Abstract
Recent scholarship has claimed that countries across Latin America have been adopting an increasingly liberal and more advanced legal framework for the protection of refugees. Yet little systematic cross-country evidence beyond case studies exists to back up this claim. To address this gap in the literature, I develop a new methodology — called the Asylum Policies in Latin America (APLA) Database — to measure policy outputs on asylum across Latin America over time. Applying this new methodology, I present the results of the codification of 19 Latin American countries, over a 31-year period (1990–2020), using 65 indicators to track the development of policy measures on asylum. The findings from this new database confirm the claim from existing research that countries across Latin America have developed an increasingly complex and more liberal legal framework for the protection of refugees. This liberal trend in asylum legislation stands in contrast to findings of increased restrictiveness over the same period across OECD countries. The APLA Database represents a unique contribution to the fields of migration and refugee studies, as it provides systematic data on the nature and development of asylum policies in Latin America through highly disaggregated data on policy outputs. Additionally, APLA demonstrates the existence of intra-regional variation. It also allows scholars to develop and test hypotheses in the field of asylum studies and provides a reference database for comparative analyses of asylum policies in Latin America, as well as a framework for the comparative study of asylum policies across the globe.
Highlights
Forced displacement is a salient global issue
I present the findings from Asylum Policies in Latin America (APLA) data, which confirm the claims from the literature on the liberalization of asylum policies in Latin America, and discuss trends, outliers, and the adoption of specific policy measures across the region
Numbers increased again in the early 2000s, mostly in Ecuador and Venezuela, both of which experienced an influx of refugees fleeing Colombia’s internal conflict (Brown 1996; 16The Cartagena refugee definition widens the 1951 Geneva Convention refugee definition to include “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violations of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order” (UNHCR 1984)
Summary
Forced displacement is a salient global issue. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world, 26 million of whom were refugees (UNHCR 2020).1 Despite evidence that around 85 percent of refugees and people in need of international protection live in developing nations, most research on the legislative frameworks for the protection of refugees has focused on OECD countries (Bjerre et al 2015; Helbling et al 2017; Helbling and Kalkum 2018). I present the findings from APLA data, which confirm the claims from the literature on the liberalization of asylum policies in Latin America, and discuss trends, outliers, and the adoption of specific policy measures across the region.
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