The Legal-Illegal Nexus: Haitian Citizens in Their Transit Migration through Peru

The nexus legal-illegal is more fluid than migration literature indicates. Thus far, research on legality/illegality (Carling, Menjivar and Schmalzbauer 2012; Golash-Boza 2012) has focused on the experiences of families with members with different migratory statuses, and/or how migrants from the same country enjoy different migratory statuses depending on the country of destination (e.g. Somalis). There is little on how migrants of the same nationality experience moving back and forth between these categorizations in their trajectory to a destination. We analyze the case of Haitian migration to Brazil to shed light on migrants’ agency and the structural constraints they face. We argue that migrants themselves do navigate successfully (mostly) the fluidity of the nexus legal-illegal due to their “migration capital.”

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Haitian migrants to Brazil through Peru have called the attention of media, local populations, authorities and security forces. Ever since, changing approaches and ad hoc stipulations in the migration policies of Brazil, Peru and Ecuador regarding “administering” the flow, have created “legal-illegal” scenarios for Haitians. Concurrently, Peru requires visa for Haitians, and Brazil grants refugee status (1/12/2012). In this context, Haitians are both treated as migrant bodies (Chavez 2009) assuming almost passively the events caused by actors who take advantage, abuse them or profit on their needs (Peruvian Police, coyotes, others). Simultaneously, they “master the local legal logics” in order to avoid “restrictions to their projects” (Fonseca and Jardim 2010). We draw on a multi-method and multisite research conducted in 2013 to illustrate this case.