Migration Machine: Marketing Mexico in the Age of ICTs

Abstract

A decade ago, a Californian couple moved to Mérida (Mexico) and used the features of their interactive 2.0 blog to publicize their new lifestyle and attract customers for their Internet development company. Their innovative use of blogging coincided with the development of digital copywriting — a type of marketing that produces commercial content for target Internet audiences. Soon, these IT professionals began to interact electronically with hundreds of potential migrants, managing a virtual community they had largely helped to create and simultaneously redirecting their contacts to businesses and professionals catering to North Americans moving to Mexico. These migration brokers, and others who will be discussed here, clearly consider migration to be a form of business, a business that scholars have started to describe in terms of “mobility industry” (David, Akerlund & Eimmerman, 2015) and “mobility management” (Geiger & Pécoud, 2013). The booming migration market they created in Mérida contributes to what French sociologist Frank Cochoy (2012) describes as a relational economy, an economy in which the development of business ties produces tangible societal change and new forms of interaction. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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