The Back and Forth between National Security and Human Rights: Migration Policies in Argentina under the Cambiemos Administration (2015-2019)

Abstract

During President Mauricio Macri’s administration in Argentina (2015–2019), a range of actors in the field of migration suspected an imminent paradigm shift. Those early fears were borne out by policies introduced by the administration as it moved gradually from a rights-based paradigm to an emphasis on securitization. This chapter is organized into three sections. The first describes the social and political process that framed the paradigm shift and the proposed approach to migration in Argentina. The specific features of the policy changes, the actors who supported those changes and the resources or the arguments they utilized are presented and analyzed in the second section. Finally, the third section describes and investigates how both migrants and the organizations that represent them responded to a hostile vision of contemporary migration. We analyzed a range of material – legislation, news articles, public discourses, interviews, and ethnographic works – out of the urgent need to reconstruct a recent historical and political process. Our analysis, though, is not limited to this particular period: we draw on over a decade of research on the migration processes in Argentina.