**1. Introduction**

Human mobility among territories, conceptualized as migration, has occurred since the beginning of the first human settlements. As a process, it is not a new phenomenon or a contemporary product. With the exception of Africa and historically depopulated territories, there are no "native peoples", since cultures are usually overcome by other cultures; this is why a nativist policy that imposes restrictions on the rights of those not born in a defined territory is not supported [1]. This process has somehow left its mark on the mentalities, affectivity, and practices of human societies, whether they give refuge to foreigners or strive to protect themselves from the others, the different, the travelers. This is a temporary set of attitudes that is more or less ambiguous, but subject to the situation and political interests of a particular group. There is practically no religion, set of historical norms or formal laws, folklore or family history that does not include a position and a discourse regarding migrating, migrants, and the phenomenon of migration as a whole. However, the increase in populations as a result of modernity, increased access to means of transportation, and the development of electronic communications and knowledge about promising places to settle, as well as the brutal increase in economic, political, social, and, increasingly, environmental pressures that force relocation have made the phenomenon of migration, under conditions that are contrary to human well-being and are increasingly frequent and complex, typical of this moment and of the last decades of the twentieth century.

Chepo et al. [2], in their analysis of international migration processes, report unprecedented figures as part of a complex global phenomenon. They indicated that in 2017, there were 258 million international migrants (3.3% of the world population) [3]. In recent years, there has been an increase of 15% in migratory flows to countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); among these, Chile stands out, with an increase of 33% in new entries registered between 2015 and 2016 [4]. Currently, it is estimated that there are a total of 1,251,225 international migrants in the country (7.1% of the total population) [3]. The predominant migratory flow is south-south, distributed

**Citation:** Segovia, J.S.; Castillo Ravanal, E. Complexities of Socio-Labor Integration in Chile: Migrating Colombian Women's Experiences. *Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health* **2021**, *18*, 11643. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111643

Academic Editor: Paul B. Tchounwou

Received: 4 August 2021 Accepted: 26 October 2021 Published: 5 November 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

throughout countries such as Venezuela (23%), Peru (17.9%), Haiti (14.3%), and Colombia (11.7%) [5]. A total of 5.6% of the total migrant population in Chile (7000 people) corresponds to refugees and asylum seekers. In this study, all of the interviewees were economic migrants, considering that those who requested refuge had to travel to Santiago (the country's capital) to undergo a complex process of recognition by the migration authorities, [6].

Among the phenomena derived from human mobility is the collision between groups that are established in a territory and those who are newly arrived, which results in harmful behaviors toward people who move. The question is, what motivates the unequal treatment, abuse, and exclusion that some social groups show toward others? What elements underlie the feeling of superiority that some groups (the inhabitants of a certain place) show over others (newcomers)?

Regarding the legal difficulties of migration processes, we know that the Migration Law in Chile, contained in Decree Law 1094 of 1975, which was in force until April 2021, originated during the period of military dictatorship. This, when considered within a logic of national security, gave excessive discretion to authorities, especially at the border, to control the entry and exit of people, a situation that is susceptible to being permeated by officials' prejudices and stereotypes [7,8]. The content of this law established five types of temporary residence permits: student, subject to contract, temporary, resident with political asylum, or refugee. Refugee applications have been reviewed and are currently regulated by Law 21325 of 2021 [1].

One of the particularities of postmodern displacement is that it brings with it a strong presence of Afro-Latin women from different latitudes. María Emilia Tijoux (see Appendix A) [9] points out that the presence of migrant women in the country has generated an unsatisfied demand for domestic work. Thus, the need for child and elderly care among middle- and upper-class Chilean families creates a labor niche that has been covered by these Afro-Latin women. Within this nucleus, however, irregularities and human rights abuses are generated [9]. Since there are no strategies for domestic co-responsibility in terms of gender and no public policies regarding this matter exist when domestic workers ("nannies") are hired, these gaps favor the prejudicial view that such work is for women with a lower socioeconomic status and a low educational level, even though in recent times, migrant women do not necessarily correspond to this stereotype, [1,10,11]. In line with the analysis of Tijoux [9], Millie Thayer points out that it usually happens that the south-south migrant population arrives in the country of destination to occupy a specific segment of the labor market, and Chile is not outside of this reality. The country's citizens reject certain jobs for reasons related to salary or status, and these are typically precarious jobs that migrants usually fill. This population tends to occupy a subordinate position in the occupational structure, lower than that of the country's citizens [12]. The preceding shows that many migrant workers do not have the option to access jobs with better working conditions, evidencing an intersection between migration and categories, such as gender, that deepen labor stratification [13].

The labor, economic, and political gaps that women already experience become more complex when they are intersected with the situation of migrants. In Chile, migration in recent years has increased from 45,000 people at the beginning of the 1990s [14], a period in which migratory flows to Chile intensified [15], to 1,492,522 as of 31 December 2019 [16]. Along with a transformation in volume, the feminization of migration has been observed worldwide [10,17,18] and in Latin America [19], and is accompanied by an increase in south-south migration, in which Chile appears to be one of the most frequent and desired destinations for migrants [20–22].

Regarding female participation in the labor market, as of 2017, approximately 43.4% of women nationwide were employed [23]. However, this rate is still much lower than the male employment rate of 60%, which has remained stable over time [24,25].

From a psycho-sociocultural perspective, we have observed that women are displaced not only by the political and economic problems they face daily in their countries of origin,

but also by the greater demand of migrant women to insert themselves into certain types of work in the destination society [10]. For example, housework and cleaning, waitresses, caregivers of the elderly or children, among others, are very difficult to achieve for migrants who in some cases did not have paid jobs, and in others who were not paid enough to be self-employed. To understand how these works are inserted in the host society, gender is a category of analysis that makes visible power relations linked to the feminization of migration; it is a fundamental instrument for distinguishing the factors and processes that structure opportunities and rights—whether conventional or legal—for men and women in different societies, [24–26] Gender is linked to the scope of recognition, power, and status in any society. Gender operates in the structural organization of each culture by setting men and women in socially differentiated spaces (public or private), placing them in a hierarchical category (higher or lower) in the economic structure, and simultaneously imposing on them a social status (of greater or lesser prestige).From the perspective of the labor redistribution of migrant women, gender can be understood as one of the organizing principles in which they will be located in the economic structure of the receiving society (women, Afro-migrants, without a university education). From these classifications, the gaze of recognition is built, and with gender belonging, cultural patterns of interpretation are encoded in social status, which, on the one hand, makes it easier for them to earn more money, but remains precarious. [27,28].

The latest studies [28,29] note that Latin American women who move have 10 or more years of education, including secondary, technical, and higher education. This should allow them to expand their life plans and diversify their possibilities to achieve economic autonomy.

In the female experiences that will be analyzed in this article, a wide range of motivations and expectations can be observed, ranging from those that are focused on the family, to those that are defined by the women's individual projects. In this research, we seek to answer the following questions: what does the experience of labor insertion in Chile mean for Afro-Colombian women integrated into the Antofagasta context? What emotional processes emerge in the face of different work interactions with Chilean employers?
