Turkey and Mexico have been recently transformed from emigration to transit and immigration countries. Mexico (2012) and Turkey (2014) recently adopted new migration laws, which were presented as completely novel legislative constructions strengthening human rights by national and international actors. In this article, we analyse and compare the emergence of human rights discourses in the development and negotiation of these laws in Turkey and Mexico in relation to the irregular migration and refugees, and in the context of the regionalisation of migration policies. With reference to the concepts of the ‘human rights from above’ and ‘human rights from below’ we show how the different use of frames in legal developments in the migration field between Mexico and Turkey highlights two fundamentally different approaches to the discursive use of human rights.
