UC Santa Barbara

Scholarly work has traditionally studied migratory processes by focusing on the movement of people from the Global South to the Global North. Contrastingly, other trajectories such as South-South migration have remained understudied. As a country whose migrant population has rapidly increased in the past decade, Chile represents an interesting opportunity to study some of the particularities of South-South migration and migrants’ process of incorporation in the context of global capitalism. While in the Global North the debate has centered around traditional sociological concepts of assimilation and integration, Chilean authorities’ discussion has centered around the vaguely defined concept of ‘social inclusion.’

This study utilizes a mixed methodology that includes quantitative data analysis as well as interviews with Haitian and Colombian migrants in Chile, in order to understand the factors behind these movements and migrants’ own definition of ‘inclusion.’ The study finds a diversity of expectations and experiences within each collectivity, a generalized existence of previous migratory experiences, and migrants’ rejection of the discourse on ‘social inclusion’ due to historical experiences of marginalization and exploitation.

By framing migration as a global phenomenon and highlighting the contributions of studying the movement of people outside the ‘West,’ this work poses that the theoretical advancement and articulation of knowledge in the Global South, as well as its engagement with the existing knowledge of migrants’ experiences in the North, is more relevant than ever.