Othering the Nation: The Reproductive Politics of Migration in Chile

Chile is facing an unprecedented sociodemographic crisis. Despite strong cultural norms towards family formation, the Total Fertility Rate (TRF) has dramatically declined in recent decades reaching a historical low of 1,17 in 2024; the lowest TRF in the Americas and one of the lowest in the world. Although fewer children are born each year, an increasing proportion of those children are being born to foreign mothers. Data from the National Statistics Institute (2023) shows that 17,4% of births in Chile correspond to a mother of foreign origin. This percentage increases to 44,9% and 37,4% for births in Northern regions of the country such as Tarapacá and Antofagasta. The more than 30,000 annual births to foreign mothers are driven mainly by the fertility of Venezuelan (23,2%), Haitian (15,1%), and Peruvian women (11,8%). While migration is often stressed as a possible solution to the demographic challenges posed by fertility decline, at the same time, the fertility of migrant women is often portrayed as problematic, unveiling racist and xenophobic views on reproduction and nationalist anxieties about the extinction of the nation. This paper analyzes the reproductive politics of migration in Chile by conducting a discourse analysis of social media messages referring to the fertility crisis posted on X during 2024. By analyzing what is said about birthing migrant mothers and children born to women of foreign origin in discussions about the fertility crisis, this paper explores the reproductive politics of migration and the challenges that these cultural views pose for the making of national futures in Chile. In doing so, this paper contributes to understanding the role of social media in shaping contemporary attitudes towards migration as well as cultural representations of migrant reproduction in the context of the fertility crisis.