Immigration to Chile
[2] However, this immigration was never in a large scale, contrasting with mass migrations that characterized Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, and therefore, anthropologically, its impact with lesser consequence.
[8] One of the main factors that has driven this migration has been the country's relatively stable political history, compared with the rest of Latin America and the significant growth of the Chilean economy in recent decades.
In 1903, a fleet of 88 Canarian families—400 persons—arrived in Budi Lake, Chile, that currently have more than 1,000 descendants, as a response to the government's call to populate this region and signed contracts for the benefit of a private company.
[37] Today, the Spanish colony continues to be the most significant in the country, having its own football (soccer) club, Unión Española and more than 80 institutions of varying purpose throughout Chile (charitable, sports, philanthropic, social, etc.).
These Basque immigrants prospered and married the daughters of the old commissioned officers who came originally from the south of Spain, making them landlords of economic, social, and political power, which has given them a certain preeminence.
The Araucanía Region also has an important number of people of French ancestry, as the area hosted settlers arrived by the second half of the 19th century as farmers and shopkeepers.
By 1854 there were 1654 Frenchmen in Chile, by 1895 it rose to 8266; about 80% of them arrived from Southwestern France, especially from Basses-Pyrénées (Basque country and Béarn), Gironde, Charente-Inférieure and Charente and regions situated between Gers and Dordogne.
[44] The German immigrants succeeded in creating vigorous villages and communities in virtually uninhabited regions, completely changing the landscape of the southern zones.
Paul Schäfer even founded Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony), a German enclave in Region VII, where massive human rights violations were carried out.
Among many distinguished descendants of the Germans in Chile are counted the commander Fernando Matthei Aubel, the architect Mathias Klotz, tennis players Gabriel Silberstein and Hans Gildemeister, the athletes Sebastián Keitel and Marlene Ahrens Ostertag and her daughter, TV host and journalist Karin Ebensperger, the musicians Patricio Manns and Emilio Körner, the economist Ernesto Schiefelbein, the politicians Miguel Kast and Evelyn Matthei, the entrepreneurs Jürgen Paulmann and Carlos Heller, the painters Uwe Grumann and Rossy Ölckers, television presenters Karen Doggenweiler, Allison Göhler, Margot Kahl, and Jenny Pérez-Schmidt, writers César Müller and Mexican-born Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, and the actors Gloria Münchmeyer and her daughter Catalina Guerra, Antonia Zegers, Aline Kuppenheim, and Bastian Bodenhofer.
It is now difficult to tabulate the full number of German descendants in Chile because of the large amount of time that has passed and because they have mixed with the Chilean population for more than 150 years.
[4][45] The English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish population rose to more than 32,000 during the port of Valparaíso's boom period at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century during the saltpeter bonanza.
Arturo Givovich is considered to be the first Croatian in Chile, having arrived in the 17th century on an English pirate ship belonging to Sir Francis Drake.
These immigrants founded the 'Body of Fire' (called Cristóforo Colombo) of the city and its Scuola Italiana, whose building has been declared by the Government of Chile "Monumento Histórico Nacional".
Although being just a fraction of the size of the migration to Argentina, Italian immigration to Chile has been present since the arrival of the first Spaniards into the country, like captain Giovanni Battista Pastene who helped Pedro de Valdivia's expedition.
Thence, with akin Latin culture, Italians have helped forge the nation, with architects (Gioacchino Toesca), painters (Camilo Mori), businessmen (Anacleto Angelini), Economists (Vittorio Corbo) and statesmen (Arturo Alessandri) among others.
The majority of Greek immigrants arrived in Chile at the beginning of century, some as part of their spirit of adventure and escape from the rigors of the World War and the catastrophe of Smyrna in Asia Minor, although many Greeks had already settled in Antofagasta, a city in northern Chile, including crews of the ships commanded by Arturo Prat for the Pacific War (1879–1883) in naval battle of Iquique (boatswain Constantine Micalvi).
Around 1884, the Chilean Government invited citizens from various European countries to settle in supposedly "pacified" southern territories in Araucania, where the first Swiss, French and German settlers continued to be harassed by the hosts commanded by the mapuche leader Colipi until 1889.
The procedure was as follows: the settlers were met by government authorities at Talca, held in quarantine, and then taken to Angol, where each family received farming tools and a cart with oxen to travel to the "promised land."
Only 28 years after the commencement of German colonization in southern Chile, the Federal Council in 1881 authorized specialized agencies to operate in Switzerland to recruit migrants.
The Federal Council, after years of examining the advantages and disadvantages to admitting migrants, posed as a premise the assumption that the Chilean authorities insisted on peace in Araucanía, which had not yet been fully accomplished.
Between 1915 and 1950, after the last recorded mass exodus of Swiss to Chile 30,000 residents were found to be installed in the central area of the country, primarily in Santiago and Valparaiso.
Under the so-called "Inspector General of Colonization and Chilean Immigration" a dozen Dutch families settled between 1895 and 1897 in Chiloé, particularly in Mechaico, Huillinco and Chacao.
[64] In the early 20th century, a large group of Dutch people, known as Boers, arrived in Chile from South Africa and worked mainly in construction of the railway.
The first Russians came to Chile in the early 19th century as part of naval expeditions circumnavigating the globe, among them captains Otto Kotsebu, Fyodor Litke, and Vasili Golovnin.
Although the majority come from Argentina and Peru due to those countries' proximity, a good number of Bolivians, Ecuadorians, Colombians, Brazilians, Venezuelans, Mexicans, Canadians, Central Americans (mostly Nicaraguans and Salvadorans), Uruguayans, Caribbean islanders (recently the small wave of Haitians) and Paraguayans.
At the end of the 20th century, Chile's economic prosperity began to produce a rapid growth in Peruvian immigration to the central zone of the country.
These events caused the public to begin discussing the situation of the Peruvian colony in Chile, with many people claiming that the immigrants were "stealing" Chilean jobs.
It is located in the vicinity of the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, which has motivated some groups to question the Chilean authorities for permitting the use of the historic district and symbol of the city by the immigrants.
According to the 2002 report of the International Organization for Migration, more than 10,000 people from the United States have immigrated to Chile, most of whom initially arrived to work for multinational corporations and possess professional degrees and are well situated economically.
