Contemporary Public Understanding on Refugees in Brazil and Chile: Trends and Reasons for Approval or Rejection

Abstract

Globally, refugees’ management has become a matter of international concern due to its significant expansion and has led to a new Global Pact on cooperative, sustainable policies. The present study analyses the concepts of coproduction between resources, knowledge, and power, tacit civic epistemologies, the shaping of public understanding, and the labelling of hierarchies between displaced subjects. The article aims to describe the international and national legislation on refugees in Brazil and Chile and the trends towards the approval of asylum seekers’ requests. It also analyses statistical differences in the perceptions of the Brazilian and Chilean publics on the role of refugees and the stances publics take towards granting them human rights, using data from a global survey on refugees carried out by the UN Refuge Agency. The study is descriptive and hypothetical, of a qualitative nature, and its data sources are: specialized literature, international conventions, legal documents and controversies, as well as selected online news. The study concludes that Brazilian refugee law was globally considered among the most advanced ones, and refugee approval has always been much smaller in Chile than in Brazil. Public opinion in both countries is based on civic epistemologies that are ill-informed and discriminatory, often due to media coverage. They tend to believe that refugees’ bring positive socioeconomic impacts but often regard their inclusion into public services as negative. In both cases, refugees’ rights are dealt with as general principles, therefore, only some of the publics consider they should be put fully into practise.