the adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees, in 2018. The discussion presented here sets out the international context in which ultranationalism, the exclusion of migrants, aporophobia, and xenophobia emerge.

Interrelating migratory dynamics, international relations, and the law, the edition will provide evidence for the contrast and confrontation/conflict among the specific legal systems of each State in the context of the historical, social, and political conditions pertaining to the issue of migration. Some States, which are poles of attraction for immigration, mainly European States and the United States, are undergoing a resurgence of nationalism learly colored/influenced by racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, thus driving the implementation of severe policy and legal instruments designed to restrict migration. Even in Latin America, state-of-the-art legislation, in countries such as Argentina and Ecuador, that recognizes the right to migrate as a human right have encountered considerable obstacles and marked contradictions. Meanwhile, Mexico is mired in its own contradictions, mobilizing ts National Guard to detain Central American migrants, in clear contrast with the diplomatic and consular discourse in favor of the rights of Mexican migrant communities in the United States.

Human mobility in a complex world obligates societies and nations to rethink their legislation within the context of the international system, in order to establish norms and active policy/active norms and policy that have people and their rights as their cornerstone. International human rights law, international refugee law, and the distinct branches of law based on norms and principles of different origins comprise a body of international law applicable for the protection of the rights of people living in a context of migration and those seeking asylum and refuge. In particular, the criteria corresponding to migrations and human mobility emitted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights take precedence in our continent.

The consideration of norms and principles applicable to people in mobility, those displaced by violence and structural conditions in their places of origin, migrants and migrant workers, including their families, constitutes the fundamental basis, in a legal system, for protecting human rights. This also includes the rights of specific groups, such as women, children, indigenous peoples, disabled people, people of sexual diversity, and older people, as well as guarantees for the rights to health, education, and work.