The Argentine Role in the Promotion of Migration Policy in Mercosur (1991–2014) (original) (raw)
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Review of International Political Economy, Volume 20, Issue 3, June, 2013, pp. 541-575., 2012
The negotiation of migration issues within the Latin American Southern Cone Market (Mercosur) has gained momentum lately and has followed a specific (relatively autonomous and fast) dynamic that is unprecedented and contrasts with the slow and conflictive negotiations to achieve the bloc's economic goals. This study explains why negotiations to harmonize migration policies are taking place, why now, and how this is happening in a way that contradicts previous assumptions. It highlights a number of facts and explanatory factors largely neglected by the existing literature, such as: (1) instable political contexts in which social inequality, marginalization, and discontent call attention to socio-political issues and prompt state attempts to regulate human mobility cooperatively; (2) regional leadership that is not simply based on relative power and economic interests but on ideologically-loaded political projects and key actors who forge and legitimize a post-neoliberal consensus linking domestic and foreign policy strategies; (3) policy networks of private and public actors whose ideas inform top policy-makers discourses and contribute to the processes of socialization of policy elites, construction of shared understandings, and cultivation of cooperative practices that feed regional integration. The findings and conclusions shed light on the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy, as well as the processes of coalition- and identity-building that are allowing South American governments to expand cooperation in a piecemeal and somewhat inconsistent fashion.
This article offers an alternative explanation for the diffusion theory that focusses on the process of governance emergence from a top-down perspective. This alternative bottom up explanation is tested studying how the model of migration governance in the Mercosur Resident Agreement was formed. In that sense, the article evaluate the actors that were involved in the Agreement, their main interests and institutional conditions, as well as the modes of interaction that prevailed among them. Based on interviews with key actors, documents and academic literature on the subject this article concludes that the Agreement was mainly the result of the Brazilian and Argentinian negotiations. Brazil needed to boost regional cooperation after Mercosur crisis and considered that a joint migration amnesty could have a positive impact in the regional block´s image. However, the Argentinian experience in migration issues was the one that allowed for a more coherent policy in the matter, which in t...
The present work is an investigation about immigration policies and on how the South American regional integration has been a place for a regional migration policy, especially within MERCOSUR and its associated states. This article is divided into two parts, the first one is theoretical and it aims to define what a regional migration policy is and who immigrants are. In the second part, all regional agreements on immigration will be analyzed and compared with regional migration figures in order to identify whether they are able to facilitate migration between the member states of MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) and its associate states (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru), or to improve the flow of people across borders. Finally, regional advances as well as continuing difficulties will be pointed out with regard to regional integration.
Adriana Braz Montenegro, 2018
This article offers a complementary explanation to the diffusion theory that focuses on the process of governance emergence from a top-down perspective. This complementary explanation analyzes the bottom-up processes of diffusion and tested them by studying the policy formulation process in the Mercosur Residence Agreement (RA) signed in 2002. Based on interviews with key actors, documents, and academic literature, this article concludes that the RA was mainly the result of Brazilian and Argentinian negotiations. Brazil needed to boost regional cooperation after the Mercosur crisis, and considered that a joint migration amnesty could have a positive impact on the trading bloc’s image. However, the Argentinian experience in migration issues allowed for a more coherent policy on the matter. Therefore, I maintain that the mode of interaction in the Residence Agreement negotiations was a bottom up diffusion process that allowed the regionalization of domestic policies.
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This document questions how the degree of integration in the region is evolving concerning the migration issue, which allows us to reflect on how consolidated the migration regional governance (GRM) is in countries such as Argentina and Uruguay, which are Member States of the Mercosur Residence Agreement (ARM) and Colombia and Peru which are associate countries to this same agreement, in a context of the high level of Venezuelan emigration through this South American subregion. A mixed methodology, qualitatively and quantitatively, was used. It was evidenced that Argentina and Uruguay applied the Mercosur Residence Agreement, with convergence towards a GRM; however, neither Colombia nor Peru applied the ARM until today, but instead, they have adopted ad hoc legal instruments, with which the convergence towards a GRM is weak, and the urgency of the application of regional migration governance is underlined.
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