The Development of Asylum Legislations in Latin America: Early Findings from the new Regional IMPALA, 1990–2018

This paper deals with methodological approaches to the study of asylum policies. In it, I identify IMPALA (the International Migration Law and Policy Analysis) as the most suitable methodology to study the development, and conduct over time cross-country analyses, of asylum policies. In addition to that, I argue that IMPALA allows researchers to identify trends, and outliers, thus opening further ways of research into the determinants of asylum policies, as well as in testing their implementation. However, I also find two main limitations to this methodology: its superficial reach and lack of aggregation methodologies. I present two solutions: I develop a ‘Regional IMPALA’ based on 66 indicators to fully capture relevant policy measures and introduce concrete examples of how to aggregate these indicators to test restrictiveness and convergence over time. I present the early findings of this research, applying this methodology to 10 Latin American countries, spanning the 1990-2018 period.