Abstract
In recent years, the influx of Venezuelans and other migrant populations to different Latin American countries have produced responses at different levels. International organizations, for example, launched regional platforms to coordinate the actions directed toward meeting the social, economic, and public health needs of displaced populations. At the national level, some states have made changes to their legal and administrative systems to improve documentation processes. This chapter analyzes the linkage between regional initiatives and the migration management model currently implemented in Uruguay from a local perspective.
We propose that the characterization of the situation in Venezuela as a “humanitarian crisis” has led to a “migration crisis”, one that has reached continental proportions. The exceptionality of the migrant situation linked to the notion of “crisis” paves the way for determining special criteria in Uruguay for the selection and definition of populations to be assisted under the assumption that the experiences Venezuelan migrants and refugees endure are entirely different from other migration processes taking place elsewhere in the region.
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Notes
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The 2005/2009 and 2015/2019 periods were led by Tabaré Vázquez and the 2010/2014 period was led by José Mujica, both candidates for the Frente Amplio party.
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It is important to note that data from the Continuous Household Survey (ECH) represents a sector of the population that lives in individual dwellings and does not include population (both national and migrant) residing in group homes and pensions, which are among the main housing alternatives for recent migrant population (Fossatti & Uriarte, 2018). Various quantitative investigations indicate the poor living conditions in this type of housing, and which have an impact on various dimensions: food, sanitary conditions, access and permanence in the labor market, conditions for educational development, among others. We assume that gaps in conditions reported by ECH increase when group housing survey data is included.
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There are two types of procedures to obtain residency. For citizens of Mercosur member countries and relatives of Uruguayan nationals, they are conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Relations, which is shorter and has fewer requirements; and for citizens of the rest of the countries (among which are Cuba and the Dominican Republic) they are conducted by the Ministry of the Interior. The rapid response in both ministries could have delays, up to 10 or 12 months before the health emergency, depending on “system overloads” (España, 2016; Uriarte, 2020; Montiel, 2019). The national administration also provides for differentiated treatment to states requesting the processing of consular visas to citizens of most countries in Africa and Asia, as well as for the Dominican Republic and Cuba (two of the main countries of origin of migrants arriving to Uruguay). In these cases, we see that the principle of reciprocity of the visa requirement is not fully met. Difficulties in the regularization of the migration situation also have an impact on processes of family reunification, undermining the children and adolescents’ right to family and community life. Visa application with difficult access requirements increases violence in displacement, by adding intermediaries, increasing costs, and abuses of people who wish to migrate.
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A very representative example of this dynamic is the Identity Department of the Ministry of Social Development, which in 2017 was renamed as Migrants Department, in response to exemption requests for document processing costs for population in situations of vulnerability.
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The visa implementation for the Dominican Republic in August 2014 is justified by the government as a response to situations of human trafficking and sexual exploitation of Dominican women. In fact, this measure is linked to the imposition of visas in Argentina and Brazil, which resulted in an increase of the migration flow to Uruguay. In practice, the visa was a response to social concern about a population frequently associated with crime and prostitution.
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Although this residency regime was implemented as a way of speeding up procedures for a priority population, in practice, delays in requesting an appointment and difficulties in obtaining the required documentation meant that, in many cases, temporary residency applications (a regime used for citizens from outside Mercosur) and refugee applications were used to obtain foreign identity documents. Subsequently, with the closure of consular offices and the restriction in appointments due to the sanitary emergency, refugee applications became the only mechanism available for entering the territory and requesting identity documents.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Asociación Idas y Vueltas and its members, who kindly open their doors so we could conduct field work that allowed the writing of this chapter. We are particularly in debt to Susana Novaro, Luis Enrique Durante, and Katia Marina, who accompanied our reflections on the intervention models applied in our work with the migrant population.
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Uriarte, P., Fossatti, L. (2022). Emerging from Crisis: Transformations in Uruguayan Migration Management of Venezuelan Migration. In: Coraza de los Santos, E., Arriola Vega, L.A. (eds) Crises and Migration. Latin American Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07059-4_4
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