Leiza Brumat


A US-designed Migration Pact for the Americas?

This blog post has been initially published by Eurac and re-published here on MPC blog. Twenty countries in the Americas recently adopted a regional agreement on migration and protection that was proposed by the US government. What is this agreement about and why did Latin American governments endorse it? And, could it constitute a migration […]

Migrants or refugees? ‘Let’s do both’. Brazil’s response to Venezuelan displacement challenges legal definitions

As Venezuelan large-scale displacement worsened and some South American countries adopted more restrictive policies, only one country in the region recognised large numbers of Venezuelans as refugees and, at the same time, adopted a longer-term regularisation policy based on a regional agreement. That country is Brazil, which is not governed by a leftist political party […]

State control + human rights: Venezuelan displacement to Colombia and lessons from South American migration governance

The emigration of 5.6 million Venezuelans since 2015 means that South America is undergoing the largest forced displacement in the region’s history. On March 1 2021, the Colombian government, the main receiving country of Venezuelan migrants, issued an Executive decree that made headlines across the world. Decree 216 of 2021 could potentially regularise around 2.5 […]

“The less we move, the more we can contain the virus”: How COVID-19 fundamentally alters understandings of mobility and the free movement of people

Across the world, government responses to the COVID-19 crisis are leading to deep changes in our understanding of social reality. A particularly important change is that hundreds of millions of people around the world currently experience severe constraints on their mobility. While perhaps being an understandable response to the fear brought by a global pandemic, […]

Venezuelans are the first nationality of asylum seekers worldwide, but South American countries do not recognise them as refugees. Why?

Both the UNHCR and IOM have labelled the current Venezuelan emigration as a ‘staggering exodus’. More than 4 million people have left the country since 2015. This happened as question marks are being raised about the willingness and capacity of South American countries (where more than 90 per cent of Venezuelan emigrants are residing) to […]