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A historic level of migration is reshaping the societies and politics of Latin America and the Caribbean, giving rise to a new era best defined by volatility. After years of unprecedented human mobility since 2010, during which time the number of migrants in the region roughly doubled, migration has become unpredictable, multidirectional, and increasingly difficult for governments to manage. Countries have simultaneously grappled with the integration of displaced people (primarily Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans), secondary migration as individuals moved on when opportunities faltered, circular and return migration, and emigration of frustrated middle classes.

The region was able to navigate the first mass arrivals, which largely began in the early and mid-2010s, thanks to solidarity-driven responses. Governments, especially but not exclusively those in South America, took bold steps to open temporary legal pathways and grant protection to millions of Venezuelans and others, enabling them to rapidly enter the labor market and obtain regular status. These policies were significant accomplishments, demonstrating remarkable pragmatism, but were often not anchored in strong institutions. Temporary permits have often expired without offering individuals a path to permanence, migrants have struggled to access education and health systems, and integration has remained uneven. These weaknesses are now helping fuel the growing unpredictability in policy decision-making. And today, South American governments that once leaned heavily into regularizing newcomers have discontinued many of these programs for recent arrivals and failed to link them with long-term integration for those who have been in the country for years.

The prospect of mass deportations from the United States threatens to magnify the vulnerabilities of integration systems in Latin American and Caribbean countries. If past is prologue—and fully 87 percent of all U.S. interior removals during fiscal years (FY) 2021-24 were to Mexico and northern Central America—the sharp rise in immigration enforcement in U.S. communities may result in a significantly greater number of returnees to the region in the months and years ahead. These governments have long-established reception and reintegration programs to assist returnees, but any sudden or large returns of their nationals may overwhelm their uneven capacities, especially as they manage other migration pressures. And while mass deportations to Haiti are not yet feasible due to the country’s difficult conditions, President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to end temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, making them subject to removal and increasing the risk of further destabilizing the Caribbean.   

This dual reality—solidarity that achieved short-term successes but left in place fragile systems that are now facing mounting pressures—frames the broader story of migration across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, regional efforts at cooperation that had blossomed in recent years are increasingly being overshadowed by uneven bilateral, deportation-focused negotiations between the United States and individual countries. Central America and Mexico have become reluctant destinations, caught between the twin pressures of managing return and reintegration of their own nationals as well as third-country nationals under U.S.-driven arrangements. For countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—where remittances from abroad account for roughly one-fifth to more than one-quarter of the economy—large-scale returns could shake the very foundations of their economies.

And in the Caribbean, regional frameworks to enhance free mobility have advanced in meaningful ways, but often by leaving Haiti, the subregion’s largest origin country for migrants, on the margins. Key countries hosting Haitian migrants are either reluctant to implement their commitments, under the guise of national security concerns, or remain outside regional migration policy discussions altogether.

Taken together, these experiences reveal both the possibilities and the limitations of migration governance in a region confronting an unpredictable new era.

This article traces these dynamics across the Caribbean and Central and South America and examines the likelihood of a tipping point in regional migration management. It is based in part on research conducted for the authors’ book, On the Move: Migration Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean (Stanford University Press, August 2025).

South America’s Migration Experiment After a Decade of Solidarity

Faced with the sudden displacement of more than 7.7 million Venezuelans since 2014, about 90 percent of whom remained in the region, South America became the stage for one of the most ambitious solidarity experiments in modern migration history. Governments moved quickly to open their doors to many of these individuals. The largest numbers of displaced Venezuelans at this writing were in Colombia (nearly 2.8 million) and Peru (1.7 million; see Figure 1). In several countries, Venezuelans were joining Haitians who had arrived in significant numbers after a 2010 earthquake ravaged their country.

Early responses were both pragmatic and far-reaching. Colombia granted first two and then ten years of temporary legal status, ultimately covering more than 2.5 million Venezuelans. A similar program in Peru covered about 500,000 individuals. Brazil created humanitarian visas that allowed for a rapid transition to permanent residence. These measures enabled millions to rapidly enter labor markets and access services, easing humanitarian pressure. Argentina and Uruguay used regional mobility agreements to grant legal status to Venezuelans, while Chile and Ecuador used flexibility in their visa systems to provide status to many recent arrivals. The policies were made possible by (in most cases) a shared language and history, as well as high levels of economic informality that made it easy for newcomers to find work, and a powerful solidarity narrative, given that many South Americans had in the past sought shelter in Venezuela during their countries’ own conflicts and crises.

But these same policies also exposed institutional fragility. Permits were often temporary, data systems meant to connect migrants with essential services and align government needs with available human capital remained fragmented, and access to social services lagged. Colombia’s Temporary Statute of Protection for Venezuelans (Estatuto Temporal de Protección para Migrantes Venezolanos, or ETPV) was suspended for new registrants in 2024 and replaced with a much more restricted program for minors and their legal guardians, known as PEP Tutor. In Peru and Ecuador, new elected leaders have repeatedly altered requirements for residency. The rapid policy changes eroded trust among migrants as well as employers and local communities. Private firms had invested in formalizing migrant workers, but sometimes lost confidence as policies shifted and workers slipped back into irregularity. Rights granted on paper lacked full connection to health, education, and social protection systems.

What the last decade has shown is that integration challenges are rarely limited to one country. As rules changed and opportunities evaporated, many migrants moved again—often through the Darien jungle leading to Central America and points north (more on this below)—placing pressure on other countries.

Challenges—and Opportunity—in Unsettled Times

These policy weaknesses are now magnified by uncertainty on multiple fronts. Governments face the unfinished task of integrating millions already present while also managing new outflows. Nearly 1 million Colombians left their country from 2022 through 2023, and 400,000 Ecuadorians have emigrated since 2021. This movement reflects widespread disenchantment with limited opportunities and rising security challenges, as well as the lure of the United States. At the same time, a new cohort of arrivals may be forthcoming, in the form of deportees from United States who will need integration assistance of their own.

Politics add another layer of instability. In Chile, for example, rising homicide rates have become an electoral flashpoint, with a major focus being Venezuelan gangs that arrived initially to extort migrants but quickly took over parts of the local crime scene. Ahead of November 2025 elections, candidates have responded with immigration-focused proposals to militarize enforcement or increase surveillance of the foreign born. Upcoming elections in Colombia, Brazil, and elsewhere across the region might lead to further policy churn.

However, within this unpredictability lies opportunity. As in other parts of the region, increasing remittances are reshaping South American societies, yet policies have so far treated these money transfers and other migration trends as short-term issues rather than part of a broader development strategy. Linking these changes to labor-market and other reforms could allow governments to turn both their immigrant and emigrant populations into economic and social catalysts. South America has already shown that solidarity, including in the form of regular status, can offer millions of immigrants a stake in their host societies. The challenge now is to build on that success and learn from past mistakes.

Central America and Mexico Evolve into Destinations

There is a long history of Mexican migration to the United States, going back to the 19th century, with Central American migration picking up in the 1980s. These patterns, too, changed dramatically in the 2010s. First, there was a rapid increase in Central Americans heading to the United States, which became particularly visible in 2014 with significant arrivals of unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Facing U.S. border restrictions, many migrants began to stay temporarily in Mexico, making it a major destination country for the first time in recent history. Then in 2018, the Nicaraguan government cracked down on opposition protests, sending upwards of 300,000 Nicaraguans into neighboring Costa Rica, which was already hosting a smaller but significant number of displaced Colombians and Venezuelans.

The Mexican and Costa Rican governments responded, in part, by strengthening their asylum systems to provide people fleeing danger a chance to stay legally. But Mexico in particular also began to face pressure from the U.S. government to do more to control its border with Guatemala. This pressure increased after the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when large numbers of Central Americans, South Americans, Haitians, and others began traversing the remote Darien Gap straddling Colombia and Panama, often bound for the United States (see Figure 2). Indeed, every country in Central America to some degree found itself caught between a desire to help and pressure to control the flow of migrants now appearing or passing through. In the case of Panama and Mexico, escalating U.S. pressure became particularly significant to try to reduce the incentives for onward movement.

The Response

Mexico, Costa Rica, and other Central American countries have been fairly open to newcomers who settle within their borders, generally offering some form of conditional legal status (such as through asylum applications or humanitarian visas), although these have become more difficult to obtain. At the same time, the governments have also developed greater capacity to deter migrants from journeying farther north. The Mexican government, in particular, significantly ramped up efforts to detain and deport irregular migrants, such as by allowing the National Guard to assist with immigration enforcement. From May 2024 through March 2025, Mexican authorities interdicted more migrants on their territory each month than did U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In June 2024, the Biden administration further limited access to asylum at the U.S. border, where it had witnessed two years of all-time high encounters of people crossing without authorization, leading to a steady decline in northbound migration. With Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and the imposition of a campaign of “shock and awe” to tackle unauthorized migration, numbers dropped even further.

Today, Mexican and Central American leaders are more concerned about their own citizens likely to be deported; more than two-thirds of the 13.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States as of mid-2023 came from these countries, according to Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates. Most countries have made some provisions to receive and provide basic services to returnees, and some are beginning to see returning migrants as potential human capital with skills that can contribute to the local economy. Leaders are also looking to a future in which fewer remittances are sent from abroad, which would have a direct impact on local economies. Any such disruption would likely reverberate through households and national accounts alike.

The Caribbean Builds a Regional Architecture—Leaving Most Haitian Displacement Unsettled

The migration story of Caribbean countries over the last 15 years has been one of increased regional integration, based on a range of shared traits and challenges, while generally declining to host Haitians who have fled their troubled country.

The Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) 15 Member States in 2023 renewed their commitment to implement true free movement, building on the pre-existing system’s focus on mobility for people with certain skills, and also build a common market and economic union. Since 2011, nationals of countries in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS)—Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines—have been able to travel, work, and reside freely and indefinitely in each other’s nations without much bureaucracy.

The desire for integration comes in part from the Caribbean’s position as a transit point for global trade. An ideal climate and beautiful beaches attract international tourists year-round. But countries have struggled to retain workers amid labor shortages and aging societies. Countries such as Barbados and Jamaica have experienced decades of emigration, particularly of teachers and nurses, and yet their own growing labor needs mean they rely on foreign workers. Faced with this reality amid a recent oil boom, Guyana’s immigration policies have become more flexible, to increase recruiting of diaspora members and other Caribbean nationals.

Yet the subregion’s topography also exposes it to natural disasters and related displacement, as seen after a 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Maria’s 2017 devastation of Dominica, and last year’s Hurricane Beryl that decimated parts of Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In instances such as these, the Dominican Republic has temporarily relaxed immigration policies, but many people have also benefitted from pre-existing labor mobility agreements in the Eastern Caribbean. Moreover, the subregion’s location and the fact that many countries are archipelagos, with multiple difficult-to-monitor entry points, makes them ripe for the smuggling of drugs and humans, and as such has led to security concerns.

Seldom discussed is migration to the multiple Caribbean territories of France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Higher-paying jobs in the hospitality and tourism industry and a potential gateway to advanced economies in North America and Europe attract workers from everywhere. Citizens of the Dominican Republic, for instance, account for sizable shares of the populations of Anguilla and Turks and Caicos (British Overseas Territories), Curaçao and St. Maarten (which are Dutch), and Puerto Rico (a U.S. territory). Many of these territories have small and, in some cases, declining native-born populations, are highly dependent on migrant labor, and lack autonomy over their immigration policy.

And while there is little immigration to Cuba, several cooperation agreements involve the movement of Cuban health professionals to other Caribbean nations. More generally, Cuba has recently experienced the largest emigration in its modern history, due to an economic downturn and political discontent, particularly among younger generations. But whereas most Cuban migrants once headed to the United States, they are now moving to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Humanitarian Needs and Haiti’s Collapse

The region has had to contend with migrants with humanitarian needs, mostly Haitians and Venezuelans, as well as smaller numbers of Cubans and Africans. Unlike South America, which strove to build immigration systems that could withstand and integrate displaced people, governments in the Caribbean have focused on economic growth and development. Policies targeted at humanitarian migrants, such as Trinidad and Tobago’s approach to Venezuelan arrivals, were modeled as emergency responses. One exception has been Belize’s 2021 regularization program, which primarily affected Central Americans.

Haiti’s spiraling security and economic crisis, which has prompted hundreds of thousands of people to leave especially for the neighboring Dominican Republic to varying degrees since 2010, is conspicuously absent from regional conversations. Low economic development and deep political instability in Haiti since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse have hardened Dominican leaders’ position towards Haitians. They have focused on stopping Haitians from coming, building a border wall, and conducting mass deportations, including 276,000 repatriations to Haiti in 2024. Dominican leaders have considered regularizing some Haitian workers, but immigration policies remain primarily restrictive.

Haiti’s socioeconomic turmoil has slowed the implementation of its own commitments towards CARICOM. And though the bloc-wide full free mobility is expected to eventually include Haiti, implementation is unlikely until the country’s political and security concerns are addressed. In fact, CARICOM’s repeated calls for solidarity with the Haitian people and regional negotiators’ role helping address Haiti’s political impasse are a recognition of the need for a collective and durable solution.

A Tipping Point

Latin America and the Caribbean are at a tipping point in their approach to migration. The last decade demonstrated that solidarity could be translated into large-scale regularization, providing millions of Venezuelans with temporary legal status and opportunities for inclusion. But it also revealed how fragile those gains were when not anchored in strong institutions or long-term development agendas. As South America’s experience shows, discontinuity, weak integration, and political shifts can erode trust and cause pressures for new migration. The lesson is clear: Integration matters for stability both at home and across the hemisphere.

This dynamic is not confined to the South. Across Central America and Mexico, governments have been pressed to manage return and reintegration of their nationals while also serving as destinations and transit countries. The Caribbean has doubled down on multiple regional migration frameworks but they are unevenly implemented and persistently exclude Haiti. Each subregion is grappling with overlapping challenges—often in silos, disconnected from one another and from national development strategies.

Policy discontinuity also defines the political moment. Recent and upcoming elections in Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil make migration policy vulnerable to abrupt shifts. Migration had previously not been politicized in most countries in the region, aside from the Dominican Republic, but it is now taking center stage in Chile and could well become an issue in other countries. In addition, new administrations across many Latin American countries have been tempted to reset their national agendas rather than build on what came before, reinforcing discontinuity.

Finally, an element of volatility has been introduced in the international funding arena, especially for integration programs. Financing was already waning before 2025, but the Trump administration’s closure of most U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs and reductions in State Department funding have further diminished resources for governments in the region. These aid cuts could prove to be counterproductive, as they were often the primary funding of programs to reduce the drivers of irregular migration as well as receive and reintegrate returnees.

Still, regional cooperation may be central to the future. The landmark 2022 Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection signed by 22 countries in the region provided a common framework for migration discussions across the hemisphere. The Trump administration has withdrawn from the process initiated by the predecessor Biden administration, and this element of regional cooperation has since foundered. Other regional forums—such as the South American Migration Conference and the Quito Process (for Venezuelan displacement)—continue to operate but with limited budgets and low political visibility. Even so, they remain critical for sustaining dialogue, avoiding duplication, and keeping alive the possibility of collective approaches in a region where migration pressures are shared.

Parts of the region have proven that solidarity can be possible despite political and institutional differences across Latin America and the Caribbean. Countries’ next moves will define not only the future of migration governance but also the region’s stability and competitiveness in the decades ahead.

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