 I'm going to be talking about South America but what I'm going to be also advocating for is the need to look at regional free movement of people beyond the European Union and in that regard I'm very interested in talking with those of you who work with ECOWAS in particular. I attended yesterday a couple of presentations on ECOWAS which were really interesting because what I find quite frustrating is that when you have comparisons of different regional models, whenever the EU is part of that comparison, the EU always stands at the top of whatever they are comparing as an ideal model and then everything seems to have to converge into an EU model in order to be successful and I think that is not very useful because obviously each particular region will have its own narratives, idiosyncrasies and characteristics and therefore we need to take into consideration that when we're discussing about free movement of people. Free movement of people is of course central not only in South America, I don't know if you know that 120 countries are involved in the world in some sort of free movement of people arrangement with different levels of course of development and with different characteristics but this is an ongoing trend which is very important and really vital in understanding it better. I'm working on South America and actually finishing a book on the legal construction of the national and the foreigner in South America for the last 200 years so migration and citizenship laws in the region for 200 years. Cambridge is going to publish that book and send in the manuscript next week so hopefully by May you will have it and I can if you if you're interested let me know and I can put you in the list of people I'll let know when when this is out right and why is South America you may wonder right why why is South America an interesting region and whenever I present South America anywhere in the world and this is the first time obviously I'm presenting this in Africa I always begin with this sentence which is as you can see quite a striking one right there are human right to migration human right to migration where have you heard that before never in your life possibly right so the human right to migration and the recognition of migrants the subjects of law must be at the center of the state's migration policies we claim that conditional respect of the human rights of migrants and we reject a number of things among others any attempt to criminalize irregular migration and I always ask my audience who wrote this sentence and I can tell you was not the European Commission it was not Donald Trump's administration who wrote this sentence who do you think wrote this sentence a very liberal scholar an NGO sorry our marks well it was actually this is a sentence coming from the Buenos Aires Declaration which is a declaration from 2013 and is signed by all 12 countries in South America and and it's actually part of a larger discourse that is happening in South America since the turn of the century and that has led to South America possibly being the most the region with the most open discourse on migration if you like and this is as you can see it has three key principles that is there are now is slowly being also translated into laws we have new laws in all the countries in South America since the turn of the century is set for Colombia or Colombia is a new law but it's not a great example is set for Paraguay and Chile but in Paraguay and Chile we also have new law proposals to amend their migration laws and as you can see there are three emerging principles if you like non-criminalization of irregular migration and the right to migrate as a fundamental right and then this idea of open borders at regional level first a son people claim that constructing a South American citizenship will be a first step towards a universal citizenship and this rhetoric is having an impact not only in national laws but also in regional laws and the most important agreement that we have a regional level is the Mercosur residence agreement and I'm going to explain in a second how it works and the challenges that it has right and this is obviously leading to South America and South American policy makers but also scholars to make two claims about what is going on in the last more or less 15 years in the region the first claim is that what is happening in South America is innovative is innovative in the sense of being new right it's a new approach to regulate migration right and the second claim is that what is happening in South America is exceptional it's exceptional in the sense of being better than the approach that the US or Europe take on regulating migration and it's part if you like of a moral avant-garde approach to regulating mobility and migration right so what I do in my book is to take those two claims and to problematize them so in order to problematize the first claim this claim of innovation I need to go back into history and I need to start seeing how South American countries through their nationality immigration laws how they legally constructed the figure of the foreigner because obviously when you have a new estate you have to decide what is my territory how do I govern myself and then you have to decide who is a national who is a foreigner and obviously nationals or foreigners are not beings found in the nature right these are beings that are legally constructed through political decisions so I go into history 200 years of analysis of history to assess the first claim and then in order to assess the second claim the second part of my book is about what is going on right now in South America and to see whether these free emerging principles non-criminalization right to migrate and open borders whether they are really translating into laws in a way that is different and in that regard innovative from what is happening in other regions around the world right or exceptional sorry so if you look at this map which I like better this is a map by a Japanese architect but it gives you a better measure of the size of the continents and of course being a map by a Japanese Japan is at the center of the map right and if you look at this map you can see that a huge region which is South America in the early 19th century obtained independence from basically Spain the largest part or nine countries emerged from what was Spain before and one country Brazil emerged from the Portuguese colonial Empire right and apart from tiny pockets in the north right which are now Suriname Guyana French Guyana the rest of the continent became independent in a period in a very short period only 16 years from 1810 until 1826 so I'm gonna tell you very very briefly before I move into free movement today what happening what happened in the 19th century and in the 19th century all these countries opened their borders to migrants and this was not only a rhetorical device it was this was actually a legal element so in all their constitutions they had all of these countries an article saying any foreigner from any nation has the right to come here so imagine open borders and shrine at a constitutional level so that was quite unique you will think nowadays how any foreigner of any nation has the right to come here has a right to establish here as equal civil rights with nationals and if that foreigner would like to can naturalize very quickly after arriving so usually two or three years or even sometimes less than that you could naturalize very quickly so of course if you think about that and if you read the laws you will think well this is was this was extremely an open approach to migration well that is a little bit far let's not far from the truth but we what we need to understand is which migrants South Americans were trying to attract and the migrants that were trying to attract were white European settlers and this was not a humanistic project if you like but this was a project which had three very clear components the first one was a racial project there were mixed race populations afro descendants indigenous and descendants of Europeans and the idea by the elites was to whiten the populations right so they wanted to attract more European settlers to whiten populations which were mixed the second element was that this was a population a population project so they wanted to populate territories that were presented as empty to the exclusion of indigenous communities who were residing in those territories nonetheless so of course we don't have westerns as we do in you know American or US movies right but you could do the same thing in South America you could have southerners because there was the expansion of the frontier towards the south in places like Chile or Brazil or Argentina and annihilating in that process and local populations right and the third element it was that this was a civilization project so the idea was that Europeans will bring civilization by bringing industries arts and sciences and actually you have this close in all the constitutions also in the different countries saying if you want to naturalize you need to be a European who is bringing either industry science or arts right if you go then to the 20th century what you find is that well in the beginning of the 19th century very few Europeans arrived so this was pretty much and a failed project right but by the end of the 19th century South America became the second region in the world that attracted more migrants only after the US so it was not Australia it was not Canada it was not South Africa it was South America Argentina attracted between 1880 and 1930 6.4 million migrants Brazil more than 4 million a tiny place such as Uruguay 700,000 right so this is something that is usually not considered when we discuss migration but South America was really the second region in the world only after the US in attracting migrants I insist many more than Australia Canada or other usual destinations in our in our thoughts right so what happened when they started receiving a lot of migrants was that they started constructing exclusions against certain categories of foreigners so these very open clauses of the 19th century let get gave way to clauses excluding by race by ethnicity by political ideology so there was at the beginning of the century the 20th century a lot of laws and saying that it was possible to expel those who were considered as anarchists and of course anarchists were those who defended social rights and then after the 1929 crisis you have many exclusions against those who are considered to be poor you have for example the banning of the entry of those coming in the third-class ticket in a ship right and then with the military dictatorships in the 60s and the 70s this reaches its climates right so possibly many of you are aware that in South America most countries in South America 8 out of the 10 that I analyze I don't analyze Surina and Guiana because they have a completely different colonial history in the 60s and in the 70s they have terrible military dictatorships where horrible crimes against a human rights were committed and forced disappearances torture etc right and it was at that point that the figure of the foreigner was considered to be a potential threat to national security so you find at that moment that the legislation on migration is extremely restrictive and I'm telling you this story because it's very important to understand that the century loan of exclusions against foreigners is not something that you can change that quickly even when you change the law even when you change the law you need to change practices that have accepted for a pretty much a century that when dealing with foreigners you were dealing with an individual who somehow had less rights and who somehow you could discriminate against so that is why I think it's very important to understand how regions reach particular discussions on free movement to understand how we can analyze those free movement regions better what happened in the 1980s very quickly when these countries came back to democracy you're going to summarize by saying two very important things the first thing is that when these countries came back to democracy in the 1980s they realized that there were not immigration countries any longer there were no immigrants coming into South America any longer the last immigrants the last important groups of immigrants that arrived to South America were after the Second World War mostly to Argentina and to Venezuela okay after the 60s no migrant from outside the region came to South America a few Asians but not really important groups right so these countries not only were not immigrant countries any longer but they were emigrant countries they have become emigrant countries through the periods of the military dictatorships and then in the 1980s in what is known as the lost decades or a decade of economic disaster in South America and then more importantly at the turn of the century with what we call the migratory stampede so thousands of South Americans with economic crisis at the turn of the century live in their countries and going mostly to Europe in particular to Spain and to the US right so these countries have become emigration countries and the second thing that is quite important that resonates to some of the debates some people were presenting yesterday and on Africa is that with the return to democracy this country said well now we are democratic states but we want everybody to know about it and the best way for everybody to know about it in the world is by ratifying every single human rights instrument that comes to your table so this is this sounds like a joke but this is not a joke South America has the best ratification record in the whole war of human rights instruments including the migrant workers convention so these two things led to a reconfiguration if you like of debates on migration so in the early 2000 this country's realize that first of all they had a lot of emigrants in the US and in Europe some of them were in an undocumented situation but also they realized that the lethal immigration that they had in South America was mostly regional okay so more than 65 percent of the migration that happens in South America is regional migration so that is why in 2002 they decided to adopt a piece of legislation at regional level which is called the Mercosur residents agreement which basically allows South American migrants who are residing in a different member state to regularize so this was not an agreement which had this objective the construction of an internal markets such as it is the case in the European Union remember the European Union we have free movement of people because that is part of the construction of an internal market where we have free movement of goods establishment services and capital right now was not the leading force in creating this residence agreement the leading force was to regularize migrants who were already residing in the different countries in South America but who were in any regular situation and that is why we have this Mercosur residents agreement this Mercosur residents agreement was adopted in 2002 and it came into force in 2009 and now it is applicable in all countries in South America except for Venezuela Suriname and Guyana this Mercosur residents agreement has of course meant that a lot of people have access to rights by means of having regular residents permit in South America but it also has a number of challenges and I wanted to raise those challenges to see if any of those resonate with the challenges that you might have here for example in ECOWAS with free movement of people with the protocol etc and the different agreements on free movement of people the first challenge that the Mercosur residents agreement has is that there is no right of entry so if you want to move to another country you need to prove that you are a tourist basically and if the border guards think that you don't fulfill the conditions to be considered as a tourist you're not going to enter the other country and that is quite contradictory because once you enter into the other country you have the right to reside but you don't have the right to move why don't you have the right to move because as I said the idea behind this agreement was to regularize migrants who were already there it was not to establish for example an internal market where you have free movement right so this is a key problem right and this leads to border guards having a lot of power in deciding who can enter who can cross the border and and this is a central concern for this particular agreement the other problem with this agreement is that in the beginning you will get a two-year temporary residence permit and in order to get that two-year temporary residence permit you just need to prove that you have a clean criminal record and that you are a national from one of the countries in South America which are implementing the agreement right after two years you need to prove also that you have sufficient resources to maintain yourself if you don't prove if you prove that you have sufficient resources you will get permanent residence but if you don't prove that you have sufficient resources you will fall back into irregularity and national law will apply to you again so this is a key concern because as you can imagine there is a large informal labor sector in South America which could also perhaps resonate with perhaps challenges here in Africa so according to ILO more than 47% of the labor market is informal in sectors outside agriculture so the idea of course of not asking a job contract to obtain a temporary residence permit was that right because if you ask a job contract a lot of people won't be able to obtain a temporary residence permit but the problem is that after two years you need to prove sufficient resources to maintain yourself some countries accept that you prove it by declaring you know that you are working informally and that you have enough resources from your informal labor other countries don't upset that so then you may fall back into irregularity and well the agreement gives you a number of rights right to work family reunification civil rights among others but let me mention a couple of other challenges just to conclude and another challenge is that in South America we have not only the Mercosur residence agreement but we also have other agreements coming from other regional organizations in particular from the Andean community so one problem that we have now in South America is the incongruity between the different instruments another problem obviously that was mentioned here yesterday when it came to echo us is the issue of implementation right there are countries which are implementing disagreements with more speed than others right the issue of adjudication that was not mentioned yesterday and I meant to ask that question what is the role of national courts right are national courts taking this agreement seriously because in principle in South America national courts could use this agreement as an international law agreement basically there is no direct effect or there is no there is no well direct effect to go in front of a court to claim the rights coming from the agreement but many national constitutional assistance in South America have said that international law once it has been ratified is superior to national law so what is the role of national courts that is an interesting question that I think will also be plausible to discuss for the case of echo us here are national courts looking at these agreements are they using then in deciding individual cases before courts right and then this idea of who is included in South America there are some debates about including not only South American nationals but also in expanding the scope of disagreements to also include permanent residents who reside in South America in the case of the European Union when European Union citizenship was adopted in 1992 there were many ideas floated around saying that EU citizens should be not only nationals of EU member states but it's will also be those who were permanently residing in a member state in Europe without having the nationality so a Ghanaian residing in Germany for a number of years having obtained permanent residents in Germany but having not naturalized in Germany so those individuals will also be EU citizens that was not taken into account so EU citizens are only those who are nationals of one member state of the European Union so these kind of debates are also happening now in South America trying to expand the scope of these free movement regimes not only for nationals of the different member states but also for those who are permanent residents that has not happened but again it's something I wanted to raise to see if it resonates with some debates here well my final point or my two final points are that I think is very important to start a dialogue between regions that are discussing free movement issues a movement of people and but without involving necessarily the European Union because I think the challenges that regions outside Europe might be facing on free movement are completely different from the challenges we may have in Europe and therefore that comparison with Europe is not always useful in my view that is why I'm quite sad that the colleague from the who was going to discuss the post-soviet space is not here right because I this kind of free movement agreements are also happening between Russia and a number of former and well new countries were part of former Soviet Union right and the second thing that I would like to mention as a conclusion is that it's very important also to understand the narratives and the history behind free movement regions or behind migration and mobility in the different regions and that is why I think it's very important to go back into understanding history and where the different agreements are coming from that should help also in making better policy recommendations and also help in constructing narratives which have a longer term view if you like right so with that I'll conclude and I look forward to your comments or questions critics thank you very much