What drove an entire region in the Global South to significantly expand refugee protection in the early twenty-first 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 consistent predictors of policy liberalization identified by the literature such as immigrant and refugee stocks, democratization, and the number of emigrants, but they 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 rather than institutional democratization and number of emigrants matters for policy liberalization is that Latin American executives embarked on symbolic human and migrant’s rights discourses that ultimately enabled legislative change.
The Venezuelan exodus is the second biggest displacement scenario in the world and meets three out of the five elements of the refugee definition of the regional 1984 Cartagena Declaration, which most countries in the region have incorporated into their national legislation. However, numbers of both Venezuelan asylum seekers and recognized refugees remain extremely low. In this context, the UNHCR created the category ‘Venezuelans displaced abroad’, which was first introduced in its 2019 Global Trends Report. Acknowledging the large percentage of Venezuelans who remain outside of the asylum system, the UNHCR maintains that this group is entitled to international protection. However, they are not officially counted as asylum seekers, refugees or ‘others of concern to the UNHCR’.
Based on 16 elite interviews this research explores the following questions: How has the category of ‘Venezuelans displaced abroad’ affected the sense- and decision-making of both representatives of international organizations and policy makers, and in how far did the category shape Peru’s policy reactions to Venezuelan displacement?
En un contexto de liberalización de sus marcos normativos, la mayoría de los países en América Latina han incorporado la definición ampliada de refugiado de la Declaración de Cartagena de 1984 en su legislación doméstica. Sin embargo, esta definición se ha aplicado pocas veces. Frente al éxodo de personas venezolanas, y en un contexto de endurecimiento de las políticas migratorias en general, y hacia la población venezolana en especial, es necesario discutir sobre la posible aplicación de esta definición a dicha población.
Sin negar la importancia de las implicancias políticas de la aplicación de Cartagena, este artículo aborda, desde una mirada jurídica, los retos para conceptualizar sus elementos situacionales, enfocándose en el de violación masiva de derechos humanos. Para ello, el artículo propone desarrollar un marco conceptual de este elemento situacional y su aplicación al caso venezolano.
This special issue of International Migration brings together seven articles that deepen our understanding of Latin American political and policy reactions to Venezuelan displacement at a national level, the role of regional protection mechanisms for displaced populations, such as the Cartagena Declaration refugee definition, as well as Venezuelans’ perceptions of such policies. More specifically, the articles offer analyses of the policy reactions of five South American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) and Mexico, as well as a regional perspective regarding the applicability of the Cartagena refugee definition to the Venezuelan case. The articles in this issue originate from discussions that took place during two panels that were organized by the co-editors in the 2019 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress, titled Venezuelan International Migration in the Americas: Origins and Challenges.
Overall, the special issue’s contribution is threefold. First, a South-North bias continues to underlie mainstream migration theories, leaving the dynamics of, and the political and policy reactions to, south-south flows substantially understudied. This lacuna is particularly worrisome considering that, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by 2020, countries in the Global South hosted 86 per cent of all forcibly displaced people (UNHCR, 2020). The focus on Latin American governments’ reception of Venezuelan migrants and refugees, thus, serves to remedy this void in the literature. Second, both scholars and specialists have pointed out that the refugee definition of the 1951 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Status of Refugees excludes many situations of forced mobility. Therefore, extended regional definitions seek to provide special protection in situations of broader humanitarian crises. The present issue aims to better understand the application of regional protection mechanisms, as well as related challenges, for the case of the Cartagena Declaration refugee definition. In addressing these points, the articles in the special issue also allow us to better understand the political and practical barriers to the implementation of exceptionally progressive immigration and refugee legislation, contributing to the literature on implementation gaps in the region.