The Reality of Migrants in Chile

Migration can be understood as a process of mobility and residence within different territorial contexts. Under this conceptual dimension, migration can be described as that change which fundamentally involves an economic and individual decision to improve living conditions; the definition arises and acquires sense, not as a product of physical displacement, but of its ultimate purposes (^{Herrera, 2006}). Although the search to improve living conditions has been the main driver of human mobility throughout history (^{Arce, 2018}), it is not the only conditioning factor to understand the concept of migration.

That is why mobility characterizes not only migrants themselves but also the series of facts and phenomena involved in the migration process, which mark sociocultural milestones and changes within their contexts. Under this perspective, the term migration is used for those processes that imply a transformation of the affiliations of individuals, their community of origin, as well as the community where they live now (^{Herrera, 2006}).

This is how migration has become a structural and global phenomenon that has caused multiple transformations in contemporary societies (^{Tijoux, 2013}). Thus, migration should be understood as a multidimensional process that implies a complex interplay of risks and opportunities for people, communities and States, wherein there is a relationship of contrasts between economic, social, legal and political dynamics (^{Liwski, 2008}). According to the above, ^{Herrera (2006, p. 35)} states that “the different shapes adopted by social reality in its daily construction could be raising the need for an adjustment in the traditional strategies meant to address and explain human migration”.

Chile has not been an exception in the face of this global reality of migration. In recent years, the number of migrants in the country has boomed, hosting approximately 1 492 522 migrants today, according to figures up to December 2019 (^{Instituto Nacional de Estadística & Departamento de Extranjería y Migración [INE & DEM]}) [National Institute of Statistics and Department of Foreigners and Immigration]; this implies the foreign population having reached approximately 8% of the total national population in Chile. On the basis that in the 2017 National Census they represented only 4.4% of the total population (^{Instituto Nacional de Estadística [INE], 2017}) [National Institute of Statistics], the exponential growth of migrants is empirically demonstrated. This in turn evidences countless failures, gaps and needs from the State in terms of public policies, and/or from communities themselves, that need to be addressed for the better of foreign-origin populations.

From the various approaches to the phenomenon of migration, “the existence of a combination of causes, functions, effects and characteristics attributed to migration movements and by extension to the migrant itself” can be established (^{Herrera, 2006, p. 59}). These movements vary over time and respond to what will be understood as migration flows; that is to say, when there is significant migrant mobility within a certain time frame, which reconfigure migration rates and transform the sociocultural characteristics of the population. In this sense, Chile has been no exception to the global phenomena of migration growth, as it has also been impacted by changes in migration inflows over the last 30 years.

According to data from the 19th Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda [National Population and Housing Census] (^{INE, 2017}) on the stated periods of arrival in Chile, before the year 1990 the migrant population was characterized by a strong 33.2% predominance of population of Argentine origin, and 42.7% from other countries, especially of European origin. This matches with certain historical migration flow milestones related to immigration policies, especially so in the south of the country, with the arrival of European populations that migrated in contexts such as the Spanish postwar period, or world wars. Migration from Argentina responds to cross-border migration, which will be addressed later in this article and is understood as the mobility between countries that share borders.

It was between 1990 and 1999 when the first great transformation of this cross-border migration flow took place. A population growth coming from Peru that reached 31.1% of the migrant population according to the statements of those who arrived in that decade (^{INE, 2017}) was recorded, and that growth was sustained between 2000 and 2009, becoming the largest foreign community during that period. This turned out to be an important milestone in the change of face of the migrant population, since migration from Peru during this period was clearly marked by sociopolitical and economic conflict: a large population inflow coming from vulnerable rural and urban sectors. This transformed the ways of political and public migration management, due to the common conceptual association of “new migrants” with different social problems and vulnerabilities.

At the same time, the incoming population from Colombia and Ecuador grew during the first decade of this century, reaching 13.6% of total migrants (^{INE, 2017}). This is another recent milestone in the characteristics of migration flows, given the growth of mobility coming from regions that are no longer clearly cross-border points, this resulting in south-south immigration growth (understood as that occurring between developing countries), in this case within the same Latin American region or subcontinent. This type of migration was only to grow in the last decade, especially with the increase of Venezuelan population that by 2020 reached 30.5% of the population, and due to the strong growth since 2010 of the population from Haiti, which currently represents 12.5% of the population (^{INE & DEM, 2020}). The departure of migrants from these last two countries is due to the humanitarian and sociopolitical crises they have endured.

Thus it can be seen that the transformation of migration flows from the cross-border concentration was 49.5% of total migrants before the 1990s, to an increase in south-south migration that up to 2020 accounted for 56.6% of the population of foreign origin (Graph 1).

Source: Own elaboration with information from ^{INE (2017)}, and ^{INE and DEM (2020)}.

Graph 1 Migration flows in Chile 

The dynamism of migration flows defines certain trends within the movement patterns that ought to be taken into account, especially within the contexts of economic and social inequality, where vulnerability indices are evidenced as a factor affecting migration decisions to a large extent. Other factors that add to the above are the social conditions and the specific economic and political crises faced by countries historically, which result in important outgoing flows of people in short periods of time (^{Stefoni, 2018}). The flow increase milestones in Chile have been mainly of south-south migration in the last decades, given the socio-political and economic contexts that Venezuela and Haiti are going through, as it was also the case of Colombia in the near past. The complexity of the migration phenomenon cannot be set apart from the social persona of migrants, and so it is necessary to analyze migration flows from the experiences of the individuals partaking in such processes, acknowledging their own perspectives and experiences, and from their very own vulnerability.

The Migration Process and Vulnerability

The immigration process is to be understood as the different stages lived by migrants, from facing triggering factors when leaving their place of origin, to their insertion in the place of arrival. From this perspective, the first stage pertains the causes and reasons of migration, and so this stage deals with the internal and external factors affecting migrants, that is to say, their macroeconomic and social and family conditions, as well as the factors that arise from the macroeconomic and sociopolitical contexts of their place of origin. Already Germani (cited in ^{Herrera, 2006, p. 77}) referred to migrations as one of the consequences of modernity, returning to the theory on the expulsive and attractive factors, understood as the circumstances that stimulate migration, as well as the image and information migrants have of the destination, contrasted with their circumstances in the place of origin. Thus, the most recurring example can be found in that in the face of economic or work insecurity in the place of origin, the image of the place of destination is raised as an answer that implies greater work possibilities and a better economic situation. In the same way, in the face of external factors such as the sociopolitical crises of the country of origin, the place of destination is glimpsed as promising within the context of greater stability. These motivations for migration are interrelated in their generality with the contexts of social vulnerability that individuals endure.

The second stage pertains the processes related to decisions on migration, understood from the ways in which migrants plan and face migration in their social and family environment. This implies the evaluation and resolution of cost-benefit elements, not only in terms of the economic cost of migrating but also of the disruption of their original environment, sometimes implying family distancing. Migration decision making implies individuals assessing the process jointly with their social and family environment, as a way of elaborating strategies to face contexts of vulnerability.

The migrant trajectory, understood as the third stage of the process, not only implies the way the displacement will be carried out, but also how will the arrival conditions in the destination be. Social vulnerability factors determine the ways these trajectories are carried out, since migrants face adversities in the migration procedures and when oftentimes moving under precarious conditions, facing various risks that imply, for example, entering the country through unofficial crossing points.

As a last stage of the process of migration, insertion in the destination takes place, which not only implies the arrival of migrants, but also the regularization of their immigration status. This last aspect will be closely related to the migrants’ process of economic inclusion in the workplace, as well as to their access basic public services, health and education. Likewise, in this insertion process it will be important to set in motion migration networks able to welcome the migrant in psychosocial and physical terms. It is within the different areas indicated that migration processes are crossed by conditions of social vulnerability, understood as a valid category for the understanding of the limited and/or adverse situations of life, from the approach of the social and economic rights of the people.

Social vulnerability is to find applicability in approaching social groups that remain contradictorily secluded in scenarios of instability and marginalization. In this interaction, a person is not approaches as a whole, does not receive adequate aid for their needs, and their rights are not safeguarded (^{Numans, Regenmortel, & Boog, 2021}). Poverty has been singled out as the main vulnerability factor of broad segments of the population (^{Arce, 2018}), understood as how people relate to public and basic services access. However, it is inaccurate to associate poverty with the concepts of marginalization or exclusion, since social vulnerability is multidimensional in that it includes various factors affecting individuals, not necessarily in terms of the economic, given that this factor can also be negatively impacted by the actions of individuals themselves or by natural catastrophes, as much as by their social environment.

As such, social vulnerability is not just a condition or attribute of individuals and/or populations; it rather corresponds to a social effect derived from exclusive historical dynamics that violate the rights of different social groups and restrict their abilities and freedoms (^{Ortiz- Ruiz & Díaz-Grajales, 2018}). It is from these conceptions that the conditions of poverty of some regions and the vulnerability that comes along them as causes of contemporary migration flows are framed.

Vulnerability pertains not only the conditions of individuals but increasingly so the social (and other) conditions of the environment in which they live, hence the need of also studying other sociocultural aspects if one is to understand this concept. From there that vulnerable populations are frequently spoken of when referring to those groups of people who, as a result of the conditions of the environment in which they live, find themselves under situations of greater susceptibility to harm (^{Feito, 2007}). It is under these premises that we can also assume migrants to live subject to a multiple-base vulnerability, first understanding that the factors triggering the migration process are linked to situations and states of individual infringement. It is following these situations of vulnerability that poverty, socioeconomic decline, and the violation of basic rights arise, which in turn determine the motivation to emigrate. In addition to experiencing these vulnerabilities during the migration processes, migrants also face environments of vulnerability at their destinations, experiences that affect their social insertion there.

The social vulnerability of migrants is a clear reflection of the socioeconomic conditions they must face, faced as they often are with a very diverse and different reality from that projected when making the decision to migrate. They face work precariousness, low habitability levels, bureaucracy when trying to regularize their immigration documents, and the erosion of their social and family relations; These are merely some of the angles of vulnerability that migrants must face; to this, myths and social stigmas are added, and so the construction of the collective imaginary on migrants is oftentimes based on xenophobic or racist perspectives. To all of the above, a last type of vulnerability must be added, which is pandemic vulnerability.

Pandemic Vulnerability

One of the first angles of vulnerability is directly related to the social determinants of health that, although accentuated by the original social fragilities of migrants and also by the very vulnerability that comes along with migration, are furthered even more in the context of the social and health emergency imposed by the pandemic. Under the context hereby analyzed, pandemic vulnerability will then be understood as the likelihood of facing adverse effects (^{Ortiz- Ruiz & Díaz-Grajales, 2018}), and the response of this population to the Coronavirus pandemic from its social determinants.

The social determinants of health have been defined as those factors and mechanisms by which the living conditions of people affect their health, and to what extent it is possible to positively impact their health levels by means of social and health policies (^{Van der Laat, 2017}). At the same time, and from various fields, migration is acknowledged as yet another social determinant of health, taking into account its dynamic process wherein changes in lifestyle are produced, as well as changes in the conditions of the socioeconomic, family, and community environment of migrants. These changes also result in greater vulnerabilities and health risks for migrants and for the environment receiving them. Thus, every migration process as described above has an impact on people’s health, either positive or negative (^{Van der Laat, 2017}). This makes migration a variable to account for among the social determinants of health.

Population mobility is understood as not in itself a factor increasing the health risks of migrants; it is rather the condition under which this migration process occurs that place migrant populations in situations of vulnerability or lack of protection against potential health threats (^{Van der Laat, 2017}), especially when facing extreme situations such as a pandemic. Health determinants and their associated indices are also closely related to the stage of people’s migration processes, as it is a dynamic process in which there are factors that have been little addressed and understood by the health systems of receiving societies.

Thus we can see how the pandemic has shed light on situations of high vulnerability within the migrant population that were previously kept buried under the city’s everyday life, somehow normalized, leading to the fragility of social health determinants. This has been evidenced in certain transverse realities such as the labor and habitability precariousness of migrants.

The first of these realities has to do with the workplace where migrants seek to insert themselves, especially when this insertion responds to an aim of socioeconomic improvement part of the expectations involved in the motivation to migrate. Labor precariousness affects a large number of workers in Chile, who, being part of a foreign population in dire need of joining the labor force, insert themselves with greater ease in jobs considered precarious. This responds not only to the economic income that supports the insertion of migrants in the country, but also to the possibility of them acquiring a job history necessary for regularization purposes. To a great extent, migrants have been occupying the labor niches that Chileans themselves have abandoned because of their working conditions; work relations in clerk positions have also increasingly informalized, and migrants can also oftentimes be found working informally and independently in sales and services. Migrants’ urgency to work means that upon their arrival in the destination country, they accept jobs without contracts that allow them to survive and establish contacts, facilitating the creation of migration networks where they insert themselves. It is in this way that they also experience job vulnerability, conditioned by their lack of information on the legal field in terms of social and labor matters. According to this, the National Employment Survey (^{INE, 2020a}) recorded that 26.7% of immigrants are in the category of Informal Labor, also reflecting that within the different fields of economic activity almost 50% of immigrants are inserted in sales and services, wherein more than half of immigrant workers are employed as these are low- skill positions.

It should also be noted that about 20% of the foreign population living in Chile is employed in high-skill jobs, among which are professionals, scientists and academics, professional technicians, and others. However, among the Working Age Population (WAP), foreigners currently represent 7.6% of the country’s total, only 10% of them being employed. The same study showed that 5.4% of immigrants were unemployed, a figure that reaches 7.2% in the case of Chileans. This data undoubtedly points out at the fact that the unemployment rate was lower among the migrant population (^{INE, 2020a}). From this it can be seen that although in many cases migrants meet a greater job insertion rate against the native Chilean population, they first are inserted in fields that represent greater labor precariousness and lower salaries.

Another social determinant to analyze that implies important degrees of vulnerability, and that has revealed itself following the social and health crisis, has to do with habitability, understood as the quality of the living space, owning a house or not, and overcrowding. In this sense, habitability becomes an important factor in the measuring of migrant vulnerability, as it pertains the quality of the living space where the spatial insertion of migrants to the territory they arrive in takes place. In the vast majority of the cases and as previously reviewed, the migration process and arrival at the place of destination of migrants is carried out with the aid of migration networks made up of relatives and/or acquaintances from their place of origin; thus, new migrants adapt to live as “guests” in this first stage, and depending on the length of their stay they can become close friends at the home they are received in. While there are structural elements that determine the possibilities for the best access to housing and better housing conditions for migrants, these are related to the time of their arrival to the country, making their inclusion process difficult if having less social and economic capital, and irregular migration status. Thus, the migrant population is presented with barriers both to access housing alternatives formally and to achieve adequate habitability conditions (^{Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes [SJM], 2020}). The overcrowding and concentration of the migrant population in some specific areas, especially within the urban radius, reflects how said population sacrifices housing space in order to be closer to labor and economic opportunities. These are part of the health conditions that migrants live and from which they have faced the COVID-19 world pandemic declaration.

COVID-19 and Migrant Populations

The first thing that can be seen is that according to the data delivered systematically by the Ministry of Health (^{Minsal, 2020a}) between March 1 and July 31, 2020, a total of 395 261 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were reported at the national level, representing 2% of the estimated population in the country (^{INE, 2020b}). According to the data requested from the Ministry of Health through the Law on Access to Public Information (^{Congreso Nacional de Chile, 2008}), 34 016 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were reported in the same period among the migrant/non-Chilean population (^{Minsal, 2020b}), representing 8.6% of the people reported as coronavirus infected in the country (Table 1).

As for the confirmed cases index, according to the total population of migrants in 2019 (INE & DEM, 2020), the percentage was 2.3%, and so it can be seen that the infection rate among migrants was slightly higher when compared with the national total. However, from the population infected at the national level as of July 31, 2020, 13 426 deaths (^{Minsal, 2020a}) were recorded, 3.4% of the total infections. Based on these data, only 454 deaths due to COVID-19 or related to it were recorded among the migrant population (^{Minsal, 2020b}), representing 1.3% of all confirmed cases among migrants.

When migrant data is reviewed per country of origin (INE & DEM, 2020), according to the increase of said population in recent years as mentioned above, the main countries of origin of migrant groups living in Chile are Venezuela (455 494) Peru (235 165) and Haiti (185 865) (INE & DEM, 2020). They are followed by the populations from Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Cuba. Migrant groups represent 89.4% of the total foreign population in Chile (Table 2).

As for the percentage of cases within migrant groups, confirmed COVID-19 cases among the Peruvian population represented 4.3% of its total, followed by Ecuadorian migrants with 2.9%; Bolivian and Venezuelan groups represented 2.6% of cases each. It should be noted that these migrant groups are proportionally greater than the 2% that represented the number of confirmed cases at the national level.

It should be noted that the group that represents the largest percentage of confirmed cases from among the migrant population is the Venezuelan community, with 34.6%, followed by the Peruvian community, with 29.8%; both groups represent 64.4% of the cases confirmed among the migrant population. This percentage of infected migrant population arranged by nationality reflects not only the change in the characteristics of the migration flow reviewed above, but could also be due to the characteristics of the place of origin of each population in those communes with a higher index of social vulnerability.

On the other hand, when analyzing the communes with the largest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases among the migrant population, Santiago is first with 5 463 cases, representing 37.6% of the total confirmed cases in the commune. The Independencia commune also stands out with 2 620 confirmed cases, representing 41.5% of total cases in the commune. It is in the Metropolitan Region where the largest number of confirmed cases were recorded, a total of 284 240 among its population (representing 71.9% of cases nationwide), in accordance with the population concentration in the urban area of the country’s capital. Likewise, a total of 26 722 confirmed cases among the migrant population were recorded in this region, corresponding to 78.6% of confirmed cases among the migrant population nationwide (Table 3).

Outside the Metropolitan Region, the largest number of confirmed cases from among the migrant population was recorded in the Tarapacá and Antofagasta regions. It is in the communes of northern Chile that the largest number and greater proportion of COVID-19 cases concentrated. These regions stand out by having a migrant population of strong cross-border characteristics.

COVID-19 incidence is thus evidenced as higher among the migrant populations in communes, from two perspectives. First, depending on the highest proportional percentage of confirmed cases among the migrant population of each commune according to the National Census (INE, 2017). This way we can draw an incidence index of infections in the migrant population from the difference in the percentage incidence by population. This is how it can be seen that the incidence index in the vast majority of these communes is about 2, which means that there are about double infections among the migrant population based on the percentage calculation of migrant and non-migrant inhabitants. It can also be seen how in the communes presented here there is an incidence rate much higher than the percentage of confirmed cases among migrants at the national level, which responds not only to their density of migrant population but also to socioeconomic and social vulnerability factors.

On the other hand, information on the percentage of confirmed infection cases among migrants by commune was collated with data from the Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (^{Casen, 2017}) in terms of the percentage of people living in multidimensional poverty, the latter understood as a concept beyond the mere insufficiency of income to satisfy basic needs, but rather from the understanding that these people lack in the dimensions of education, health, labor, social security, housing, and overall quality of life (^{Casen, 2017}). Also, this information was in turn collated with the percentage of community overcrowding as a specific housing vulnerability factor that migrants live under. Table 4 shows the ten communes with the highest percentage incidence of infections confirmed among the migrant population. Attention should be brought to the fact that the percentage of confirmed cases was calculated in relation to the total cases of each of the communes, independently from the magnitude in numbers represented by these percentages. Thus, it can be seen that a large number of municipalities of strong rural characteristics were accounted for, municipalities that presented a high percentage of infected migrants despite their low general population density.

This shows that those communes with the highest percentage of confirmed infection cases among the migrant population also have a percentage of multidimensional poverty at the communal level higher than the national average, reaching 20.7% of the population. These communes also recorded an overcrowding percentage level higher than the national average which stands at 7%; overcrowding is understood as more than 2.5 people per room (^{Casen, 2017}).

For an example, it is interesting to take a look at the Independencia commune, which has the highest incidence percentage of infections among migrants: although its poverty rate is within the national average, its overcrowding rate (12.6 %) is greater than the average. Such is not a minor fact, given that according to the ^{Casen Survey (2017)}, 21% of migrant households are under overcrowding conditions, most of them categorized as in medium-low overcrowding with

2.5 to 3.49 people per room. According to data from the same survey, one in six migrants who live in overcrowding is under critical conditions, as this means that five or more people share a single room. While proportionally the percentage of overcrowded migrant population is lower than among Chilean families, overcrowding conditions among migrants add to the structural precariousness of their households and their irregular access to housing itself. It is along these lines that subleasing appears, where the informal division of properties takes place upon sharing common spaces among a number of family units, sometimes even rooms, exacerbating in an irregular way the overcrowding of households. The Coronavirus social and health crisis has evidenced these dimensions of vulnerability, particularly when it comes to habitability. From this perspective, habitability is directly related to the secure settlement that it is able to provide for the migrant.