Migratory Policy: Regulation Policy Recovery and Incorporation policies; fighting the Brain Drain and the end of illegal immgrants

Now todsy we are going to start off talking about Regulation policies "they are aimed to influence the flow of migrants, whether by restricting their movement, channeling it or facilitating it" (Marmora, 2004; p 100). Here I

would locate partially Argentina’s current policy, since the country tries to foster regional migrants, helping integration with the other States of MERCOSUR and it makes frontier transit easier, especially for people that live in towns and cities next or near the border, facilitating trade among the member and associate Nations, channeling migrants to cross legally to the country. On the other hand the Argentine State tries to take control on what is happening with regional migrants its territory, there is more regulation on these people bringing more order to the migratory flow and transit, migrants most enter legally if they want a residency (Argentina has a issues with porous borders, we’ll see this in latter posts).

 Recovery policies have a specific objective "to promote the repatriation of citizens that live abroad, or activate his or hers involvement with the country of origin"(Marmora, 2004; p 100), planting the seed of a possible return one day.  In the case of Argentina has the 26.421 law, which is independent of the law that establishes its main migratory police. This particular law creates a program called

Raices or Roots one of its main goals is to repatriate Argentine scientists who have gone abroad for work or study; it’s a way to mitigate the effects of the brain drain that the country has been suffering because of its cyclical economic problems, it’s one of the very few actions that government has taken relative to argentine emigrants, a void in the country’s main law. It is an explicit attempt at retrieving highly trained human capital that has left the country for various reasons. Seven hundred scientists had recovered since 2003 up to mid-2010 and it is estimated that they there are between 6,000 to 7,000 more abroad (IECO, 2010), the last time I checked march 2016 there were 1269 repatriated citizens (http://www.raices.mincyt.gov.ar/), its seems a meager number but one must take into account that these have a great values as human capital and bring know how that they have obtained from aboard.

Now I’m going to explain two examples of a recovery where the respective States try to keep their citizens abroad involved in civil, political or cultural issues with their origin country, trying to maintain a link with them, keeping the door open for a possible return one day. In the first case we have a special program that Argentina has called Province 25 which allows   argentines to vote outside of the country, it publishes has special newsletters and promotes special events and activities of relevance for their citizen that live in the diaspora abroad. The second example to illustrate my point belongs to Uruguay that has a similar program called Department 20 which does pretty much the same thing as the argentine program but in this case Uruguay has a special office within its Foreign Ministry Affairs called Direccion de Vinculación it translates as the Office of Involvement or Linkage, where it tries to elevate its level of involmente to its citizens, personalizing it.

Finally on the list of Marmora’s migratory policies we can find all actions relative to the  incorporation of migrants, which basically pursued the objective of regularizing the situation of migrants and achieve its proper insertion into society, and to achieve optimal integration with the host country, especially entering the economic system, these migrants are able to work legally and pay tax and compete fairly in the job market. They are no longer forced to be part of the informal economies which implies a great disservice for the migrant, that is exposed to questionable job conditions  and the host country has to spend large amounts of money on finding them and expelling them because of their illegal status ( the right term is irregular, a person cannot be illegal).

In the case of Argentina it has achieved regularization of thousands of foreigners without resorting to an amnesty (this presupposes that migrants are criminals), and the initial society inclusion has been remarkable migrants from MERCOSUR countries have been flowing constantly to get there residencies, and thanks to this being able to work legally and establish themselves in the country without the fear of deportation.