The director of the National Migration Service (SerMig), Luis Eduardo Thayer, revealed that there has been an explosive increase in the number of irregular migrants in the country. He pointed out that around 127,000 people entered Chile irregularly, from 2018 to date, compared to 16,650 complaints of irregular income recorded between 2013 and 2017. Faced with this situation, the Executive seeks mechanisms and criteria to regularize them.
“According to the records of the PDI, there are around 127 thousand people who entered irregularly from 2018 to date. And the objective is to advance regularity through ordinary mechanisms, that is, those established by law. Today the The law allows children and adolescents to be regulated and, in addition, it says that regularization mechanisms can be established in the National Migration Policy. Then, when the policy is in place, regularization mechanisms can be defined,” said Thayer, in conversation with The Third PM.
Said policy would be announced during the month of October, after the government studies the criteria. According to Thayer’s statements to the evening paper, family reunification, responding to victims of human trafficking and the need to address the workforce deficit could be included as possible causes. And it is that, according to the director of SerMig, the idea of regularizing the situation of migrants occurs because it is practically “unfeasible” to expel that number of people.
“When more people were expelled in a year, there were a little more than two thousand, then there is a problem. We have to see how we solve it and, for that reason, the registration process announced by the President will begin. review case by case, we are going to check if the person has a criminal record and when there is merit for the expulsion, it will be done, but there are also mitigating factors that the law considers,” Thayer added to the newspaper.
The intention, according to the public official, continues to be “to strengthen the regular routes of access to the country linked to access to work. That is why we want to enable people to apply for job opportunities on our platform at the same time as they process their visa” .
Regarding the renewals, the National Migration Service counts 12,193 initiated, but only 1,225 materialized. 10,968 have been rejected because Bolivia does not receive redirected people. For this reason, prior coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the state service will meet with Bolivian authorities in the coming days.
People who have not been able to be redirected to their country of origin, remain in Chile, a report is filed for clandestine entry, a file is opened for their expulsion, they are left with a weekly signature in the PDI, and the Civil Registry is mandated to enroll them and give them a provisional RUN.
From the SerMig they specify that since April 2, 631 resolutions have been issued to start the administrative expulsion procedure. And the Ministry of Defense was notified to make Fach planes available for the expulsion of 180 people in the coming months. These definitions are “stuck” due to the large number of pending visa applications.
One of those who expressed concern about the matter was the former Undersecretary of the Interior Juan Francisco Galli, who told the aforementioned media outlet that “it is necessary to avoid at all costs that this type of advertisement generates a pull effect and that people, who may be victims of traffickers, believe that by entering clandestinely they will be able to regularize their situation”. And he added that “there is a risk that there will be less regular migration in the future.”
