Description
Postcolonial theories of migration have historically looked at the “influx of migrants to the West from the less affluent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; in other words, from postcolonial nations” (Nair 2013). The movements of people across and within the historical postcolony and the role this had played in the lived experience of citizenship is less well understood outside of a few well studied cases (for example South Asia, Chatterji 2012). Latin America offers a rich and fascinating laboratory for the study of postcolonial citizenship, especially within the context of mobility, race and security. In past decades changes in migration policies underwent noticeable shifts from restriction to openness, (Cantor, Freier & Gauci 2015), and more recently – as the public profile of the archetypical migrant to Latin America has changed from European entrepreneur/adventurer, to forced migrant from African, Central American and neighbouring states – towards anew restriction and securitization. The single most profound event to re-orient these debates on postcolonial subjectivities around migration and citizenship in Latin America has been the Venezuelan ‘migrtion crisis’. The influx of 4.5 million Venezuelan citizens to other states is forging new relationships between coloniality, criminalisation and citizen rights. This paper discusses the case of Peru – the second largest receiving country of Venezuelan migration. It examines the tension between two conflicting ideological paradigms: migrants’ human rights and national security, and further examines how far policy diffusion from the metropole - the European Union – contributes to increasing securitization of immigration as a political issue.
