Facto Refugee Protection: Lessons From The South
12.4. Conclusion: Lessons from the South
South America presents an interesting case that could offer some lessons for other world regions. Unlike Europe, its regional refugee regime does not create ‘external borders’, so there is no need to enforce them, in sharp contrast with the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. At the same time, the South American intra-regional regime works in at least two different, and sometimes contradictory, ways. On the one hand, legisla-tion - the formal dual regime - is exceplegisla-tionally progressive with a view to the expanded refugee definition of Cartagena and the socio-economic integration of both asylum-seekers and refugees, but also of intra-re-gional migrants. For example, across the region, Venezuelans can work as soon as they arrive in most host countries, regardless of their status as economic migrants, asylum seekers or refugees (Freier, 2019). Given the largely informal character of South American labour markets, even irregular migrants start working as soon as they arrive in their destina-tion country, and in some countries such as Argentina, their labour rights are protected.
On the other hand, formal refugee legislation coexists with different policy practices, some of which are restrictive and violate the interna-tional obligations that these countries have, while others offer alternative protection for refugees. For example, most South American borders have remained open to legal Venezuelan immigration despite the large scale of this displacement. Other countries, such as Ecuador and Peru, have limited legal entry for domestic political reasons (Freier and Castillo Jara, 2020). In either case, there is regional awareness that borders are porous and that it is not possible to stop people from migrating (Brumat, 2020).
Following this logic, even for countries that have seen recent restrictive policy shifts towards Venezuelan immigration, the solution to irregular arrivals is not deportation, but regularisation.
South American countries have opted for migrant regularisation, not only because of an ideological paradigm shift, which led States to increas-ingly follow a human, or migrant’ rights- based approach in the past 20 years (Cantor et al., 2015), but also because of pragmatic reasons (Brumat, 2020). A regularised migrant population is easier to integrate into society and the formal economy, which benefits the state, especially in the case
of highly skilled migrants. Migrant regularisation is also paramount from a public health approach, especially in times of Covid-19 (Freier, 2020).
Although there are significant intra-regional differences and increasing resistance to regularisation due to the large scale of Venezuelan displace-ment in some countries, overall this stands in opposition to the logic that prevails in the EU. As seen in the recent Pact, its underlying logic is set on blocking the arrival of those who seek protection (Carrera, 2020).
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