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This article analyzes the role of ideas, domestic actors, and international influences in migration policy change (MPCh) in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Building on 67 in-depth interviews with key actors in migration governance, public declarations of government representatives, and relevant legislation, we argue that the increased power of "securitist" actors within national bureaucracies shaped MPCh in all three countries. Between 2015 and 2019, these actors promoted a set of programmatic ideas and policy proposals that linked migration to security issues and distinguished between "good" and "bad" immigrants, emulating Global North countries. This set of ideas resulted in policy change at the country level, but at the same time, national-level policy change coexisted with continuity at the regional level. This article contributes to the literature on migration governance, first, by extending the geographical focus of migration policy studies, which frequently focus on party politics, coalitions, and public opinion, beyond the Global North. Second, we further current explanations of MPCh and policy contradictions by differentiating between continuity and change in programmatic ideas, policy proposals, and public philosophies. Third, we advance the regional migration policy literature by distinguishing between different groups of actors within national bureaucracies and enhancing understanding of these actors' roles at both the national and international levels. Across its sections, this article shows that policy ideas—where and from whom they come—matter. By unpacking the different types of ideas that influence policy shifts and the actors who promote them, we can better understand apparent contradictions in migration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractFor migrants in Brazil, the COVID-19 global health crisis meant a considerable worsening of living conditions, with increased basic material needs. The reduction of individuals’ existence to the mere search for survival had important repercussions on the activities of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the country, whose work became increasingly focused on the distribution of emergency assistance for these populations. Drawing on 25 interviews with actors from CSOs, this paper unpacks the entanglement between the political and the biological aspects of migrants’ lives. It argues that the pandemic brought to the fore the prominence of biological life to the detriment of migrants’ political and social lives in humanitarian responses to the health crisis. In this context, CSOs working with migrant populations in Brazil were pushed to reaffirm this dichotomy, while also contesting and reminding us that the impoverishment of migrants’ political and social lives can endanger the biological life that they meant to prioritise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intimate entanglements of heteronormative power, citizenship and affect in the UK family migration visa. It pays particular attention to the material intricacies of the application process itself and the place of narration and emotional investment central to this form of government. The power of the family visa is how it is attuned to the explicit quantification and categorisation of intimate relationships on which claim to territorial rights rest. Drawing on both the analytical and methodological promise of work on 'intimacy' we take the family visa as a particular site for exploring our own intimate entanglement and complicity in this practice of 'geopolitical making'- that is as both subjects and researchers of the visa. We are interested in how the visa both relies upon and produces certain forms of intimacy, particularly through processes of 'archiving' and the intricacies, solidarities and fragments that this is entangled with. We thus explore how we are both authors and subjects of the reproduction of heteronormative order central to visa and the drawing of borders around sanctified and unsanctified intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post-2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected by 21 representatives of international and non-governmental organisations and consultancies, and 14 academics with diverse disciplinary expertise from an initial pool of 704 questions submitted by 110 organisations based in 34 countries. The shortlist includes questions addressing long-standing problems, new challenges and broader issues related to development policies, practices and institutions. Collectively, these questions are relevant for future development-related research priorities of governmental and non-governmental organisations worldwide and could act as focal points for transdisciplinary research collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South American countries have been increasingly opening their doors to resettle extra-regional refugees. One of the most visible initiatives was the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Chile and Brazil during 2007 and 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]