Proposing Comprehensive Migration Policy Guidelines to Combat Human Rights Violations in Argentina and Colombia: A Study of Regional Experiences (2003–2025)

Abstract

This article addresses a problem that directly harms the human rights of South American immigrants located in Argentina and Colombia, as these two countries concentrate the largest number of intra-regional migrants. This harm occurs because public migration policies, despite their normative formulation being rights-guaranteeing, exhibit rigid and exclusionary institutional practices in their application. Migration arises from a growing scenario of human mobilization, driven by various shared regional motives: social, economic, and political crises. The encompassing causes include the absence of comprehensive migration policies in destination countries, the lack of adequate protection at borders under a humanitarian approach, systematized discrimination, and the legal invisibility that affects this community. In this sense, the main objective is to identify means for formulating comprehensive migration policies that protect the human rights of the migrant population. A specific objective is the identification of normative and practical precedents that limit effective access to fundamental rights. The hypothesis is conceived that adopting comprehensively formulated migration policies will reduce the exclusion and social invisibility of inter-regional immigrants in these two South American countries. The article adopts a qualitative and comparative approach, based on a situational, normative, and historical analysis of South America: Argentina and Colombia. Meanwhile, the conclusions of this research evidence that despite the existence of a rights-guaranteeing framework that claims to protect the human rights of this community, the established migration policies do not respond to the needs of this migrant population, thus evidencing the authorities’ limited interest in integrating them into society. Consequently, a reform in the means of policy formulation is proposed for the defense of the human rights of inter-regional immigrants, promoting their inclusion and the effective exercise of their rights.