Latest Post

Not All Latin American Migrants Head North

Posted June 24, 2010 by Leslie Josephs

With undocumented Latin American immigrants clearly at the forefront of the United States immigration debate – and the contentious laws that seek to criminalize their status – it’s easy to overlook what else happens south of the Rio Grande.

Not all migrants are heading north.

Hundreds of thousands of Latin American migrants do not head north to the United States at all, but to neighboring nations wealthier than their own.

Thousands of Bolivians and Peruvians have migrated to Chile and Argentina for work opportunities where they often take low-paying jobs. Bolivians and Paraguayans enter Brazil for the same reason. Nicaraguans have streamed into wealthy Costa Rica since violent civil war in the 1980s and continue to do so in search of economic opportunities.

Internal immigration is on the rise in South America, particularly after the financial crisis in the United States and Europe, according to anecdotal reports from the region. Jacqueline Mazza and Eleanor Sohnen note in their May report “On the Other Side of the Fence: Changing Dynamics of Migration in the Americas,”  that accurate migration data is scarce because so many immigrants enter recipient countries undetected and undocumented, or are fleeing violence. That’s the case in Ecuador and Venezuela, which sandwich Colombia, where a more than 40-year internal armed conflict has raged.

Between 2000 and 2001, the University of Sussex’s Global Migrant Origin Database found that the destination countries with the highest numbers of intraregional migrants during that time period were Argentina (1,043,000), Venezuela (762,000), Costa Rica (280,000), Paraguay (156,000), and Chile (134,000). Regional data from the 2010 Census is expected to give a better idea of the situation.

“Given the costs, distance, difficulty of gaining legal entry, and danger of migrating illegally to destinations like the United States, most of those who migrate within Latin America, with exceptions, appear to be poorer and less educated on average than those migrating to OECD countries,” Mazza and Sohnen wrote.


Image courtesy of thejourney1972 via Flickr.

Tags : This blog entry is not yet tagged.

Comments

More LI Features

Media Mentions