The Institute for Global Health and Development
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/9
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Item Migrants’ entangled socio-political and biological lives during the COVID-19 emergency in Brazil(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-09-04) Castro, Flávia Rodrigues; Zapata, Gisela P.; Vera Espinoza, Marcia;For migrants in Brazil, the COVID-19 global health crisis meant a considerable worsening of living conditions, with increased basic material needs. The reduction of individuals' existence to the mere search for survival had important repercussions on the activities of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in the country, whose work became increasingly focused on the distribution of emergency assistance for these populations. Drawing on 25 interviews with actors from CSOs, this paper unpacks the entanglement between the political and the biological aspects of migrants' lives. It argues that the pandemic brought to the fore the prominence of biological life to the detriment of migrants’ political and social lives in humanitarian responses to the health crisis. In this context, CSOs working with migrant populations in Brazil were pushed to reaffirm this dichotomy, while also contesting and reminding us that the impoverishment of migrants’ political and social lives can endanger the biological life that they meant to prioritise.Item Weakening Practices Amidst Progressive Laws: Refugee Governance in Latin America during COVID-19(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-10-05) Zapata, Gisela P.; Gandini, Luciana; Vera Espinoza, Marcia; Prieto Rosas, VictoriaThis paper develops a comparative assessment of the state of asylum in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay. It argues that an accelerated weakening of refugee protection, exacerbated during the pandemic, has taken place across the region. Faced with growing mixed flows, the region’s refugee framework has either been used as an ad hoc regularization mechanism or not been broadly used. Also, pandemic mitigation measures have further weakened access to asylum, through militarization and border closures, and a platitude of deterrence practices. These regressive practices may result in the undermining, abandonment and/or replacement of the region’s widely praised refugee governance.Item COVID-19 and immigrants’ increased exclusion: The politics of immigrant integration in Chile and Peru(Frontiers, 2021-03-10) Freier, Luisa Feline; Vera Espinoza, Marcia; Ramji-Nogales, JayaThe COVID-19 pandemic has put into sharp relief the need for socio-economic integration of migrants, regardless of their migratory condition. In South America, more than five million Venezuelan citizens have been forced to migrate across the region in the past five years. Alongside other intra-regional migrants and refugees, many find themselves in precarious legal and socio-economic conditions, as the surge in numbers has led to xenophobic backlashes in some of the main receiving countries, including Chile and Peru. In this paper, we explore in how far the COVID-19 crisis has offered stakeholders an opportunity to politically reframe migration and facilitate immigrant integration or, rather, further propelled xenophobic sentiments and the socio-economic and legal exclusion of immigrants.