Migration Governance Across Regions: State-Diaspora Relations in the Latin America-Southern Europe Corridor by Ana Margheritis

Author:Ana Margheritis [Margheritis, Ana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Emigration & Immigration, Social Science, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317437864
Google: VGBACwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28410213
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Political and Economic Expats

All sources and all people interviewed for this study agree on the difficul-ties in accurately assessing the number of Argentines living abroad under different immigration statuses. As it was mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, it is tentatively estimated that they amount to around 1 million today. There are very few and only partial studies on this issue. They point out the following trends: (a) there is a lack of reliable quantitative information; (b) emigration is not a totally new phenomenon: it started in the mid-1950s and has been incremental since then, though with oscillations; (c) numbers increased since the mid-1970s and peaked at the time of the 2001 crisis and immediately afterward;5 (d) developed countries and particularly Western Europe (mainly Spain and Italy) became the preferred destinations for the last wave of emigrants; (e) domestic factors (namely political and economic crises, together with an underlying questioning of basic cultural and ethical beliefs) are the determinants of the decision to emigrate;6 (f) members of this last wave of outflows were mostly young (between 25 and 44 years old) and with high educational levels and jobs at the time of leaving, though the socioeconomic profile is more heterogeneous today than in previous waves (i.e., professionals, technicians, as well as other occupations are included); and (g) in contrast to other South American cases where women led outflows, the number of women and men was almost the same.7

As for Argentines in Spain, Martínez Pizarro (2003:35) argues that the number almost doubled between 1991 (53,837) and 2001 (103,831), but it is estimated that the figure may be considerably higher today. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina, the total number in 2005 was somewhere between 380,000 and 500,000, including legal residents who have dual citizenship in Spain or another country within the European Union (and consequently do not appear in the statistics as immigrants) or are under different types of visas (e.g., workers, students) and illegal residents (a figure that is impossible to calculate exactly). From that total, at least 150,000 are believed to have emigrated in the past decade (mostly around the time of the 2001 crisis).8 Yet, the only official figures refer to those who have residency cards or authorization to stay, and these come from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of Spain (see note 12) or the National Institute of Statistics. The latter counted 231,630 Argentine immigrants (that is, individuals born in Argentina, over 15 years old, who had resided in Spain for a year or more) in 2007.9 Immigration flows have declined and even reversed in the last few years, mostly affected by the global economic crisis.10 By 31 December 2012, the number of Argentines holding residency cards was down to 93,696.11

In the heyday of the concerns with emigration in Argentina, the regularization process12 conducted by Spain between February and May 2005 shed some light not only on the magnitude of the flows but also on the incipient development of some transnational processes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.