“Immigrants and discrimination” by Veronica

Introduction

In the next essay I will analyze the discrimination that immigrants had suffered especially Peruvians and Bolivians.
I will try to review some of the mainly reasons that causes discrimination, mainly on this kind of immigrants. Even when we know that there is more than one kind of immigrants, according their nationality, in our country. And also I’ll see the government position on this theme, which affects mayoralty to one group of immigrants.
Immigrants and discrimination.

When I first started this course, I must admit that I had a bad prejudice with immigrants in general, because all I could see about them were the bad things associated with Peruvians and Bolivians such as drug trafficking and other criminal conduct. But during the progress of the seminary I realize that the situation is different.

For start there is more than just one kind of immigrates (according to their nationality) in this country, which is a thing that not too many people can see. And too many people (just like I did) see Peruvians as the ONE immigration in this country. But in fact there are a lot of types of immigrants nationality such as Ecuadorians, Colombians and specially Argentines which are the second in quantity in our country with a 20.5% of the immigrant’s population in Chile, but I guess that people don’t talk about them that much because they come here to other kind of jobs and they have another status.
We normally are use to see only Peruvian’s and Bolivian’s immigration because the Medias enhance the bad things and even the criminal conduct that some of them have. In some of the Medias highlights we can see things such as “Narcotraficantes peruanos detenidos al intentar ingresar droga al país” (which means that Peruvians were trying to bring drugs to our country, but the police catch them before they could do that). I could also mention that a candidate for the congress mention about the Peruvians that: "Muchos lideran bandas de delicuentes" (many of them lead criminal bands) and this doesn’t happen with other immigrations. And in conclusion Peruvians represent a bad immigration. This situation helps to create the negative idea that all immigrants are like that, which leads to a discriminatory situation for Peruvians and Bolivians.

In general, we can see that one out of three immigrants declares have been victim of discrimination. And talking about Peruvians and Bolivians, I can say that these kinds of immigrants had the highest percentage of discrimination in our country. 42, 8% of the Bolivians immigrants declare to be treated with discrimination in our country and 36, 1% of Peruvians declares to be treated in a discriminatory way in our country, which is above the immigrant’s discrimination rate average (dates obtained from migratory policy in Chile). Beside the discrimination we can also mention that Peruvians and Bolivians are the immigrant’s population with the largest victimization rate. 39.6% Peruvian’s immigrants declare to be victimized of some crimes, and the victimization rate of the Bolivians was 35.1%.

Our government has taken conscience about this situation. And we can see that in our new migratory policy, in which Chile declares it self as an open country to immigrants and a country that searches for a non discrimination reception of immigrants.
To overcome this discrimination situation, we must know that not all immigrants are bad and not all of them come here to do criminal things. Some of them come here just to find better life’s condition and a better job to provide their families. And they come to Chile mostly because of the economic stability that our country offers, and the deteriorating economic and political situation of other nations in the region.
After saying that we can notice that this immigration has economics reasons, and this is something that our government has taken in consideration. And this is something we can see when our country ratified the international convention of workers and their families in 2005, in this convection Chile makes a duty to: incentive the non discrimination between immigrant’s workers and national workers; and also to maintain an equalitarian treat.
In immigration aspects we just see a part of it, and normally is the bad side that we see and this is just the smallest part of it. That is the mainly reason of the discrimination in our country, we need to remind that a lot of immigrants come here to work here and make it progress too. So I guess we don’t have to judge immigrants, because they are mostly searching the same things that us: better opportunities for them and their family.

Conclusion

Through this essay I’ve discover one of the mainly reasons that leads to discrimination, that affects mostly to Peruvians and Bolivians in our country. This is in my consideration the effect that Medias had over people’s thoughts. The communications Medias only enhance the bad conducts of this kind of immigrants. And they make a big silence respect of the good things that they do and they also silence the activities of other groups of immigrants, such as the argentines which are a large group in quantity in our country.
Our government position about this theme is to strengthen the non discriminatory insertion of all groups of immigrants (but only the legal ones), without make distinction for nationality.
What we need to keep in mind when we talk about discrimination produced for the enhance of the negative conducts that some immigrants have, is that not all immigrants are like that, and that they all came to our country, mostly for the same reasons: search for better opportunities for them and their families.