A Liberal Region in a World of Closed Borders? The Liberalization of Asylum Policies in Latin America, 1990–2020

Abstract

Recent scholarship has claimed that countries across Latin America have been adopting an increasingly liberal and more advanced legal framework for the protection of refugees. Yet little systematic cross-country evidence beyond case studies exists to back up this claim. To address this gap in the literature, I develop a new methodology — called the Asylum Policies in Latin America (APLA) Database — to measure policy outputs on asylum across Latin America over time. Applying this new methodology, I present the results of the codification of 19 Latin American countries, over a 31-year period (1990–2020), using 65 indicators to track the development of policy measures on asylum. The findings from this new database confirm the claim from existing research that countries across Latin America have developed an increasingly complex and more liberal legal framework for the protection of refugees. This liberal trend in asylum legislation stands in contrast to findings of increased restrictiveness over the same period across OECD countries. The APLA Database represents a unique contribution to the fields of migration and refugee studies, as it provides systematic data on the nature and development of asylum policies in Latin America through highly disaggregated data on policy outputs. Additionally, APLA demonstrates the existence of intra-regional variation. It also allows scholars to develop and test hypotheses in the field of asylum studies and provides a reference database for comparative analyses of asylum policies in Latin America, as well as a framework for the comparative study of asylum policies across the globe.

Analyzing the Main Determinants for Being an Immigrant in Cuenca (Ecuador) Based on a Fuzzy Clustering Approach

“…There exists an ample consensus in the existing literature about the main causes for both flows immigrants and refugees [14]. Thus, the list of thirty items correspond to the categories of factors that include economic variables, globalization, political variables, social variables, cultural variables and access variables [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. Other items were obtained from the items included in the studies of secondary houses as these are also related to the objective of the study [31][32][33][34][35].…”

Symbolic Refugee Protection: Explaining Latin America’s Liberal Refugee Laws

“…Rather, with the expansion of economic and social constitutional rights that followed the region’s redemocratization processes in the 1980s (Gargarella 2013; Meili 2019; von Bogdandy and Urena 2020), there has been significant discursive policy liberalization (Acosta and Freier 2015a). These developments ultimately culminated in the passing of exceptionally expansive refugee laws during the twenty-first century (Freier and Gauci 2020; Hammoud-Gallego 2022).…”

“…The region ought to be of special interest to scholars of refugee policies for three reasons. First, at least on a de jure basis, Latin America has a long tradition of spearheading global and regional refugee protection efforts, such as the 1889 Montevideo Treaty on International Penal Law (Harley 2014) and the refugee definition of the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, which was passed in the context of the Central American refugee crisis (Arboleda 1995; De Andrade 2019; Freier and Gauci 2020; Hammoud-Gallego 2022; Reed-Hurtado 2017). Second, over the last three decades, the majority of countries in the region have developed increasingly complex and liberal refugee policies, including the incorporation of the Cartagena refugee definition into their national legislation (Freier and Gauci 2020; Hammoud-Gallego 2022).…”

Jubilut, Liliana Lyra, Espinoza, Marcia Vera, Mezzanotti, Gabriela. 2021. Latin America and Refugee Protection: Regimes, Logics and Challenges. Berghahn Books: New York. pp. 434.

“…Yet, foreshadowing the broader issue that resurfaces throughout this volume, de Andrade makes clear already in the first chapter on the negotiations that led to the drafting of the Cartagena Declaration, that its “broad [refugee] definition is seldom used, thus having greater application in rhetoric than in practice” (p.41), even though most Latin American countries have included it into their refugee legislation (Hammoud‐Gallego, 2022). In the following chapter, Rushing and Lizcano Rodriguez focus instead on the lesser‐known 1994 “San José Declaration” which—despite not having been referenced explicitly in any national legislation or policy—they claim has put “internal displacement on the humanitarian agenda both regionally and globally” (p. 53).…”