Political Theory-Migratory Policy: States Social Identity and how they Establish their Political Interests.

As we have seen on previus post Corporate identity is the engine that provides the initiative to the actor/States for their actions, but these are conditioned by the social relations of the actor, therefore the corporate identity depends on the relations of the subject with others (Wendt 1994; 356). Here is where we introduce the concept of social identity where the actor attributes meaning to itself and by doing this it takes perspective of the others actors, it is impossible to think an actor as a person who is completely alone in the world, likes it or not it must interact with others, to a greater or lesser extent this depends on each State. The two identities have a strong interrelation and feedback in to each other, to strengthen over time. But there is something one must keep in mind, that an actor has one corporate identity, but may have multiple social identities, but it is always limited and determined by the historical and cultural background of the actor. When one assumes an identity the actor also gives identity to others and in this context the vision of the State is born. Social identity can be simplified   in these terms, it the way the actor sees itself, how he sees others and how it’s seen. The vision of the actor in the world is born of this social identity. In the case of migratory policy we’ll see how the definition of a social identity condition de decisions of an actor, in this case Argentina.

Identity determines interest and therefore a change in any aspect of the Sates identity, will drag in a new group of interests. We are using the example of Argentina Migratory Policy in my post, to explain this point.  Initially you can see that the previous Immigration law caused dissociation between the actions ^[6] of the actor, social reality in its borders and its identity. Argentina’s view on migrants had a serious distortion of what was happening on a domestic level and on a international level, the old law that established its migratory policy did not serve the countries best interests, you can si a similar situation in the US  that has a high dissociation between its migration policy, social reality and their national identity, which has sparked a strong debate on what the government should do, this point will be developed in detail later in other posts. What we can say preliminarily is that currently that the Argentine identity revolves around the fact that sees itself and is seen by other States ( especially in the region), as a democratic country that respects human rights and that it had a historic role of reception of migrants.

Within the process of identity formation Wendt says that the actor uses imitation and social learning (Kowert; 2001), this is a borrowed concept from other constructivist author from another area of investigation, that is Jean Peaget, an expert in the psychology of education. We must establish whether Argentina immigration policy is the result of imitation or is a product of social learning. The actor learns to change their knowledge and perceptions of the world, and this is a dynamic process that is maturing over time, the perceived world is not a static place but is always changing.

Also can be exposed ahead of time that there is no doubt that the Argentina learned from their past mistakes committed during law 22.439 and capitalizes on that to create an immigration policy that is much more efficient, functional and that fits the needs of the country. One must ask what could have changed in the Government/State or within the population or what modification on the basis of their social relations, would lead to a change Argentina’s view, that made it change its migratory policy? Because something triggered an adjustment in policy and created a whole new theoretical body of knowledge, to be able to operate a new international and domestic reality. But this knowledge is not a copy of reality, here comes the factor of perception, one tends to see what best suits ones interests best, may be relatively selective according to the subject and this in turn is determined by the experience, needs and how the actor encodes and decodes the information that it receives from the world. The perceived world is a subjective world that can be shared by other actors or not.


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