Chile and the politicization of migration governance

• In Event: Governance issues in present-day Chile

Abstract

This paper explores how key Chilean policymakers are making sense of contemporary migration trends, in order to analyse the current changes in migration governance in the country. Sebastián Piñera started his second presidency with a strong shift on migration policy and governance. The inability of the previous President, Michele Bachelet, to modify Chile’s out-dated Pinochet-era immigration law from 1975, gave Piñera the perfect political excuse to make migration reform one of his priorities. In March 2018, Piñera introduced a series of measures affecting migration, including a law proposal, administrative decrees dealing with visa procedures for Venezuelan and Haitian migrants and, finally, a regularisation process. The shifts on migration governance in Chile need to be understood in the context of a non-linear migration history and as part of a longer-term debate between various actors (see Acosta et al 2018). At the same time, the increased political salience of migration has become a valuable political capital that the Piñera administration has utilized to frame the idea of ‘tiding up the house’, which has proven popular among public opinion. The government has also been using the global discourse of ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’ to justify restrictive policies supposedly to protect migrants. Chile is shifting, moving from a situation of inertia, to a more restrictive migration policy. Nonetheless, this restrictive approach coexists with a human rights discourse still surviving at the regional level in South America. This paper will analyse these tensions and the reconfiguration of migration governance in Chile.

Author

• Marcia A Vera Espinoza, Queen Mary University of London