Abstract
This research is aimed to study the labor migration effects over the social and territorial regionness, after the political crisis and the war conflicts, a period between the years 1990 to 2005. Regionalism is understood as a process of the social-economic, political, and organizational cohesion of region building. The regionness
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provides an understanding about the states or phases of the regionalization within the trans-border region comprised by the geographic isthmus of Central America. This study unfolds in four dimensions: firstly, the relation between intra-regional migrations and the regional integration are studied. Secondly, it explores the formation of a regional labor supply-system produced by the articulation between intra-regional labor migration and other types of mobility -internal and extra-regional. A third dimension addresses to the territorial interdependency woven by the effects of migration. Finally, the last dimension looks at the territorial and social cohesiveness that rises as a new arena for a regional citizenship. As a result of the migratory interactions, three spatial realities are studied: (a) the rise of migrant workforce enclaves. (b) trans-border spaces and (c) the urban space, all three parts of a territorial division and fragmentation in both economic and labor enclaves. The variety of types of migration have been linked together through a flexible labor-supply system created for diversified labor markets -sectorally and territorially-, segmented by the economic competition, the regularization mechanisms and the cultural stigmas over immigrant labor jobs. These linkages are notorious according to a number of territorial interactions at different scales which produce spatial fragmentation, competition between localities and deterioration of the territorial cohesion. Despite of the centrality of migration, its existence poses a breaking point in the legal order and in other forms of social life regulation. It reveals new contradictions and conflicts in the sphere of citizenship as well. In addition to the limitations on the virtues of justice, equality and liberty, this rupture is expressed by the implementation of immigration policies, based on national security criteria, and setting distances from the international norms of protection for migrant people. This is the juridical expression of the fracture of the regionness: between democracy, (understood as a government mechanism) and the implemented system of rights.
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