💔🇻🇪 🚶➡️ 🇨🇴 ❤️ Venezuela's collapse created the Americas' worst migrant crisis, and Colombia absorbed nearly half of 7 million refugees… here's the story ↓
A quarter-century ago, the idea of millions of people moving to Colombia would have certainly raised some eyebrows.
This was a Colombia recovering from the narco-violence of the early 1990s and still facing both government corruption and FARC-related guerrilla violence.
A Colombia which had seen millions of its own citizens moving overseas, especially to the United States, Spain, and Venezuela.
In a tragic twist of irony, the last of these countries changed everything for Colombia, beginning a decade ago.
With Venezuela’s descent into economic devastation and government repression under the regime of autocrat Nicolás Maduro, the country has entered the worst migrant crisis in the Americas.
Roughly 7M of the Bolivarian Republic’s citizens have fled overseas in search of work, stability, and freedom—a mass exodus largely unparalleled in contemporary peacetime.
Unsurprisingly, nearly half of these have gone to neighboring Colombia, leading to the country becoming the top destination for migrants in Latin America.
So what happens when the exodus suddenly reverses course?
Like most refugees, a majority of Venezuelans would like to return home once they are able to. Yet their current predicament has forced countries around the region to adapt.
For Colombia, a country of just 50M people, the millions of new arrivals have meant needing to be proactive.
The Colombian government has set up a program to grant legal residency and formalization for Venezuelan migrants, hoping to avoid the sort of administrative and regulatory problems faced by undocumented immigrants.
While hosting such a dramatically large immigrant population in a developing country comes with serious challenges, many in Colombia do remark on the somewhat poetic irony of the situation.
[story continues… 💌]
Source: International Migrant Stock | Population Division
Tools: Figma, Rawgraphs
by latinometrics
6 Comments
Interesting. Colombia is basically the Poland to Venezuela’s Ukraine. But in this context Venezuela plays the part of both Russia and Ukraine by creating internal strife so bad that everyone leaves.
I guess this is agitprop intended to endorse Trump’s terrorist attacks in the Carribean in the last couple of weeks and intention to launch more unprovoked military attacks in the next few weeks.
In relative terms, [5.8% of the population of Colombia was born abroad](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/migrant-stock-share?mapSelect=~COL&globe=1&globeRotation=3.92%2C-73.07&globeZoom=2.5).
I’m not sure about this, but a lot of the people (Millions) that tried to migrate from Central and south America to the US but can’t make it, stay in Mexico. the Mexican Government always talks about millions of people getting stuck in Mexico, but I can’t find the specific numbers.
Pretty bad that Venezuela pants on head moronic government drives its people out, it’s also not helping that Trump is trying to start a war with them.
Thought it was emigrations, was really confused.