South America’s moves to liberalize irregular migration are in stark contrast to the punitive and fatal policies of the U.S. and Europe

In light of the escalation of the Mediterranean migrants and refugee crisis, human rights activists have once again severely criticized the approach of the U.S. and Europe to managing irregular migration. South America, in contrast, has become much more accommodating to irregular migrants over the past 15 years. Luisa Feline Freier and Diego Acosta Arcarazo write that, despite persisting inconsistencies, this philosophical paradigm shift in South American immigration policies – which has culminated in the granting of a universal right to migrate in some countries – challenges the fatal criminalization of irregular migrants in Europe and North America

Turning the immigration policy paradox upside down? Populist liberalism and discursive gaps in South America

A paradox of officially rejecting but covertly accepting irregular migrants has long been identified in the immigration policies of Western immigrant receiving states. In South America, on the other hand, a liberal discourse of universally welcoming all immigrants, irrespective of their origin and migratory status, has replaced the formally restrictive, securitized and not seldomly ethnically selective immigration rhetoric. This discursive liberalization has found partial translation into immigration laws and policies, but contrary to the universality of rights claimed in their discourses, governments reject recently increasing irregular south–south migration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to varying degrees. This paper applies a mixed methodological approach of discourse and legal analysis and process tracing to explore in how far recent immigration policies in South America constitute a liberal turn, or rather a reverse immigration policy paradox of officially welcoming but covertly rejecting irregular migrants. Based on the comparative analysis of Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador, the study identifies and explains South American “populist liberalism” in the sphere of migration. We highlight important implications for migration theory, thereby opening up new avenues of research on immigration policy making outside Western liberal democracies, and particularly in predominantly migrant sending countries

Symbolic refugee protection: why Latin America passed progressive refugee laws never meant to use

From free legal assistance in Nicaragua to the recognition of the right to refuge for people fleeing environmental disasters in Ecuador, Latin American refugee laws are exceptional. Yet they often seem to represent more of a utopian manifesto than the basis for political action, as Omar Hammoud Gallego (LSE) and Luisa Feline Freier (Universidad del Pacífico, Peru) found

Symbolic refugee protection: explaining Latin America’s liberal refugee law

What drove an entire region in the Global South to significantly expand refugee protection in the early 21st century? In this paper, we test and build on political refugee theory via a mixed-methods approach to explain the liberalization of refugee legislation across Latin America. First, we use data from the new APLA Database, which measures legislative liberalization over a 30-year period and test both general and region-specific immigration and refugee policy determinants through a series of nested Tobit and linear spatial panel data regressions. Our models do not support some key predictors of policy liberalization identified by the literature, such as immigrant and refugee stocks, democratization, and the number of emigrants, but offer statistical evidence for the importance of leftist government ideology and regional integration. We then shed light on the causal mechanisms behind these correlations for two extreme but diverse cases: Argentina and Mexico. Based on process tracing and elite interviews, we suggest that the reason that leftist political ideology matters for policy liberalization, rather than institutional democratization and number of emigrants, is that Latin American executives embarked on symbolic human and migrant’s rights discourses which ultimately enabled legislative change

A reverse migration paradox? Policy liberalisation and new south-south migration to Latin America

In past decades, immigration policies in Latin America developed in stark contrast to other regions. Whereas most countries moved towards more restrictive policies, many Latin American countries liberalised their immigration policy frameworks and recently passed laws that expand individual rights in unprecedented ways. At the same time, migratory movements in Latin America are in flux, one of the most noteworthy recent developments being the increase in extra-continental immigration from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. This PhD explores a reverse migration paradox inherent in the reciprocal causal relationship between immigration policy liberalisation and new south-south migration. The first paper uses a mixed approach of legal analysis and process tracing to show this paradox in the cases of Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador. It analyses the tension between liberal discourses and policies that invoke the universality of migrants’ rights and free human mobility, on the one hand, and the rejection of recently increasing irregular south–south migration on the other. Using a difference-in-difference design, the second paper tests the impact of Ecuador’s policy of visa freedom of 2008 on previously restricted countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and shows that immigration from these regions more than doubled. Qualitative findings confirm that visa freedom was the main determinant of migrants’ decision to move to Ecuador and further show great variance of migrant characteristics. The third paper is based on 35 in-depth interviews, which collectively demonstrate that perceived security threats of domestic and international political actors, which led to the partial reintroduction of tourist visa requirements for ten African and Asian countries by 2010, were closely intertwined with racism. Taken together, the three papers have important implications for the study of immigration policies, south-south migration and the securitisation of migration

The Venezuelan exodus: placing Latin America in the global conversation on migration management

Though Venezuelan emigration has passed through phases like those of the European migration crisis, issues of foreign policy have seen Latin America respond quite differently to large-scale migration, write Nicolas Parent and Luisa Feline Freier (Universidad del Pacífico, Peru)