The right-wing candidates vying to become Chile’s next president are falling over each other to show voters who’ll do more to stop migrants from slipping across the border. Heading into Sunday’s elections, they’re promising internment camps, walls, trenches, mass deportations and, in one case, even deadly land mines.
Hundreds of thousands of foreigners, mainly from Venezuela, have arrived in Chile over the past decade, often through informal paths across the high-altitude northern desert that once served as a natural barrier. As Chileans clamour for more control, the nativist campaign platforms portend a crackdown, the latest example of growing anti-migrant sentiment sweeping the globe. Yet as the population here rapidly ages and the birth rate sinks below Japan’s, Chile risks going too far by locking out desperately needed foreign workers.
José Antonio Kast, the hard-right former congressman who recent polls show would triumph in a likely run-off ballot in December, describes clandestine migration as a national security threat. “Chile will be for Chileans and for everyone who complies and respects the law,” Kast said in a speech earlier this year. He’s promising to expand a military deployment to seal the border and to deport tens of thousands of people.
Kast is now warning undocumented immigrants to get out while they can. “What you have, sell, take the money in cash and leave.” Otherwise, “you’ll leave with only the clothes on your back.”
Libertarian Johannes Kaiser, whose upstart candidacy has recently gained momentum, wants to round up undocumented migrants into camps, bar their children from school and eventually deport them. Rival Franco Parisi wants to lay mines.
The promised clampdown is not limited to the right. As leftist President Gabriel Boric prepares to leave office in March, his communist former labour minister Jeannette Jara, who topped recent polls for the first-round ballot, is pledging to tighten border security and expel foreigners convicted of drug trafficking.
Some 92 percent of Chileans want more restrictive immigration policies, far more than in other major economies in the region, according to LatAm Pulse, a survey conducted in October by AtlasIntel for Bloomberg News.
At a recent campaign stop in a working-class district of Santiago, centre-right candidate Evelyn Matthei was greeted by supporters waving signs that read “Expel the criminals.” Víctor Sobarzo, a 66-year-old resident, complained that newcomers have turned the neighbourhood into a “no-man’s land” by blaring music day and night, disrespecting the local way of life.
No going back
Anti-migrant sentiment is driving a rightward shift across the Americas. It helped put Donald Trump back in the White House and propelled Panama’s José Raúl Mulino to power in 2024 on a platform to close the Darién Gap, his nation’s notoriously perilous jungle crossing. In Canada, conservative Pierre Poilievre only narrowly lost an election on a platform calling for stricter immigration caps.
For decades, foreigners accounted for just a sliver of Chile’s population. But in recent years refugees have poured in as economic turmoil and violence engulfed Venezuela, Haiti and Colombia.
Chile’s foreign-born residents jumped by nearly 50 percent in the five years through 2023, reaching 1.9 million people, or about a tenth of the overall population, according to government statistics.
The country’s willingness to embrace migrants is wearing thin as troubles in their home countries persist, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. “The more open-ended it becomes, and these become permanent crises, the harder it is to sustain those feelings of solidarity.”
Former government officials say that Chile, long a beacon of relative stability and prosperity in Latin America, was unprepared for the flood of new arrivals.
“More than the volume of migrants who arrived, it was the lack of institutional capacity to deal with them,” said Rodrigo Sandoval, who served as former president Michelle Bachelet’s top migration official.
The government has tightened entry rules for certain nationalities like Venezuelans, but migrants continue to arrive. The number of foreign-born residents with irregular migration status soared to nearly 337,000 in 2023 from some 10,000 in 2018.
Grey tide
The risk of pushing back too hard on migration lies in Chile’s greying demographic profile.
Latin America’s most prosperous country is ageing fast and having fewer babies, echoing the demographic trends facing countries like Japan. The share of people 65 and up per 100 of working age will triple to 60 percent between 2020 and 2060, according to estimates from the Organisation for Economic C-operation and Development (OECD).
The total fertility rate – the average number of children a woman is likely to have over her childbearing years – fell to just 1.03 last year, half the level recorded in 1999, according to government statistics. Japan’s 2024 rate was 1.15.
Worried about labour supply and pressure on healthcare and pensions, business leaders are striving to temper the migration debate.
“What we need here are people to come in a regular manner, who want to work, find opportunity in Chile, who are needed and required in industries as important as agriculture, and for this to happen in an agile, orderly way,” Susana Jiménez, president of the Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio, one of the country’s main business associations, said in a recent local radio interview.
That nuanced approach would help Chileans like Mauro Magnasco, a farm owner who says the government needs to do a better job on migration.
Farms like his that underpin Chile’s booming agricultural exports rely on foreign-born workers to harvest and pack fruit.
“We need to find ways to identify good migrants from bad ones, to distinguish between hard-working people and those who come to leech off of this country,” Magnasco said in an interview at his 450-hectare (1,112 acres) property in the Ñuble region south of the capital Santiago.
Since the pandemic, the third-generation family business manager has been enlisting farmhands from Bolivia and Peru, as locals in nearby towns are increasingly loathe to pick blueberries, apples and cherries under the piercing sun.
Foreigners account for half of all the workers in Magnasco’s fields when fruit is ripe. “At harvest time, you need volume and speed,” he said.
Antonio Walker, head of Chile's main agriculture trade association, has called for "limited" legalisation of undocumented workers in Chile, a position that drew an immediate rebuke from Kast.
“Chile can no longer tolerate improvisations on immigration matters," Kast told reporters in September when asked about Walker's proposal.
Sowing fear
For the political class, it’s proven more expedient to conflate migrants with crime than to draw distinctions between formal and informal immigration.
Almost daily, Chilean news channels broadcast stories of armed robberies, kidnappings and murder involving foreign suspects – usually highlighting the nationality of each one. Nearly 16 percent of Chile’s prison population is foreign, according to the country’s Gendarmerie. The largest share is from Venezuela, followed by Colombia and Bolivia.
Locals also grumble at sights of migrants lining up at public schools and hospitals.
High-profile killings linked to the notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, have ignited fears that refugees brought organised crime and violent tactics along with them. Cultural differences and Chile’s exceptionally low bar for foreign residents to vote have added to the friction.
In June, 43-year-old Venezuelan migrant Yaidy Garnica was murdered following an argument with neighbours over loud music. Security camera footage of the incident shows people banging on the gate to Garnica’s home in a working-class Santiago neighbourhood before ensuing into a scuffle.
Then, a man rushed in with a shotgun and fired at Garnica. Amnesty International later described the incident as an anti-immigrant hate crime.
The killing rattled migrants already facing rising xenophobia. Now, they describe a sense of unease in their communities ahead of the presidential vote.
“Frankly, I’m scared,” said Carla Silva, 31, a Venezuelan doctor and undocumented migrant who came to Chile in 2022. “And everyone around me is also really upset and alarmed.”
Silva left home following the pandemic. She says her political activism made it impossible to find work in Venezuela’s public hospitals, so she connected with a friend in Santiago, crossing the continent by bus and motorcycle.
She is hopeful that she will be able to legalise her migration status once she validates her medical diploma. Though with anti-migrant sentiment running high, she is also considering leaving again.
“I’m a doctor and I could be useful to the country,” she said. “But how can I be, if everyone here is completely closed off?”
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