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For migrants in Brazil, the COVID-19 global health crisis meant a considerable worsening of living conditions, with increased basic material needs. The reduction of individuals' existence to the mere search for survival had important repercussions on the activities of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the country, whose work became increasingly focused on the distribution of emergency assistance for these populations. Drawing on 25 interviews with actors from CSOs, this paper unpacks the entanglement between the political and the biological aspects of migrants' lives. It argues that the pandemic brought to the fore the prominence of biological life to the detriment of migrants' political and social lives in humanitarian responses to the health crisis. In this context, CSOs working with migrant populations in Brazil were pushed to reaffirm this dichotomy, while also contesting and reminding us that the impoverishment of migrants' political and social lives can endanger the biological life that they meant to prioritise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the debate on the migration–remittances–development nexus in Latin America has advanced considerably in recent years, the literature has yet to analyse the socio-political implications of the process of Financialisation of Remittances (FOR) in the region. This paper sheds light on the relationship between the FOR and diaspora engagement policies in Colombia, thus contributing to a growing body of critical analyses on diasporas as agents of development and processes of financialisation beyond the global north. Since the turn of this century, Colombian governments have invested in consolidating part of the state apparatus to capture and maintain the diaspora and their resources connected to the motherland. The paper uses a case study approach centred on a systematic examination of the political–institutional apparatus developed to engage the diaspora and financialise remittances in Colombia over the past 20 years, incorporating a temporal and historical perspective of the triad migration–development–financialisation trends at the national level. It argues that the FOR is a centrepiece of the state's broader strategy for the symbolic and material redefinition of (transnational) membership, in which both, embracing – by extending social and political rights – and tapping – into migrant households' connections to global circuits of capital and finance – elements co-exist This case is illustrative of how a growing number of states are adopting models of diaspora engagement that, on the one hand, feed into the dominant financialised model of development; and on the other, serve as an instrumental strategy in the emerging architecture of the global governance of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fleeing from the country's humanitarian crisis, around 224,000 Venezuelans, half of whom requested protection as refugees, had crossed the border into Brazil as of December 2019. The paper uses a case study approach combining quantitative and documentary evidence to systematically examine the Brazilian political‐institutional response to this mass displacement. Although Brazil has been internationally praised as a model, its policy response has been far more complex and ambiguous, lacking the clear progressive character ascribed to it. Despite having a 'progressive' migration and refugee legal framework, the state's framing of this displacement as a temporary 'migration crisis' has led to the militarization of migration management and the adoption of ad hoc regularization mechanisms for the temporary settlement of Venezuelans, with little articulation with other long‐term intersectorial socio‐economic policies. This case illustrates how countries in the global south manage the tensions between securitization and human rights concerns in their migration governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been discussed in the international literature about the relationship between family arrangements and migration decision-making, although few studies have done so through the analysis of quantitative data from migrants' countries of origin. Based on the theoretical contributions brought by the New Economics of Labor Migration and Transnationalism, we investigate how three intervening factors affect household living arrangements in the migrant's country of origin: people's life-cycle stages, migration regimes, and family normative systems. Using as case study the municipality of Governador Valadares, Brazil, the country's main international emigration hotspot, we draw on a mixed-methods approach that includes the analysis of the Brazilian Census and novel survey data, in addition to 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with migrants' relatives and returnees. The results point to clear differences between the structure of households with and without international emigrants. The reasons for these differences may be two-fold: (a) international emigration is an important factor leading to the rearrangement of family care systems, and (b) migration decision-making processes are dependent upon particular household structures, family norms and migration regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]