Extending and restricting the right to regularisation: lessons from South America

This article explores how South American politicians rhetorically justify extending and restricting irregular migrants’ right to regularisation. Since 2002, the region has gradually established the right to regularisation before expulsion, creating norms and frameworks through which the opportunity for regularisation is the expected state response to irregular migration, rather than exception. Despite these innovations, many South American politicians have worked to undo some of these protections, particularly as migrants fleeing the political crisis in Venezuela overwhelm state capacities to administer these rights to mobility and regularisation. The result is an uneven and fluctuating patchwork of migrants’ rights to mobility in South America. How do politicians justify their work to extend and restrict this right to regularisation? Analysis of South American politicians’ justifications of these shifts reveal that, when extending the right, politicians prioritise the rights of the individual migrant, and claim credit for the capacity of the state to manage and extend those rights; when retracting the right to regularisation, politicians demand that migration policy serve state interests. In the South American context, regularisation programmes are a flexible and powerful policy tool, offering politicians problematic power to make and unmake this right to mobility.