Constructing the ‘good migrant’ in South–South migration: The emotional and aesthetic labour of foreign workers in the Chilean hospitality sector

Research on migrant labour in hospitality shows how organizations script demeanour and body for competitive advantage, yet we still know little about how employers actively construct migrants as ideal service providers and how this legitimizes segmentation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with hotel managers and HR leads in two intermediate cities in south-central Chile (Talca and Curicó), this article examines employer evaluations at two moments: pre-hire profiling/screening and post-hire appraisal/role allocation. We find a composite ideal of the ‘good worker/good migrant’ anchored in availability for unsocial hours, punctuality, cordiality and ‘good looking’, frequently couched in nationalized/racialized common sense yet framed as business–rational service culture. Employers toggle between a competency discourse (soft skills as trainable and scriptable) and an idiosyncrasy discourse (warmth and deference as ‘natural’), which improves placement in customer-facing roles without an economic reward. We theorize this oscillation as idealized cultural production, a meso-level process that converts biographical and the challenging socio-legal features of migrant life (e.g. regularization, remittances and family networks) into valorized labour capital. The study extends debates on emotional/aesthetic labour beyond the Global North, clarifies how territory sets employer preferences, and identifies practical levers for fair evaluation of soft skills.