Beyond vigilance and control.

Bolivian migration and regularization policies in the city of La Plata, Argentina

Abstract

The article discusses the way in which around the implementation of documentation programs for migrants and the possibility they provide of access to "papers" political processes that transform the place of those arrived in the target society are constituted, focusing on the case of the Bolivian migration to the city of La Plata. In this way, we investigated a dynamic in which consular agencies and social, labor and support institutions placed migrants as relevant actors within the framework of their objectives and were part of the development of processes of mobilization and elaboration of innovative demands.

We seek to hold two arguments: first, that identity documents -and policies designed to facilitate their processing- can be objects with a political productivity that is much more complex than that restricted to surveillance and control. And, in consonance, in front of the speeches that indicate that regularization programs operate as a form of continuity of security logics, we aim to demonstrate that together with Law 25,871 they formed an essential part of a dynamic of citizen positioning of Bolivian people that impacts in different aspects of their lives.