‘I Need to Work to be Legal, I Need to be Legal to Work’: Clandestine Markets and Labor Precarity Among Haitian Women in Santiago (Chile).

Immigration and legal status are dimensions of recent forms of labor market stratification and precarious employment in countries with high migrant flows. This paper explores the relationship between precarity and legal status within the framework of Haitian migration in Chile, where new forms of racial discrimination and gender segregation have emerged in the past few years.

Chile’s migrant population has recently transformed based on the changing political and economic circumstances in Latin America, and the tightening of migration policies in the ‘global north.' Since 2015, Haitian migrants have become more present in the Chilean social landscape, which is reflected in the dramatic increase of their temporary visa and permanent residence applications. As a new group, their presence entails racial and linguistic differences, as well as new kinds of gender segregation that challenge current forms of integration that operate at different levels of society.

Drawing upon participant observation with Haitian women in Santiago (Chile), statistical analysis of migratory records in the country and interviews with the key informants, I intend to unravel the different strategies Haitian women use to gain labor stability, such as clandestine economic practices to regularize their migrant status. I seek to describe the nascent black market of fake contracts, in which most Haitian women fall into with both successful and failed outcomes. Also, I describe the multiple experiences of employment and unemployment that Haitian women who buy these fake contracts have. In doing so, I attempt to critically analyze how the relationship between migrant status and labor precarization in Chile is explained considering these findings; and how racial and gender differences can deepen our understanding of this relation in Latin America and other contexts.