Racialized control policies in the south American border regime: The intensification of “transit migration” in times of COVID-19

Abstract

This article analyzes the intensification of Haitians’ “transit migration” from South America to the United States during 2021 in the framework of disputes between the migration movements and control policies that reconfigured the South American border regime during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that racialized control policies are a constitutive dimension of the border negotiations that Haitian migrant engage with diverses actors in contexts of illegalization exacerbated by COVID-19 and reinforced by the expansion of North-South “transit migration” as a matrix of political intervention. Through a qualitative methodological approach based on document analysis and online interviews with Haitian migrants, this article synchronously and asynchronously reconstructs the collective travel strategies of four groups of Haitians that left the Southern Cone heading toward the United States and the political scenarios being restructured around the activation, facilitation, diversion, or obstruction of their mobility. The analysis reveals the racialized character of the control policies inscribed in institutional frameworks of “transit migration” based on the new velocity and magnitude of South-North migration and their institutional construction in terms of a “migration crisis” on the Colombia-Panama border between July and September 2021. Similarly, it proposes that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to strengthening the Southern Cone-Andean Region interface as a by-product of the amplification and diversification of South-North routes and a constitutive dimension of the infrastructures of violence and resistance that spatially and temporally connect the migratory and border dynamics of South, Central, and North America.