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This chapter provides an overview of contemporary mobility patterns in the Americas and evaluates them from a regional rather than a single-case or sub-regional perspective. In examining these new mobility patterns, it explores migration conditions and intersections devoting special attention to historical continuities and changes. This chapter covers five main topics: violence and migration; political and legal responses to changing migration patterns; lifestyle and high-skilled North–South migration; spaces of transatlantic and transpacific migration; and new patterns of intraregional South–South migration. The chapter argues that contemporary patterns link the entire region in a complex web of transnational and transregional movements connecting origin, transit and receiving countries. It further posits that new patterns are having major impact on states’ policies and sociopolitical conditions and are shaping in significant ways the lives, roles and identity of people on the move including migrants and refugees.

This chapter explores the paradigmatic case of Michoacan, Mexico, a model transnational state with intense social and economic interconnections with the United States suffering very high levels of violence. It investigates how insecurity resulting from criminal-related activities and the concomitant reaction on the part of the Mexican state and self-defense groups has forcibly displaced thousands of people, critically reshaping the state’s migration patterns, such as with the rise of internal displacement. Relying on interviews with migrant authorities and representatives of civil society both in Mexico and the United States, this chapter traces the effect that violence is having on traditional migration patterns showing how an important number of uprooted Michoacanos have attempted to migrate north using existing transnational migration networks. The analysis thus underscores the complex intermestic dimension that human mobility is attaining in the North American corridor.