Fabiana Frayssinet: Latin American Migrants Suffer Prejudice in Their Own Region Fabiana Frayssinet - Inter Press Service
go to original February 16, 2015

Emiliana Mamani holds up a magazine from the year 2000, which warned of “the silent invasion” of Bolivians in Argentina. The picture was even photoshopped, she said, to make the immigrant look like he was missing a tooth. (Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS)

In the movie “A Day Without a Mexican“ (see trailer below), the mysterious disappearance of all Mexicans brings the state of California to a halt. Would the same thing happen in some Latin American countries if immigrants from neighboring countries, who suffer the same kind of discrimination, went missing?

The response is that the situation is not comparable. But a new report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), only available in Spanish, shows that intraregional migration flows intensified in the 2000-2010 period, growing at a rate of 3.5 percent a year, while migration to the rest of the world slowed down.

There are 28.5 million Latin Americans living outside their countries, 20.8 million of them in the United States. And of the 7.6 million immigrants in Latin America, 63 percent are from other countries in this region.

Nor are the strict immigration policies of the United States or Europe comparable with those of Latin America, where regional integration accords have facilitated residency for citizens of neighboring countries and where “the unilateral and restrictive measures of some developed countries” have been rejected, ECLAC says.

Nevertheless, Pablo Ceriani, an expert on immigration issues from Argentina, said the hypothetical plot of “A Day Without a Latin American in Latin America” could be based on something that this region shares with the United States, which has come in for so much criticism: expressions of xenophobia.

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