The Construction of Immigration Systems in Latin America?

• In Event: The Policy and Politics of Forced Migration in the Americas

Abstract

More than 3 million Venezuelans have left their country in recent years, most in the past two or three years, making this one of the largest and fastest migration and refugee flows anywhere in the world. Latin American countries have received the vast majority of these migrants and refugees.

And though few countries in the region have immigration systems built to manage movement on this scale, most have tried to maintain an open door to those arriving from Venezuela and to create legal pathways so that they can integrate into local communities and economies. Some countries have used existing visa categories, migration agreements, or asylum and refugee programs to ensure that the arriving Venezuelans have regular legal status, while others have implemented new temporary programs to regularize those in the country without legal documentation.

These approaches have helped ensure that many Venezuelan migrants and refugees in Latin America have some sort of legal status. Yet some of these measures have significant shortcomings in terms of their coverage, permanence, or the access to public services that they allow. And while the region has largely adopted a definition of asylum that could justify offering protections to most Venezuelan migrants, only Mexico has put it into practice, with other countries opting for other ways of trying to regularize Venezuelan migrants, even those who might otherwise seek asylum.

With no end in sight to the economic and political crisis that has spurred this movement, and projections that as many as 5.4 million Venezuelans may be living abroad by the end of 2019, mostly within the region, governments in Latin America now face the challenge of transitioning from ad hoc responses to long-term planning.

Will this become the moment that Latin American countries, which have largely seen themselves as emigrant nations, begin to develop their own robust immigration, asylum, and immigrant integration policies and procedures? How will these differ from those in established immigration countries, including those in the European Union, the United States, and Canada? And will these countries continue to maintain easily accessible legal pathways for migrants and refugees or will they follow more established immigrant receiving countries in beginning to restrict access to immigration?

Author

• Andew Dan Selee, Migration Policy Institute