Finding Security in a New Rhythm: How South-South Migrants in Uruguay Negotiate Transnational Temporalities

• In Event: Beyond Asylum and Resettlement: Diverse Modes of Refugee Migration

Abstract

This paper analyzes how South-South migrants in Montevideo, Uruguay negotiate transnational temporalities within global regimes of precarity. These ethnographic accounts are shaped by their relationships to family and friends who are migrants in the United States, offering a transnational perspective on the “American Dream” and the promise of middle-class stability. Previous scholarship frequently links migrant temporal disruption to restrictive legal regimes in the Global North. Therefore, Uruguay’s highly regularized migration regime, which provides equal residency and work status regardless of mode or reason for arrival, alongside the nation’s strong labor protections, present an alternate case in which legal and organizational forms of security are high, even as economic mobility remains limited in a Global South context. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with 31 participants from 14 countries across Latin America, Asia, and Africa, this paper finds that these South-South migrants have found a new form of middle-class security that relies not on future-oriented mobility and purchasing power, but on an “embrace of the present.”

Migrants speak to three interconnected domains of non-economic security that are more accessible in Uruguay than in their home countries or in the United States, which promote an “embrace of the present” and a slower lifestyle: bodily and mental security brought by a slower pace of urban life and public safety, family security through quality time made possible by a regularized migration system and fair working conditions, and labor security at large based on strong institutional protections despite stagnant wages and limited opportunities for savings. Paradoxically, migrants perceive that their U.S.-based relatives who live in greater legal and labor precarity, display a greater capacity to achieve their long-term dreams through high relative wages, at the cost of daily insecurity. These findings contribute a South-South reflection to theories of (in)security and migrant temporality developed in the Global North.

Author

• Asha Marie Kaur Sawhney, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign