Graduated hospitality: Perceiving scale through migrant resettlement infrastructure in Querétaro,Mexico

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of graduated hospitality to theorize how migrant reception in Mexico’s non-border cities is perceived as shaped by uneven distributions of logistical capacity and moral accountability across institutional and territorial scales. Drawing on eight weeks of ethnographic fieldwork with CAMMI and allied actors in Querétaro (2022), I examine how participants assign responsibility for perceived successes and failures of a UNHCR-supported resettlement program. In comparison, logistical shortcomings were often attributed to local factors; critiques of national and transnational actors, including the UNHCR, centered on moral and geopolitical concerns. Extending Ong’s notion of graduated sovereignty and engaging Mezzadra and Neilson’s hypothesis that contemporary bordering renders scale simultaneously volatile and determining, I develop graduated hospitality as an analytic for tracking pattern subjective allocations of moral and functional responsibility across institutional and territorial scales. The analysis specifies an attribution gradient—functional critiques concentrate locally, while moral critiques scale up—thereby offering an empirically grounded refinement to debates on differential inclusion. I treat interlocutors’ expressions of ambivalence or confusion about such responsibility as a second-order phenomenon, illuminating how these attribution patterns are experienced and negotiated. In short, graduated hospitality names both the uneven distribution of responsibility across scales and the scalar legibility of those distributions, making territorial re-scaling through migration governance more empirically traceable.