This article examines the political rationales at work behind the particularly repressive 2006 Costa Rican immigration law and subsequent immigration reform process and resulting 2010 law through an analysis of two rival framings of immigration in Costa Rica. First, I examine how the rushed nature of the 2006 law constructed a crisis in which migrants, particularly Nicaraguans, represented urgent threats to national security. Next, I examine the 2010 law that emerged from the reform process and the alternative framings of immigration as an issue of human rights and integration that migration advocates contributed to the new law. I argue that the juxtaposition of integration and security frameworks in the new law reinforces the law's most repressive measures, contributing to an overall project of securitization and marginalization of immigrants.
This article examines the everyday lives of Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica to understand the temporal aspects of illegality produced by immigration law. Two sets of temporary measures highlight the temporality of both law and illegality. First, frequent legal reform, temporary immigration measures, and the bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration administration create a sense of Costa Rican immigration law as temporary. The ongoing temporary character of law and the forms of immigrant illegality it generates create uncertainty about the boundaries between legality and illegality among migrants in Costa Rica. Second, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica respond to the indeterminacy of the law and their economic and social position in relation to it through their own temporary measures. These measures constitute two forms of waiting: first, immigrants feel "locked up" by the shifting legal and administrative complexities of immigration; and second, they create quasi-legal ways to navigate immigration law during the long process of legalization of their status.
Despite renewed interest in Central American migration, little attention has been devoted to understanding the diversity of migration pathways within the region. This article explores the tensions in the complicated connections between migration, land, consumption, and love in the case of migration between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations with members of transnational families in Achuapa, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, I examine how migrants and nonmigrants talk about remittances to make arguments about both abandonment and connection-that is, love for the land and people. Houses and land mediate local understandings of both the absence and presence of migrants in Achuapa. However, those who send and receive remittances, women and men, and young people and old all understand the relationships between migration and care or abandonment differently. At the community level, discourses around remittances tie in to nation-building projects through the resurgence of revolutionary discourses of solidarity under the Sandinistas. In this context, migration has become a new way for poor Nicaraguans to participate in the global economy and care for loved ones, even as it threatens nationalist longings for solidarity.A pesar de una renovación de interés en la migración centroamericana, se ha dedicado poca atención a la diversidad de flujos migratorios dentro de la región. Este artículo examina las tensiones entre la migración, la tierra, el consumo y el amor en el caso de la migración entre Nicaragua y Costa Rica. Basado en entrevistas y observaciones etnográficas en Achuapa, Nicaragua y Costa Rica, se examina como los y las migrantes y personas no-migrantes hablan sobre las remesas en discusiones sobre el abandono y la conexión-es decir, el amor por la tierra y las personas. Las casas y la tierra median el entendimiento de la ausencia y presencia de los y las migrantes en Achuapa. Sin embargo, los que envían y los que reciben remesas, las mujeres y los hombres, las personas jóvenes y las viejas entienden la relación entre la migración, el amor y el abandono de manera diferente. Al nivel de la comunidad, los discursos sobre las remesas se vinculan con proyectos sandinistas y nacionalistas a través del idioma de la solidaridad. En este contexto, la migración se ha vuelto al mismo tiempo una nueva manera para que los nicaragüenses pobres participen en la economía global y cuiden a sus seres queridos, y una amenaza a los deseos nacionalistas de solidaridad.
In Costa Rica, there is a widespread belief among the public and policymakers that the country's ‘exceptional’ universal healthcare system represents a magnet for Nicaraguan immigrants. However, examining immigrants’ actual access to social policy demonstrates the importance of legal and extra-legal mechanisms of exclusion that go hand in hand with official recognition of human rights. This paper critically assesses the relationship between migrants and the state, and public social policy in particular, in both sending and receiving country. We analyse the extent to which Nicaraguan migrant families on both sides of the Costa Rica–Nicaragua migration system incorporate public social protection in their welfare strategies. Drawing on two sets of qualitative data, we find that, on both sides of the border, migrants and their families display very similar commodified practices of welfare strategies, side-stepping the state and purchasing services in the private sector.
Este artículo evalúa críticamente la relación entre la población migrante y el Estado, en particular la política social pública, tanto en el país de origen como en el país receptor. Se analiza la medida en que las familias migrantes nicaragüenses incorporan la protección social pública en sus estrategias de bienestar a ambos lados del sistema migratorio, Costa Rica-Nicaragua. Basados en dos grupos de datos cualitativos, se encontró que, en ambos lados de la frontera, las personas migrantes y sus familias evidencian prácticas mercantilizadas muy similares de estrategias de bienestar, donde esquivan al Estado y compran servicios en el sector privado.
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