State and migrants face to face. Institutional and subjective conditions in the state for precarious recognition of migrants in Chile.

• In Event: Transnational Migration and Comparative Perspectives on Non-Citizenship in the Americas

Abstract

Standing on the previous analysis of local governments’ actions and policies in Santiago of Chile (LASA 2015), this paper examines migrants’ precarious status focusing on one side, in the rights that cover and do no cover those actions and policies, and on the other, in the disposition that the actors in the political field have towards migration and migrants’ recognition. The central thesis is that the absence of a migratory policy leads, at the local level, to found the policies in arbitrary actions of particular functionaries; what we have called “the policy of mood”. At the central level the “policy of no policy” leads the actors of political field to found their positions on intuition and prejudice, instead of consistent political conceptions emerged from the discussion around the recognition of migrants. Both conditions create a frame of instability and uncertainty, which is the basis of the precarious situation of the migrants in Chile. The research results that we present are part of a wider work aimed on one hand, at understanding the institutional and subjective conditions implicated in the recognition of migrants in Chilean society, and on the other, oriented to understanding migrant’s expectations about recognition as directed to the society and the state

Author

• Luis Eduardo Thayer, Universidad de Los Lagos