Strolling through the streets of Buenos Aires, it’s not difficult to see the influence that immigration has had in the formation of the city and the Argentine nation. Mismatched architectural styles reflect a diverse array of cultural influences, and the name of any passer-by is just as likely to sound German or Italian as it is to sound Spanish.

In Argentina, 4th September is Immigrants’ Day, a day to commemorate the diverse waves of immigration that have helped formed the demographics of the country’s population and influenced its rich culture.

Map of European immigration to Argentina in the late 19th century (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Perceptions and Realities: The History of Argentine Immigration

Migration has played a central role in the history of Argentina since the arrival of the Spaniards, who sought to populate the vast expanse of their colonial territory.

After the country gained independence in 1810, its new leaders continued to see migration as a useful tool for the nation’s development. The dominant view towards migration in the country’s early years could be encapsulated by the words of Argentine politician Juan B. Alberdi’s, “to govern is to populate”.

Statistically, immigrants grew as a proportion of Argentina’s total population from the second half of the nineteenth century through World War I. At the peak of immigration in 1914, immigrants represented nearly a third of the total population and nearly half of the population of the city of Buenos Aires.

Since World War I, however, the proportion of immigrants as a proportion of the total population has gradually lowered. In the 2010 census, 4.5% of Argentina’s total population was born in another country.

In Argentina there is an oft-quoted saying, “the Argentines descended from the boats”, which suggests that all Argentines are descendants of European migrants.

The vast waves of European immigration at the start of the century were unquestionably influential in the formation of modern Argentina. European migrants made up the vast majority of migrants to the country during the greatest waves of immigration at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A closer look at the historical statistics of migration to Argentina, however, also reveals that this phrase leaves out other large populations that have immigrated to the country throughout its history.

Hidden behind the massive waves of European migrants arriving at the turn of the twentieth century was a comparable small but steady stream of migrants originating from neighbouring countries. Regional migrants have hovered consistently around 2% of the total population throughout most of Argentina’s history.

Shifts in the Composition of the Foreign-Born Population

And so, while the population of migrants from neighbouring countries has not altered significantly over time as a proportion of the total population, it has come to represent a much greater proportion of the foreign-born population.

At the peak of migration in 1914, migrants from neighbouring countries made up only 8.6% of the foreign-born population. In the years since, that proportion has steadily risen, such that migrants from neighbouring countries made up 68.9% of the foreign-born population in the 2010 census.

This 68.9% represented an 8.7% increase since the last census in 2001. In the same period, migrants of Peruvian origin grew from 5.8% to 8.7% of the foreign-born population, and migrants from other nations in the Americas from 1.9% to 3.8%.

Peruvian Independence Day Celebration in Buenos Aires (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Simultaneously, the percentage of the foreign-born population of European origin decreased from 28.2% to 16.6%. The proportion of Asian origin also decreased, although less dramatically, from 1.9% to 1.7%.

Finally, while the percentage of the foreign-born population originating from Africa and Oceania remained smaller than 1%, both groups experienced growth; the population of African origin increased by 50%, and that from Oceania nearly doubled.

Argentine Migration Policy

Today, Argentina’s migration policy is codified in Migration Law 25.871, signed into law in 2004 by then-president Nestór Kirchner.

The law has been widely recognised in the international community for its open nature, and particularly for its Article 4, which states: “The right to migrate is essential and inalienable to each individual”.

Pablo Ceriani Cernadas, director of the Human Rights Centre at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús, observes that under this new migration policy, an “irregular” migration status is seen “as a consequence of structural factors and inequalities on the global level” and that therefore the law considers an appropriate response to be “not a restrictive policy but rather to recognise migration as a right, facilitate regularisation, facilitate access to employment and equal rights”.

The Law 25.871 is particularly notable for the law that it replaced, the notorious Law 22.439. Colloquially known today as the ‘Videla Law’ because it was signed into law under in 1981 by then de facto president General Jorge Videla, the law was engineered under the paradigm of national security.

This law constituted a highly restrictive policy that effectively created large groups of undocumented migrants for the first time in Argentina’s history. Mostly affecting migrants from neighbouring countries, the law placed many immigrants in a state of intense vulnerability.

As the law was passed under the military junta, it did not pass through the normal legislative processes. Nevertheless, after the return to democracy in 1983, the Law 22.439 remained in effect.

Despite several large-scale amnesties to regulate the status of large populations of irregular migrants, the migration policies of the 1981 law remained largely in place. Indeed, during the 1989-99 Menem administration the Law 22.439 was applied perhaps even more harshly than it had been during the dictatorship.

Ceriani notes that in the 1990s, with “the appearance and the progressive growth of the social, economic, and political crisis, the increase in unemployment, the increase in poverty, the increase in insecurity, and the overall sensation of insecurity” came the “use of migration as a scapegoat” for a wide variety of social woes.

The passage of the Law 25.871 in 2004, therefore, marked a stark shift.

Louis Bogado Poisson, Academic Secretary at the newly inaugurated Institute of International Migration and Asylum policy, suggests, however, that the law was also in many ways a return to more open migration policies of the past: “Argentina comes from a long tradition of receiving immigrants; its own dynamic, this dynamic of immigrant reception, is what brought it to adopt this policy.”

Under the previous law, detention and deportation figured prominently as responses to undocumented migration. Under the new law, the focus shifted to regularisation, with the use of detention and expulsion extremely restricted.

Immigration office in Buenos Aires (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Under the previous law, there were few legal avenues for immigration, access to social services was restricted, and neither the protection of migrants’ rights nor the prevention of discrimination was mentioned.

The new law opened more legal avenues for migration, and included two regularisation programmes. One of these programs, known as ‘Patria Grande’, was aimed specifically at regional migrants. In showing a preference for regional migration, the law marks a shift even from earlier open Argentine migration policies.

What’s more, as Bogado-Poisson observes, the law “recognises wide rights; it goes further than any other law”.

Constitutional rights and human rights are extended to all immigrants in the country. Regardless of their legal status, migrants have the right to education, health and social assistance.

Still, Ceriani observes that, there is “not a general acceptance of equality and integration and Argentina as the great receiver of migrants…this work is still a pending challenge…xenophobia is still very present in Argentine society”.

In presenting Decree 616/2010, the ‘reglamentación’ of the Law 25.871 that fleshes out how the law will be implemented, President Christina Fernández de Kirchner stated: “We are all children or grandchildren of an immigrant. We have to echo our own history and the identity of our country. We have to integrate immigrant populations instead of discriminate against them. We must oppose the cultural subordination that dictates laws against immigrants.”

“It’s been a long week,” explains Maxine Swann, sitting down with a glass of white wine. And coming from a woman who’s launching her third book in only a few days, that’s not hard to believe.

As a writing coach, contributor of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post, and an award-winning author of the novels ‘Serious Girls’ and ‘Flower Children’, her writing has received literary recognition in the form of a Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and was also selected to appear in the 1998 and 2006 collections of ‘Best American Short Stories’.

Originally from the rural state of Pennsylvania, Maxine lived in New York, Paris and Pakistan before arriving in Buenos Aires, but something about migration to faraway places obviously agrees with her. For this edition of BA Lives, The Indy caught up with her to talk about her not-so-recent relocation and the theme of migration in her new book ‘The Foreigners’.

You’ve lived in Buenos Aires for almost ten years now, how did you come to settle here?

Well, I arrived in Buenos Aires in 2001 with the intention of staying for a few months, and, now that I say this, I realise there’s a pattern here. I arrived in Paris in 1991 to study for a semester and stayed for seven years. I arrived in Pakistan in 1998 with the idea of staying for a month and stayed for over a year. But I’ve never stayed anywhere as long as I’ve stayed in Buenos Aires. I feel like it suits me. I’m happy here – relaxed and playful, and inventive in a new way. Who knows why it happens, but I do feel like certain tendencies I have towards solitude, or being overly reserved, are corrected here.

Can you tell me a little about your latest book ‘The Foreigners’?

Yes, of course. I started writing ‘The Foreigners’ without knowing what the book would be about. I just knew I wanted to capture Buenos Aires, so I began with descriptions of the streets of Chacarita, that kind of thing. I wanted to capture certain feelings the place had given me- of freedom, happiness, loneliness. Of course, I’m also a foreigner here, so my Buenos Aires is a foreigner’s Buenos Aires; which is the other thing I wanted to write about – what it means and how it feels to be a foreigner. So I chose my characters based on that. They each have a different experience of “foreignness”, that I’ve either experienced myself or observed in others.

What interests you about the theme?

I think the interaction between a living creature and its environment is really fascinating – the intensity of that relationship. There’s a metaphor running throughout the book comparing foreigners to invasive plant species. Some plant species, when placed in a foreign environment, simply wither straight away. There’s too much moisture in the air, or too little, or not enough minerals in the soil, or too much iron, who knows. I’ve spent a lot of time living abroad and, in my experience, the same thing happens with foreigners. Some are immediately diminished by their new surroundings, while others flourish in entirely unexpected ways – sometimes beautifully and sometimes frighteningly – growing rampantly, choking other species, blocking their light, that kind of thing. I think sometimes foreigners feel free to act with a kind of impunity, where the codes are all unfamiliar and their own identities in the new place are suddenly hazy. There’s a chain of events in my book that also has to do with that.

Your previous books ‘Serious Girls’ and ‘Flower Children’ have both been based on your own upbringing and adolescence. Did writing about adult characters in this book feel like a natural progression?

Yes, I think so. I did suddenly find myself fascinated by adulthood. That said, this book is much less autobiographical than my other books. Part of the evolution also had to do with that, feeling freer to invent, and create rather than reflect the world, even if the reflection was always substantially deformed. I often think that when we write fiction we write our dream version of the world, everything switched around, several people conflated into one – your uncle becomes the dog on the corner – that kind of thing. Here I think I stepped even further away, which is maybe why writing this book was so enjoyable.

As a foreigner yourself, there’s perhaps an assumption this book is at least tangentially autobiographical. To what extent are the characters in the book based on yourself or your own experiences as a foreigner in Buenos Aires?

There are definitely some parallels in the book with my own experiences – the loneliness that the Austrian woman feels, and the moments of delirious freedom that the American woman does.

All three of your novels, ‘Serious Girls’ in 2003, ‘Flower Children’ in 2005 and now ‘The Foreigners’ in 2011, have been completed since moving to Argentina. How do you find the creative climate in Buenos Aires compared to other places you’ve lived?

I think there’s more space here to be experimental than in the United States. There, literature seems to be increasingly at the mercy of the marketplace – meaning everyone’s main concern is how many books you sell. Not only editors, but writers too – because the amount of books you sell determines the value of your next book contract. So, needless to say, it’s not an environment that encourages audacity. Here, probably because there’s nearly no money involved, the criteria are different. I feel for writers here from a financial perspective, but on the other hand, I find it very refreshing.

You also run two writing workshops each year. Tell me a little about the workshops and what motivates you to teach?

I’ve been directing writing workshops for a while, in different settings. I think teaching is a perfect antidote to writing. I enjoy helping people figure out how to express what they’re trying to express. Having spent so much time struggling with that myself, I also think it makes sense to pass along whatever knowledge I’ve come up with. Also, writing is so solitary. I like trying to find ways to make it more social. I still hope to find a way to write a collaborative novel – it’s one of my cherished future projects!

And finally, with three books already under your belt, what’s next?

At the moment I’m writing a new novel that takes place in Pakistan. It’s a book that’s been germinating in my mind for years so it’s great to finally have it on the table.

Copies of Maxine Swann’s ‘The Foreigners’ will be on sale at the public launch party where Maxine will be joined by special guests discussing the book. Readers of The Argentina Independent are invited to attend at 7.30pm, Costa Rica 5824, Palermo Hollywood, Buenos Aires.

Photo by Kevin Loria

The beaches of Bahía in Brazil are usually crowded with sunbathers from around the globe. This time last year, however, thousands of unexpected visitors started arriving. Patagonian penguins washed up on the sandy shores, most of them were young, and already dead or fighting for survival more than 4,000 km from their normal habitat

Patagonia is home to many different species of penguin. The colonies for each species can contain more than a million penguins during high season and normally, they exist peacefully between the glaciers and ice-cold waters of Patagonia. In April and May of every year, as temperatures begin to drop, the millions of penguins that live in Patagonia start to prepare for the feeding season. They spend months at a time foraging for food up the coastline of South America, but last year, due to increasing ocean temperatures and a shift in currents, something happened during their annual food migration and thousands of penguins became lost at sea.

In December, 2,500 juvenile Magellan penguins began appearing on the shores of tropical Bahía. About half the penguins that were found on Brazilian beaches were dead, and the others were starving and very weak. Valeria Ruoppolo, an emergency veterinarian with the International Federation for Animal Welfare in São Paulo, coordinated the rescue of many of the penguins.

“Of the live ones, less than 50% survived,” she explains. “We always have a few strandings here and there. In 1994 and 2000 we had big strandings. But not like this. More than 2,000 penguins is unheard of.”

Experts and volunteers spent months caring for the 372 surviving penguins. They were then tagged and flown to Pelotas in Brazil before being released into the South Atlantic Ocean with a few adult penguins in the hope that they would be able to lead the young ones back to their home in Patagonia.

So why did this happen? How did these penguins, who as a colony have been making this journey annually since before Darwin, get it so tragically wrong?

Photo by Kevin Loria

Something fishy going on

“The penguin population is intimately linked to their supplies of food, so this suggests something is happening to the population of fish they eat,” says biologist Marcelo Bertellotti from the National Patagonian Centre in Puerto Madryn, Argentina.

Experts and researchers speculate that climate change is mainly to blame for the changes in fish numbers. Ruoppolo explains in 2008 “the surface of the Atlantic Ocean was one degree Celsius warmer. The penguins follow the fish, especially their favourite, anchovies. Probably what happened this year is the anchovies went deeper into the ocean for the cold water. The penguins couldn’t reach their food and became stranded because they were starving.”

Worldwide, global warming has caused ocean temperatures to rise slowly for the last 20 years, normally a fraction of a degree annually. However in Patagonia, between 2005 and 2008, ocean temperatures rose much more rapidly, indicating that the process is speeding up, putting more pressure on the marine environment.

Furthermore, World Wildlife Federation (WWF) scientist Sybille Klenzendorf predicted that penguins would suffer from the ocean changes exacerbating the already diminishing fish numbers, due to aggressive commercial fishing in the region. During nesting season, penguins had to swim comparatively further distances each day to feed and to find suitable food for their young.

“We find lots of penguins here with catfish bones in them, which they normally don’t eat,” Muniz said. “That suggests they’re not finding their normal fish.” Saltwater catfish are lower in fat than the cold-water fish penguins usually eat, so provide them with less thermal protection meaning they could not survive as long in the cold waters.

This year was especially bad for fish levels, as an oil spill off the coast of Uruguay in May killed a large proportion of the fish on which migrating penguins rely for food. A week after the accident, dozens of penguins and other marine mammals such as sea lions were also found dead on the shores of the Uruguayan capital Montevideo.

Adding to the penguin’s predicament are the melting icecaps in the Antarctic. Global climate change has caused massive volumes of fresh water to be introduced into the salty waters of the South Atlantic. This also changes ocean currents, which according to the WWF, confused the migrating penguins and sent them too far north last year

Human activities, such as oil drilling, aggravate the problem and cause irreversible changes in the pH balance of the water. This drives fish away, into more suitable waters and makes hunting more challenging for the penguins accustomed to salt water.

What does the future hold?

Klenzendorf recently warned: “If the earth’s surface temperatures rise two more degrees – which is expected within 50 years – other species, namely the Emperor and Adelie penguins, and various Antarctic wildlife will become severely endangered.”

This is yet more bad news for the penguins of Patagonia, whose colonies have already been dramatically reduced because of improper use of fishing nets off the southern shores of Argentina.

Photo by Kevin Loria

Punta Tomba is the largest Magellan penguin colony in the world, yet no other colony is as easily accessible to the public. High volumes of tourism both help and hinder the conservation efforts. Whilst money generated from visitors helps fund and run environmental projects in the area, the average 105,000 annual visitors to the colony disturb the birds and alter their natural behaviour, according to Dee Boersma, a penguin expert based at the reserve’s research centre in Punta Tomba.

As climate change brings more rainfall to the region, the future of the colony is placed even further in harm’s way. Boersma explains: “As coastal Patagonia is normally very dry, the increasing rains mean that wet penguin chicks die of exposure.”

The decreasing colonies do not only affect the resident penguins. Boersma explains how “penguins are sentinels of the marine environment. By observing and studying them, researchers can learn about the rate and nature of changes occurring in the southern oceans.”

So the future looks somewhat bleak for everyone’s favourite flightless bird. The regional governments in Patagonia commented after the events of last December that the economy is just as fragile as the environment and dissuading tourism would be catastrophic for the region’s human residents. It has, however, pledged to impose stricter rules and more penguin-only zones to protect the bird’s habitats.

But unless the world as a whole begins to comprehend the reality of global warming, we will have to heed Sybille Klenzendorf’s warning: “In the future, it’s probably not going to be unusual for these things to happen.”