Chile: Lemos To Lemonade

CHILE

Lemons to Lemonade

Americans rarely think of South America as a destination for immigrants and refugees.

But Chile is now experiencing an influx of newcomers that’s one of the largest immigration surges in the nation’s history.

Annual immigration to Chile, the continent’s wealthiest country per capita, has grown from around 460,000 in 2015 to 2 million last year, according to Voice of America. That’s double what Germany saw in its so-called refugee crisis in 2015.

In Chile, immigrants are now around 7 percent of the population, more than double the proportion three years ago.

Chile’s population is aging. The economy needs more workers. As illustrated by Al Jazeera’s story on the Palestinian community in Chile, the largest outside the Middle East, the country already has an immigrant culture where newcomers settle and assimilate without losing their roots. Those factors come together to make Chile an ideal destination for migrants.

“As US Slows Immigration, One Latin American Nation Embraces It,” read a Wall Street Journal headline early this year.

Today, however, immigration is stirring controversy in Chile, and ghettos are appearing where previously little poverty could be found.

Haitians are among the largest cohort of newcomers. They are discovering that Chile, settled largely by white Europeans who speak Spanish, is not always so welcoming to black Francophones, reported the Miami Herald.

A flood of Venezuelans fleeing their country’s economic mess also led Chilean authorities to tighten up rules designed to keep refugees out, the Washington Post wrote.

Officials are also moving to bring illegal immigrants into the open so they might join the formal economy rather than work on the black market, Bloomberg explained.

“The time of illegal immigration is behind us,” even as Chile “remains a welcoming country,” President Sebastian Pinera told the financial news service.

Think tank Stratfor noted that those efforts come as Chile is revising other immigration rules with an eye toward building a tech sector and a more diversified economy that might lessen the country’s dependence on copper exports. Stratfor noted that 40 percent of employees at 1,300 startups launched in the past eight years were foreigners.

Those efforts stand in contrast to efforts in the US and Europe to repel refugees or blame them for crime and other problems, wroteformer Chilean President Ricardo Lagos in the Argentine newspaper Clarin. “We must widen our outlook and understand the migrant not just as social burden or political pawn, but as a source of economic development,” he argued.

Social tensions will inevitably arise from immigration. But Chile shows natives can make lemonade from lemons.