Being forever stuck in the asylum queue or progressing with temporary protection: is South America approaching the end of asylum?

The cross-border movement of over 5 million Venezuelans (R4V, 2022) only in the South American continent has surfaced significant legal, political, and social challenges to extant paths for protection. The emergence of new temporary mechanisms to address Venezuelan mobility has reconducted their claims from asylum to other temporary migratory measures (R4V, 2022) even when some of them may have international protection needs. While such shifts may appear familiar to policymakers and scholars in Europe, in South America, temporary mechanisms to address mixed movements are recent and are producing unique transformations that are both similar and different to what has been studied in the European context. The proposed topic is innovative since it analyses the progression from one system to another in South America integrating both the States and policy responses and the individual contestation. Recent scholar literary has not addressed yet the Venezuelan case study of mixed migration as a paradigm of this tension between the asylum and the migratory system and the subsequent shift from one to another. With this gap, this research proposal will formulate the following question: Does the contemporary legal and policy praxis in South America, resulting from Venezuelan cross-border mobility in the region, signal an end of asylum practice as the scholarly conception understands it? The implications of the transition from one system to another might be divided into two approaches. At the top-down level, it could be associated with the erosion of asylum as a legal institution created and enforced by States and its subsequent replacement with other domestic and temporary measures. It also demonstrates how the non-citizen is perceived as a "migrant" as the only category applicable to those who aspire to reside in a third country. On a bottom-up approach, the progression might indicate asylum is blurring as a legal protection form orientated to bring long-term residence schemes to individuals who experience persecution and other kinds of violence in their country of origin. Studying this new change of paradigm will contribute to two tiers. On the one hand, it enables understanding that other continents are replacing asylum policies towards pragmatic and temporary mechanisms, blurring asylum as a legal protection category. On the other hand, it will help to analyse the impact on the non-citizen, who find in the temporary mechanisms a small but significant space to resist the legal ambiguity and build a future with the migratory possibilities offered by States.