Four generations of regional policies for the (free) movement of persons in South America (1977–2016)

First Online: 30 August 2020In the last two decades, South America created a regional regime for human mobility that is regarded as the most developed one after the EU. This regime is characterized by equal social and economic rights, working conditions and family reunion, as well as the right to reside and work in other Member States. Despite these important advances and the ground-breaking positions that this region sustains at the global level, South America remains understudied in governance, Regional Integration (RI) and migration studies. This chapter will make a contribution to the literature on regional migration governance in the Global South by proposing to assess the human mobility agenda in Regional Organizations (ROs) by identifying ‘generations’ of policies. I will argue that South American migration governance has gone through four of these generations, evolving from regional legislation that mainly focused on labor migration to the current ‘liberal’ regime (Cantor et al., 2015). In spite of being a ‘younger’ RO, Mercosur turned out to be the leader in proposing regional migration policies for the whole of South America by multilateralizing its Residence Agreement in the early 2010s, and by developing farther-reaching measures than the Andean Community. I will explain the main characteristics of each policy ‘generation’ and will briefly look into the reasons that explain these developments and Mercosur’s leadership. I will finally open the debate for the possible beginning of a ‘fifth generation’ of regional policies, beginning in 2015 with the change in the political orientation of the governments in the region and the possible upcoming modifications of regionalism in South America. This article draws information from more than a hundred in-depth interviews conducted between 2012 and 2018 with key governance actors in both the Mercosur and the CAN. It is also based on an analysis of the legislation on migration and institutional policy documents.The findings on which this research is based were supported by European Research Council funding for the project Prospects for International Migration Governance (MIGPROSP) agreement no. 340430 awarded to Professor Andrew Geddes