ABSTRACT
During the 1990s the Argentine government and mass media announced on different occasions the arrival in Argentina of a new wave of immigrants, comparable to the transatlantic migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This time around, however, the immigrants were from the border countries of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru. The Argentine government took this to mean that Argentina had entered the first world: Germany had Turkish immigrants, the United States had Mexicans, and Argentina had Bolivians. But at the same time, according to government officials, the growing unemployment and lack of security announced at that time were also a result of immigration: the exorbitant number of border immigrants were taking jobs from Argentines and were also responsible for the high crime rate.
