Human Rights Protection and Migration: Strategies in Tension under a Framework of Regulation, Security and Order. A Comparative Analysis of Chile and Argentina in a Global Context

This article analyses transformations in migration governance in Argentina and Chile between 2015 and 2025, focusing on access to regular status as a central dimension. Despite their historically divergent normative frameworks -one more rights-oriented (Argentina) and the other more security-based (Chile)-, this paper argues that both countries have converged towards increasingly restrictive and discretionary forms of regulation. The analysis shows that legal reforms, administrative practices and digitalisation processes have introduced new barriers to regularisation, producing fragmented and unstable forms of legal status. In both cases, irregularity emerges not as a failure of the system but as an outcome of its design and implementation. The article argues that migration governance in the region is shifting towards models that manage, rather than resolve, migrant precarity, reinforcing the role of economic and labour requirements as key criteria for access and permanence.