https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanja_de_Alsina
First as a tragedy now as a farce I guess. Same mentality and upbringing, 150 years apart.
(the spanish version of the article is longer but it has some big piles of garbage about "the indians were ackchually chileans")
Fun fact: the current goverment is blaming the migrant situation on candidates that promote housing in their policies, saying that they are creating an incentive for people to come to Chile
Being a place where people do not want to live to solve immigration. That's using your noggin'.
Reminds me of the "dig a ditch of freedom" shit from GTA Vice City, where an unhinged nativist (from out of state) wants to secede by digging a big ditch in the north of Florida.
There are tons of Haitian and Venezuelan (illegal)immigrants/refugees in Chile (about a million arrived in the last 10 years which is about 5% of Chiles total population). Most of them live in completely precarious and horrendous conditions (no housing or shacks, no healthcare, uncertain legal status etc.) and are either unemployed or work the most terrible jobs on the planet(like gig economy stuff and so on).
Also the Northern border area is very inhospitable and for those few towns/cities(which are already pretty poor) on the migrant routes(most migrants want to go all the way to Santiago where most of the opportunities are) this influx of people is actually a massive problem. Recently in one of these northern cities (Iquique) there was a major far-right/fascist rally against migrants which ended in them threatening migrants and burning the few possessions of the migrants there . Truly horrific Scenes.
Of course all this crisis is because of the complete failure of the government & state (which failed to legalize immigration statuses, provide jobs, housing, healthcare etc.). But of course the Far-Right is the one that is able to profit the most from this crisis because of their anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric.
JA Kast be like. "We will build a great, great ditch on our northern Border and the flora and fauna will pay for it"
