Infrastructuring pathways: traversing the legal infrastructure of mobility in South America

Human mobility is as complex as the legal regimes that govern it, demanding an approach that extends beyond migration and refugee law to include temporary, pendular, and extralegal dynamics of movement. This paper adopts the lens of legal infrastructures to analyse how law and mobility co-constitute each other in South America’s diverse mobility pathways. Using doctrinal and empirical methods, it maps the plurality of legal sources around distinct pathways, while examining how opportunities, obstacles, and practices shape them. Fieldwork in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia (2023–2024), involving interviews and observations of border crossings and legal aid, highlights three key pathways: residence as permanence, tourism as entry, and cross-border pendularity. The analysis shows that movement and the interaction of multiple regimes continuously (re)configure a legal infrastructure that both enables and constrains mobility, capturing how law shapes mobility, and how mobility, in turn, reshapes law.