Beyond the Normative Impasse of Environmental Migration: From Regimes to Infrastructures in a Latin American Key

The article draws on the concept of legal infrastructures and infrastructuring processes in the context of the ongoing discussion on the (legal) framing of environmental migration. It lays out why the entanglement of empirical and normative indeterminacy in environmental migration forces open the door to a transdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective. It explores how framing environmental migration in terms of legal mobility infrastructures, or, rather, of the legal infrastructuring of (global) mobility can help transcend the legal impasse that currently still surrounds it. It draws on previous work on entangled mobility regimes in Latin America, most notably in the context of the Venezuelan refugee crisis as of 2015 and on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the border regime in Brazil. Some of the phenomena observed in these contexts provide valuable insights into the logic of the legal infrastructuring of mobility and into how the environment/displacement nexus might be infrastructured in a region that is one of the hotspots of the climate crisis.