Venezuelan migration, an issue that needs action from the countries of the region

Venezuelan migration has been one of the most talked about issues in the region for several years.

This week ministers from various American countries met in Bogotá to address “the migration challenge” as a shared problem that they must solve together and with the urgency of slowing down the flow of people fleeing countries such as Haiti or Venezuela.

This Ministerial Conference on Migration was led by the Vice President and Foreign Minister of Colombia, Marta Lucía Ramírez, and the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, and ministers from countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Mexico, Guatemala participated. , El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, affected by the different crises that the hemisphere is experiencing.

The president of Colombia, Iván Duque, whose country is the largest recipient of Venezuelan migrants with 1.8 million, made proposals that, he believes, will help address the problem: he asked international cooperation agencies to carry out a census to find out how many migrants there are. in the American countries, because “without precise information” there will be no “precise public policies”; the second is that with this decisions are made on the type of visas that will be granted to migrants, whether permanent or temporary, and for which there must be “great cooperation” between the countries that host them.

Colombia has implemented solidarity measures, such as the Temporary Protection Statute, to provide Venezuelan migrants with decent living conditions, transparent access to state institutions, and integrate them into the economy and the labor market.

Until the end of 2020, an estimated 5.4 million refugees and migrants from Venezuela had left their country. Figure that the Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela (R4V) increases to 5.66 million this 2021.

Of these, 2.69 million have regular residence and stay permits, while 171,000 are as refugees and 851 have applied to be.

In Ecuador this Thursday a study of the situation of Venezuelan citizens in Ecuador was presented by the Working Group for Refugees and Migrants (GTRM) -which would become the representative of R4V in the country-, in which they participate international agencies such as UNHCR (United Nations Agency for Refugees) and IOM (International Organization for Migration), non-governmental organizations and civil society, in order to play a complementary role to the State’s responses to the Venezuelan population that has arrived.

According to the GTRM, it is estimated that there were 451,000 in Ecuador as of June, with the provinces of Pichincha, Guayas, El Oro, Imbabura and Manabí, in that order, being the most popular.

The GTRM presented a study carried out with 2,278 family groups made up of 9,004 members in 21 provinces, in which it defined the main needs of refugees and migrants from Venezuela, among which they are – depending on whether they have been with them for less than a month or more than a year in the country-: food, employment, shelter or accommodation, documentation, medical services, hygiene items, education.

86% of the surveyed family groups, with at least one person employed, have a per capita labor income of less than $ 70 per month. 14% did not have access to a sufficient quantity of food and 59% had partially had food.

Furthermore, 37% claim to have experienced episodes or situations of discrimination, mainly (94%) due to their nationality.

Other data to highlight are that 43% of family groups did not have timely access to health services, and that children and adolescents in this group do not attend school.

Data from 2020 indicated that in Ecuador there were 22.5 thousand Venezuelans with residence permits, 13.6 thousand with refugee applications, and 410 people with refugee status.

Moving on from Ecuador, perhaps the most complex case would be that of Chile, where it can be said that there is a xenophobic outbreak in the middle of the electoral campaign for the general elections in November.

Even the main presidential candidates have promised to fix the issue in various ways, including deportations.

In Chile there are officially 450,000 Venezuelans, among migrants and refugees, being the third destination country in the region, after Colombia and Peru (1 million). (I)