Venezuelan migrants: aid from South America is not enough, many continue their journey to the USA.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia – Food shortages caused by Venezuela’s economic collapse prompted Víctor Rojas to hop on a bus and cross the border into Colombia. But soon after arriving, she was in shock.

He had quickly gone from studying music at a university in Caracas, Venezuela and performing in orchestras, to playing the violin for tips on the streets of Bogota.

But a few months after his arrival, he obtained a special residence permit to deal with the wave of Venezuelan immigrants. Over time, street performances became regular performances at weddings and graduations, and his permission allowed him to formalize his growing business and establish himself financially.

The furlough program, created by Colombia in 2021 and backed by the United States, has been hailed as innovative and generous.especially for a country with little experience in mass migration flows, and has been considered a potential model for large-scale displacement in other regions.

In the United States, which has contributed more than $12 million to the program, the effort was seen by policymakers as a way to address the immigration crisis at the US border.

During a visit to Colombia two years ago, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the program “a model for the region and, in many ways, a model for the world”.‘.

The program, announced by then-Colombian President Iván Duque, a conservative ally of the United States, grants temporary protected status to nearly all Venezuelans in Colombia, including many who are not photo-identified, allowing them to live and work legally for 10 years.

Rojas, 26, said his resident status “has absolutely changed everything”.

“I had access to health care, I had access to banks”He added.

The program has been a complete success: more than two million Venezuelans have registered for residency in Colombia.

But in other respects, the policy falls short., and many Venezuelans have left Colombia for the United Statescontributing to the record number of Venezuelans arriving at the US border last year.

While no data is available on how many Venezuelans with Colombian permits have emigrated, many northbound Venezuelans say they decided to leave Colombia because they could not earn enough to support their families.

While Rojas has found economic stability in Colombia, he said he has no plans to make the country his permanent home.

Growing up studying classical music, he said, he always dreamed of going to Paris and New York, cities “where everything that moves my soul comes from”.

Since 2016, Venezuelans fleeing economic ruin under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolás Maduro have settled mainly in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.

But when word got out that Washington’s lack of diplomatic ties with Venezuela made it difficult to push back the migrants, many decided to risk a perilous journey through the Darien Passa jungle uniting South and Central America, creating a humanitarian and political crisis for President Joe Biden.

Venezuelan migration to the US border has skyrocketed in recent years, to more than 189,000 crossings last year, up from about 4,500 in 2020. This has made Venezuelans the second largest group of migrants, after Mexicans, entering the United States illegally.

For the United States, Colombia’s temporary visa program has become a way to deal with the increase, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

“Over time, it has gained more visibility as a means to manage migration across the hemisphere,” he said.

But in October the Biden administration abruptly changed course and began expelling most Venezuelans, applying a public health standard since the time of the pandemic. At the same time, the government created a new pathway that allows Venezuelans outside the United States to apply for humanitarian parole, though critics say the process is complicated.

Since the United States began detaining Venezuelans trying to enter the country, the number of Venezuelans found at the border has dropped to less than 100 a day in January, from about 1,100 a week before the administration’s announcement Biden in October, according to data from the US Customs and Border Protection.

More than 7 million Venezuelans, a quarter of the country’s population, have left the country since 2015 -the second largest migration in the world after Ukraine- and about a third ended up in Colombia. The two nations share deep linguistic, cultural and familial ties and the approach to the growing migrant population has been rapidly inclusive.

For Colombia, a country of 50 million inhabitants with an average income level, welcoming 2.5 million refugees was no mean featand the campaign to grant permits to people Duque often called his “Venezuelan brothers and sisters” drew international praise.

“This policy is really a model. Which country has made it?” said Mireille Girard, representative in Colombia of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Giving 10 years of temporary protection to a large number of people who needed it and with a country that had its own problems”.

Neighboring countries have also set up temporary visa programs for Colombian migrants.: In Peru, 360,000 of the 1.5 million Venezuelans in the country have a legal status, while in Ecuador, 200,000 of the 500,000 Venezuelan migrants have a similar status.

Christian Krüger, former director of the Colombian immigration authority, noted that in 2014, the total number of foreigners from any country living in Colombia was less than 140,000.

When Venezuelans began to arrive in large numbers, lThe authorities have adopted an open door policy distribute various types of visas, before establishing the broader program of temporary permits.

Rojas, for example, first received a residence permit in 2018, before being granted temporary protection status in 2021.

It hasn’t been without its setbacks. Reaching applicants in rural areas without internet access or documentation was difficultsaid Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá who has studied the licensing program. Many employers, bank employees and health professionals do not recognize permits, he added.

There were also long delays. Although 2.5 million Venezuelan emigrants have registered for the permit, fewer than 1.6 million actually received it.

Experts point out that these shortcomings contribute to the choice of Venezuelans to leave Colombia.

But many Venezuelans suggest a bigger reason: that not even a seemingly generous immigration policy can solve low wages, the lack of upward mobility and high inflation plaguing Colombia and much of Latin America.

“They don’t leave because of the immigration policy,” says Ligia Bolívar, a Venezuelan sociologist who lives in Bogotá. “They still believe in the American dream.”

In a corner in front of a hamburger restaurant in Cedritos, a neighborhood in northern Bogotá nicknamed “Cedrizuela” for its large concentration of Venezuelans, a group of delivery men, all from the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, gathered.

They all had similar stories. They said they had obtained temporary permits, but dreamed of living elsewhere. They had worked in car washes, fast food restaurants and bars. No one paid more than necessary to survive.

In the last few years, Venezuelans have become the engine of what many workers call a low-pay sharing economy and overworked in Colombian cities, where they distribute food and other products on motorbikes or bicycles to the wealthiest people.

José Tapia, a 24-year-old delivery man, used his phone to view payments, all of which were less than $1. On a normal day, he said, he made about $10, roughly the equivalent of the minimum daily wage in Colombia.

Another delivery man, Santiago Romero, 39, has lived in six Latin American countries over the past four years. But His ultimate goal is the United States.; She has started the application process under the new probation program and hopes to join her brother in Las Vegas.

“It tells me things are better here,” Romero explains. “That you have to work hard, but that’s better.”

The permit program was “valuable, but in itself it does not address the needs of migrants,” said Laura Gil, Colombia’s deputy minister for multilateral affairs. Without further US investment in improving living conditions in Colombia, she added, Venezuelans will continue to leave.

Rojas, the violinist, embodies the advantages of politics, but also its limitations. In his own words, he was fortunate that the process of obtaining his temporary permit was relatively easy, and he is “extremely grateful” to the Colombian government.

Even so, their ultimate goal has always been the United States or Europe.

Last year he planned to cross the Darien pass but was thwarted after the sudden change in border policy closed the door to most Venezuelans. Now he doesn’t know how, when and where he will emigrate, but he doesn’t let himself be intimidated.

Like many Venezuelan emigrants, she says uprooting her life once makes it easier to do it again.

“Migrating made me feel free, because I felt that in Venezuela I had already lost everything“said Rojas. “This doesn’t scare me anymore, because I understood that you can be reborn.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society