Contemporary immigration in Chile. From ethnic-national differentiation to class inequality

In the last decade, international migration in Chile has acquired renewed interest. However, in many cases, immigration and migrants are analyzed as a relatively homogenous and abstract whole, without considering the structures of social differentiation that make it up. In this text, we move from the demographic and formal analyzes that illustrate the volumes and trends of immigration as a component of the Chilean population, to an analysis of how the differentiation structures of immigration correspond to the structures of social differentiation and classes that prevails in Chilean society. As a social and historical process, immigration is also traversed by the social structures of differentiation and inequalities that constitute Chilean society, reproducing in their own way those same structures of social differentiation. Our interest in this article is to document with statistical and demographic data these structures of social differentiation between the different components of contemporary immigration in Chile. For this, we rely on the social and demographic statistics recorded by the population censuses and the CASEN surveys, the main sources of sociodemographic information at the national level in Chile.