Chile’s far-right presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast has vowed to deport “all” undocumented migrants if he emerges victorious in the November election.
Kast, one of the favourites to succeed leftist leader Gabriel Boric as Chile’s next head of state, suggested Monday that illegal migration should be classified as a crime so that undocumented immigrants, including families with children, can be deported.
Some 330,000 foreign nationals, the vast majority being Venezuelans, live illegally as undocumented immigrants in Chile, according to official estimates.
Kast, an admirer of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, is hotly tipped to win the Presidency on his third attempt.
The law-and-order candidate, who was narrowly beaten by Boric in December 2021, declared that all illegal migrants, including children, would be detained pending their deportation.
“Illegal immigration will become a crime, and that crime will increase the penalty so that the person can be detained until they can be deported,” said the Republican Party Candidate in a press conference.
He also proposed that foreigners who commit crimes in Chile will be confined in a special prison so that once they serve their sentence, they can be deported.
Opinion polls show Kast neck-and-neck with communist former labour minister Jeannette Jara, representing the main centre-left coalition, ahead of the first round of the election on November 16.
Conservative ex-mayor Evelyn Matthei is running in third.
While some of the surveys put Jara marginally ahead, all show Kast beating Jara if, as predicted, the election goes to a second round on December 14.
The ultraconservative father of nine has vowed to go to “war” against organised crime and build maximum security prisons, modelled on El Salvador’s notorious Terrorist Confinement Centre, for dangerous offenders.
He has previously vowed to build a wall along Chile’s desert border with Bolivia to keep out undocumented migrants.
“Anyone who comes through the window will never be awarded with any benefit from our nation,” said Kast on Monday.
“When a family of immigrants come with their children, all of them will stay in a situation of illegality … Everyone will stay in temporary detention centres until their expulsion to their country of origin, or will be rerouted to the country through which they entered,” he told a press conference, echoing the hardline policies of US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Polls show rising insecurity, for which many Chileans blame foreign crime gangs, particularly Venezuelan, as voters’ top concern.
Chile’s murder rate, while one of the lowest in Latin America, has more than doubled in the past decade and cases of extortion and drug trafficking have also risen.
“Anyone who enters [Chile] through the window [illegally] will never be rewarded with any benefit in our nation,” the 59-year-old lawyer, the son of a suspected German Nazi who fled to Chile after World War II, said.
Unless they commit crimes, foreigners who enter Chile illegally and settle into the country are not currently deported and can begin the legalisation process.
Chile’s immigrant population has doubled in the last seven years, reaching 8.8 percent of the population of nearly 20 million, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE)..
– TIMES/AFP
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by RODRIGO ARANGUA, AFP
