Former President of Chile Eduardo Frei says that more attention must be given to the immigration problem that he says is affecting Latin America, a situation he says has changed in the last few years. He said that Latin American countries needed to develop public policies on immigration to confront this “reality of the modern world.”
As reported by the Dominican Ministry of Foreign Relations, Frei told Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso that “20, 30, 40 years ago this was not an issue in Latin America, but today it is. I am aware of the problem that the DR has, for example, but in Argentina there are more than a million from Bolivia, we have around 500,000 Latin American immigrants, including 250,000 Peruvians, there are Dominicans, Colombians, Argentineans. In Chile we have around 600,000-700,000 immigrants from all Latin America. We do not have a state policy in those cases because historically it was not a problem. But the time has come for each country, together to design policies to undertake this immigration reality as a reality of the 21st century, a reality of the modern world we cannot escape.”
Frei said that institutions in each nation should find ways to resolve the problem. He said that solutions applied in one country would not necessarily work in another.
“There is a public policy and that has to work with the institutions that are capable of taking on that task as a public policy that is how to deal with this,” he stated.
www.elnuevodiario.com.do/app/article.aspx?id=368164