Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights, Labour, Latin America & the Caribbean, Migration & Refugees, Population

MIGRATION-CHILE: Back Home, Things Are Even Worse

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Sep 10 2007 (IPS) - “I can’t go back to my own country because things are really bad there,” says Gloria, a 25-year-old Peruvian woman who came to Chile less than a year ago, pregnant with her third child. But her life here is no better: she is an undocumented immigrant with no job, living in a borrowed room.

Her older children, ages seven and nine, are living in Peru with their grandmother, who cleans houses and does laundry for a living. “How could I raise my three kids there?” asks Gloria.

She also talks about the problems she had when she arrived in Chile, when a member of the carabineros militarised police took her tourist visa away as she was riding in a bus on the way to Santiago. And after that she was robbed by thieves.

Gloria lives in constant fear of being deported, because she does not have the necessary documents to live and work in Chile.

To obtain a temporary visa and an identity card, she must present at least a two-year work contract. But to get a work contract, she must show that she has permission to live in the country. And to gain access to health care and other services, people must show an identity card.

Because of this vicious circle in which undocumented migrants are trapped, the Committee of Peruvian Refugees in Chile asked the authorities on Sept. 2, National Day of the Immigrant, for a moratorium for illegal immigrants.

“The government does not have the political will to address the demands of immigrants and refugees,” the president of the Committee of Peruvian Refugees, Raúl Paiba, told IPS.

Peruvians make up one of the largest foreign communities in Chile and suffer the greatest discrimination.

To raise public awareness of the problem and pressure authorities, Paiba organised a “solidarity dance” on Saturday, and is planning other activities as well.

“There is no information or statistics on the real situation in which immigrants and refugees find themselves in Chile,” Anuar Quesille, a researcher at the private Diego Portales University’s human rights centre, told IPS.

The human rights centre recently presented its latest annual report on the state of human rights in this South American country.

Besides documenting the vulnerability of immigrants in terms of health care, education, social security coverage, work, housing and discrimination, the report criticises the government’s failure to hand over information on initiatives that would benefit immigrants.

Immigration in Chile is currently governed by a 1975 decree-law on foreign nationals, which regulates the questions of entry and departure of immigrants, and residency status. There is no specific law on refugees.

Paiba criticised the arbitrary manner in which border agents decide who can and cannot enter the country, which he said often led to the separation of families.

The 1975 law includes a clause establishing that the employer must pay for an immigrant’s ticket home after the work contract is finished, which is a disincentive for legally hiring immigrants.

Many Bolivians, Ecuadorians and Peruvians are smuggled into Chile hidden in trucks, including refrigerator trucks, and a tragedy could occur at any moment, said Paiba.

Once they are in the country, undocumented immigrants often live in overcrowded, sub-human conditions. For example, warehouses have been found, separated into tiny rented rooms without sanitation, water or electricity, which house dozens of migrants, said the activist.

The Diego Portales University human rights centre has twice submitted a written request to the Interior Ministry’s Departamento de Extranjería y Migración, the office in charge of immigration affairs, for updated, broken-down statistics on immigrants and refugees, as well as information on new laws being drafted by the government.

After it failed to receive a response, the human rights centre filed a legal request on Aug. 30 for access to public information against Interior Minister Belisario Velasco.

Chile’s 2002 census counted 184,464 immigrants in the country, 26 percent of whom were from Argentina, 21 percent from Peru and six percent from Bolivia.

According to a written message to IPS from the assistant secretary of the Interior, Felipe Harboe, 258,829 foreign nationals currently live in Chile, a country of 15.6 million. Some 1,000 have been granted official refugee status.

Paiba’s estimates, meanwhile, are based on figures from Peru, which indicate that around 70,000 Peruvians have left that country, headed to Chile, in the last three years and have not returned. An estimated 20,000 of them were undocumented immigrants.

In addition, the activist puts the number of refugees in the country at 1,400, most of whom are from civil war-torn Colombia.

Harboe confirmed that two new laws are in the process of being drafted by the government, although he did not go into detail.

“The timeframes for introducing the draft laws have not been defined, mainly because the draft law on the question of refugee status is still being drawn up, with the advice of international bodies specialised in that area, and the draft law on the status of foreigners is being reviewed by state bodies involved in that area,” he said.

He identified some advances made in recent years: “the incorporation of pregnant migrant women in the health services” and “the regularisation of the residency status of all children registered in an educational establishment recognised by the state.”

Three other initiatives are also currently being developed, one of which would allow foreign minors to regularise their legal status in order to gain equal access to the health system, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.

Another would give immigrant and refugee children access to preschool. And the third would allow applicants for refugee status to become beneficiaries of the public health system.

But Paiba complained about the lack of information made available on the development of provisions that would benefit immigrants and about the discriminatory treatment that foreign nationals receive in public institutions.

Chile attracts large numbers of immigrants, but does not have adequate policies to deal with them, Bárbara Romero of the non-governmental Inter-American Observatory for Migrants’ Rights (OCIM), told IPS.

OCIM drew up a draft law on immigration, based on international conventions and local legislation, to serve as a model for all countries in the region. It has been presented to the lower house of Congress in Chile and to the Andean Commission of Jurists.

“The draft law defines all of the immigration and refugee-related concepts, outlines the rights and duties of migrants, specifies the duties of the state, and identifies the legal resources and protection available to migrants,” Rodrigo Durán, who drafted the text, explained to IPS.

OCIM is also one of the organisations behind the “campaign for the rights of indigenous people and for an intercultural identity in Chile”, launched in Santiago on Sept. 6 with the aim of raising public awareness on ethnic diversity through newspaper, TV and radio ads and publicity spots.

Experts say discrimination in Chile is suffered mainly by darker-skinned immigrants with indigenous features, regardless of their educational level.

For that reason, the treatment received by immigrants from Argentina, many of whom are of European extraction, contrasts sharply with that received by people from Peru and Bolivia, where most of the population is either indigenous or of mixed-race origin.

Karlita Jacobo, a 29-year-old Peruvian math and physics teacher, came to Chile with a tourist visa, found work in a school in the capital, and obtained a temporary residency permit. But a few weeks ago her work contract was cancelled, after she became the target of harassment by authorities at the school.

Jacobo is not giving up, however. She has not ruled out the possibility of working as a domestic employee until finding another job as a teacher. Her goal is to settle in Chile and bring her five-year-old daughter, who is living with her grandmother in Peru, over to live with her.