APRIL 27, 2026 6:30 PM | ROOM 9205 GRADUATE CENTER CUNY, 365 FIFTH AVE, NEW YORK CITY.

The book tells an unfamiliar story: Mexico trying—and spectacularly failing—to control emigration to the United States. Across four decades, Mexican officials imposed moratoriums, launched “stay-at-home” campaigns, clashed violently with their own citizens at the border, and experimented with domestic labor programs designed to redirect migrant labor. None of it worked. Internal corruption, migrant resistance, and the overwhelming pull of American power combined to make Mexico’s migratory statecraft collapse in on itself. By 1980, a state that once imagined migration as a manageable flow found itself swept away by the current it had cautiously created with the US.

The book reframes the history of U.S.-Mexico migration from Mexico City’s perspective—a story driven not by American policy decisions but by the Mexican state’s own ambitions, failures, and the agency of migrants who refused to bend to Mexican directives.

Irvin Ibargüen is a historian of the Latino diaspora, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at New York University, where he teaches courses on U.S. history and immigration. His work focuses on the movement of Latin American populations across the Western Hemisphere and the ways in which states—sending, transit, and receiving—have attempted to regulate that movement.
His research is driven by a central question: what happens when the study of migration shifts away from prioritizing its impact on the United States, and instead considers how it is experienced by sending states, transit countries, and migrants themselves? This transnational perspective reorients the field toward a more complex understanding of migration as a multidirectional and contested process.
His first book, Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940–1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), offers a Mexico-centered history of migration in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources and periodicals, the book examines how the Mexican state attempted—often unsuccessfully—to control out-migration to the United States, revealing the tensions between state power, migrant agency, and transnational dynamics.
Ibargüen received his PhD from Harvard University, and his scholarship contributes to broader debates on migration, sovereignty, and the limits of state control in the modern era.