New mobilities in Latin America: Venezuelan migration in crisis contexts and the regional responses
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Abstract
The unprecedented political, economic and social collapse of Venezuela became in a massive and unexpected emigration, which was mainly directed to Latin American countries. This article aims to investigate how the processes of incorporation occur within the legal frameworks for migration enforced in Latin American countries. Where some of them rely on normative frameworks of progressive and more consolidated imprint, others experience a transition or stand at a delay stage, but in general, these are countries with little or no experience of receiving immigrants. The evidence analyzed here combines the documentary review of laws, migration policies and ad hoc measures designed to respond to Venezuelan migration, with the results of a qualitative investigation based on more than 200 semi-structured interviews with recent migrants in eleven Latin American countries. The main results point to an array of responses that goes from lack of protection to legal certainty. This gradient goes from the improvisation of specific instruments, such as the responses from Colombia, Chile, Peru or Brazil, to the enforcement of more established regulatory frameworks -Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina- that conceive migration from the human rights perspective.