Migration: The Experience of Argentina

Migration: The Experience of Argentina

During the 1990s the Argentine government and media regularly announced the entry of a new wave of immigrants, comparable to the transatlantic migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This time around, however, the immigrants were from the border countries of Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. The Argentine government took this to mean that Argentina had entered the First World: Germany had Turkish immigrants; the United States had Mexicans, and Argentina, Bolivians, Peruvians, and Paraguayans.

This idea of joining the First World was the way that Argentina inserted itself into the increasingly globalized world from 1990 and was directly related to the country's traditional self-image as a European enclave in Latin America. People proudly affirmed, in accordance with the racist ideology of the era, that Argentina was a country with no African-born or indigenous population. Yet globalization and the changes introduced by neo-liberalism produced a new scenario in which social conflict began to be seen as cultural conflict. Ethnic identities and ethnic politics became relevant as State and subaltern politics. Bolivians and migrants from other neighboring countries came to the center of new ideas and definitions of nationality, class and citizenship.

But overshadowing the celebration was an official xenophobia that blamed the newcomers for the country's growing social and economic ills. According to government and media accounts, the torrent of immigrants from bordering countries was causing an explosion in unemployment and crime. But demographic data showed that there was no jump in immigration rates. The proportion of the population made up of immigrants from neighboring countries increased but a fraction of a percent during the 1990s. Between 1991 and 2001 their representation within the total population increased only from 2.6 per cent to 2.8 per cent.

Neo-liberal globalization has made borders flexible and porous in order to facilitate the movement of capital, while exerting a restrictive effect on the population. States and their political frontiers have been transformed, not erased. The objective of the new policies is not primarily one of controlling territory; it is to control circulation. The key is no longer space but flow. MERCOSUR has tried to activate ‘integration from above’, while at the same time generating new frontiers between populations and citizens down below.

The public authorities have an alternative. They can either foment policies that hinder migration, criminalize undocumented immigrants and encourage xenophobia, all of which only make immigrants more vulnerable to exploitation and social exclusion. Or they can truly embrace the spirit of solidarity expressed in the declarations of regional summits by rejecting the narrow, nationalistic policies that currently marginalize immigrants. The Argentinean case shows how migration, in the contemporary phase of globalization, is constitutive of the ways in which a social conflict scenario is actually defined. The ethnicization of migrant groups is the way in which the culturalization of social and political conflict is now taking place.

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