Abstract
The article deals with the pendular movement between democracy and authoritarianism that historically permeates Brazilian migration policies. It analyzes the nineteenth-century immigrant projects - whose scope was the “laundering” of the national population - and the restrictive policies adopted in the first half of the twentieth century and which culminated in the 1980s in the issue of the Foreigner's Statute (Law No. 6.815/1980), marked by the construction of the immigrant's image as a “subject of risk” to sovereignty and national security, as well as by a clear separation between immigrants considered “useful” and “useless” according to the demands of the labor market. It assesses the extent to which these authoritarian characteristics are still present in contemporary times, after the issuance of the new Migration Law (Law No. 13.445/2017), which, even presenting a paradigmatic break oriented to the promotion of migrants' Human Rights, still finds an obstacle. particularly in view of its own Regulatory Decree (Decree No. 9.199/2017), marked by numerous setbacks, evidencing a resumption of the authoritarian perspective in the management of immigration to Brazil, which gains new impetus with the rupture of the country. with the United Nations “Global Compact on Safe, Ordered and Regular Migration”. The theoretical framework that guides the construction of the article is the Foucaultian and Agambenian biopolitics. The research method employed in the investigation is the phenomenological-hermeneutic.
Keywords:
Biopolitics; Migration policies; Authoritarianism; Democracy; Human Rights