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

Abstract

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.

Non-Incorporation of the Principle of Non-Refoulement in the Chilean Immigration and Aliens Law

“…127). For further analysis of an expanded LatinAmerican refugee protection, see (Çalı et al, 2020, p. 358;Cantor & Barichello, 2013;Dembour, 2015;Hammoud-Gallego & Freier, 2023).…”

“…To further explore how does the Refugee Convention relates to non-signatory parties, see(Janmyr, 2021).7 The ongoing Venezuelan crisis challenges the application of the extended definition of Refugee contained in the Cartagena Declaration. See(Acosta et al, n.d.;Blouin et al, 2020;Feline Freier & Parent, 2019;Hammoud- Gallego, 2022;Hammoud-Gallego & Freier, 2023;Ochoa, 2020) . For a critical view on the Cartagena Declaration, see (Fischel de Andrade, 2019).…”

Temporary protection for forced migrants: A commentary on the Colombian temporary protection status

“…A recent article in the American Political Science Review shows that such reforms occurred in the absence of mass displacement scenarios. Leftist ideological convergence of governments in the region and their increased political and economic integration led to the adoption of similar standards of refugee protection, in a situation where migration and especially refugee protection where non-salient issues in political debates (Hammoud-Gallego & Freier, 2022). Venezuelan displacement puts these exceptional laws to the test, particularly in Colombia where immigration is a new issue on the agenda and where the government must innovate not only to assist displaced people, but also to foster their inclusion in the host communities to prevent xenophobia and exclusion.…”

Immigration and Nationalistic Attitudes: Panel Evidence from Chile

“…For examples of research studying the politics of migration in Latin America, see Malone (2019), Vega-Mendez and Visconti (2021),Holland et al (2021),Acevedo andMeseguer (2022), andHammoud-Gallego andFreier (2023).…”