Right to stay? : a study of migrants’ “settlement right” in Argentina

Abstract

Often, migrants arrive at a place and spend years or even their whole lives living there. They work, socialize, and settle down without necessarily acquiring the new country's citizenship. Some of them could be irregular migrants in legal status, but share the daily life, culture, and mindset of ordinary citizens. Yet, they could still be subjected to expulsion, finding themselves returned to a country that has become strange lands to them regardless of the story their birth certificate tells us. Recently, the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice decided to expel dozens of these migrants not because they had committed a felony but solely because they hold an irregular migrant status. This paper thus asks whether transnational law presents an opportunity to recast Argentinian migration law by generating a "settlement criteria" that would prevent the expulsion of these long-standing migrants. For this purpose, the paper begins by outlining primary legal sources used in Argentina. The second section continues to engage with secondary sources from the international human rights regime. A third and final section concludes that there are several elements that allows to affirm the existence of the “settlement criteria” for the Argentine case.