This article looks into some milestones in the history of Chilean immigration laws since independence until the current normative DL 1.094, published in July of 1975. The analysis address how has been defined the idea of "migrant" in the normative to answer the question about the kind of recognition involved in those definitions. Standing in the description of two periods in the history of Chilean migratory legislation the study argues that the law imposed in 1975 by the military dictatorship implied a emphasizes a long term process of progressive consolidation of conditionality in the migration recognition rooted in the early XX century.