Venezuelan refugee crisis

Based on Wikipedia: Venezuelan refugee crisis

Nearly eight million people have fled Venezuela. That's more than one in five Venezuelans who have packed what they could carry and left everything else behind—their homes, their jobs, their elderly parents, their entire lives. To put that in perspective, it took the Syrian Civil War, widely considered one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of our time, years to produce similar numbers of refugees. The Venezuelan exodus has now surpassed it.

This is the largest recorded refugee crisis in the history of the Americas.

A Reversal of Fortune

The bitter irony is that Venezuela spent most of the twentieth century as a beacon for people fleeing hardship elsewhere. When Europe convulsed with fascism, war, and reconstruction, Venezuela welcomed immigrants. When dictatorships spread across Latin America, Venezuela offered refuge. Newsweek once described the country as "a haven for immigrants fleeing Old World repression and intolerance."

Now the flow has reversed completely. The publication called it "a reversal of fortune on a massive scale."

The transformation didn't happen overnight. It unfolded across two decades, gathering momentum like a snowball rolling downhill, until it became an avalanche that no government policy or international intervention could stop.

The Revolution That Ate Its Children

When Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998, he promised a Bolivarian Revolution—named after Simón Bolívar, the nineteenth-century leader who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonial rule. Chávez pledged to redirect Venezuela's oil wealth to help the impoverished masses who had been largely ignored by previous governments.

The wealthy and middle-class saw the writing on the wall immediately. Asylum applications from Venezuelans to the United States jumped between 1998 and 1999. This first wave of emigrants were people with means—business owners, professionals, educated elites who could see how redistributive policies might affect their comfortable lives.

Then came the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez, which failed. Another wave left. His re-election in 2006 triggered yet another departure of those who opposed him.

By 2009, an estimated one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the decade since Chávez took power. The Central University of Venezuela calculated that between 1999 and 2014, somewhere between 1.5 million people—representing four to six percent of the entire population—had left the country.

But here's the crucial detail that makes this crisis so tragic: the people leaving changed over time.

First the Rich, Then Everyone Else

Early emigrants were doctors, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Venezuela experienced what economists call "brain drain"—the departure of educated and skilled workers who take their expertise and potential contributions with them. This hollowed out the professional class that any functioning society needs.

Then something shifted. The economic crisis deepened. Inflation spiraled. Shortages spread. Crime exploded.

The very people Chávez had promised to help—the poor, the working class, the forgotten—began to flee too. The revolution was devouring its own children.

By the time Nicolás Maduro succeeded Chávez in 2013, the trickle had become a flood. Between 2012 and 2015 alone, the number of Venezuelan emigrants increased by an almost incomprehensible 2,889 percent. The New York Times called it an "exodus."

Why They Leave: The Collapse of Everything

Understanding why millions of people abandon their homeland requires understanding just how completely Venezuela fell apart.

Start with crime. Venezuela's murder rate quadrupled under Chávez, climbing from 25 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 82 per 100,000 by 2014. By 2018, at 81.4 per 100,000, it was the highest in Latin America. The World Health Organization considers anything above 10 per 100,000 to be an epidemic. By that standard, violence had reached epidemic levels in 88 percent of Venezuelan municipalities.

Kidnappings increased more than twenty-fold from the start of the Chávez presidency to 2011. Parents and grandparents began actively encouraging their young people to leave the country for their own safety.

Government security forces made things worse, not better. A special unit called the Special Action Forces—known by their Spanish acronym FAES—conducted extrajudicial executions disguised as security operations. In 2018 alone, more than 7,500 of Venezuela's 23,000 violent deaths were officially attributed to "resistance to authority."

An Economy in Freefall

Crime pushed people out. The economy made staying impossible.

When global oil prices collapsed in 2014, Venezuela—which had bet everything on petroleum exports—crashed too. The government's response was disastrously inadequate. Currency controls imposed in 2003 to prevent capital flight backfired catastrophically, leading to a series of currency devaluations that destabilized the entire economy.

Price controls meant to help consumers instead caused severe shortages. Store shelves emptied. Venezuelans found themselves searching for food, sometimes eating wild fruit or scavenging through garbage. Lines for basic necessities stretched for hours.

The International Monetary Fund calculated that Venezuela's economy contracted by 45 percent between 2013 and 2018. Gross domestic product—the total value of everything the country produces—dropped by more than 35 percent.

And then there was inflation.

In 2015, Venezuela's inflation rate crossed 100 percent—the highest in the world and the highest in the country's history. But that was just the beginning. By the end of 2018, inflation had reached 1.35 million percent. That's not a typo. One point three five million percent.

Imagine earning a paycheck on Monday and discovering by Friday that it could only buy a fraction of what it could at the start of the week. That was daily life in Venezuela.

A 2018 Gallup analysis put it starkly: "Government decisions have led to a domino-effect crisis that continues to worsen, leaving residents unable to afford basic necessities such as food and housing." Venezuelans, the analysis concluded, "believe they can find better lives elsewhere."

Families Torn Apart

The human cost of these statistics is incalculable.

Initially, Venezuelan men left first. They crossed borders—some walking through the dangerous Darién Gap, a roadless jungle spanning the Colombia-Panama border where migrants face drowning, starvation, robbery, and worse—to find work and send money home to wives, children, and elderly parents left behind.

Remittances—the money migrants send back to family members—became lifelines. But as conditions continued to deteriorate, even those lifelines weren't enough. Eventually, mothers and children followed, desperate to reunite with fathers and husbands, exasperated that money sent from abroad could no longer sustain their daily needs.

Millions of families made impossible choices. Leave everything familiar behind, or stay and watch your children go hungry?

The Numbers Keep Climbing

In 2017, during a constitutional crisis, Colombia braced for what was coming. More than 100,000 Venezuelans crossed into the country in just the first half of that year. Colombia created a Special Permit of Permanent Residence for Venezuelans; over 22,000 applied in the first 24 hours.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—the international body responsible for protecting refugees worldwide—recorded more than one million Venezuelans settling in Latin American host countries between 2014 and 2017.

After Maduro's contested re-election in May 2018, the exodus accelerated. Venezuelans had no hope that policies would change or conditions would improve. By November 2018, the combined estimates from the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration showed three million refugees—roughly ten percent of Venezuela's population—had fled since the revolution began.

The UN predicted five million by the end of 2019. A Brookings Institution study suggested six million—approximately twenty percent of the 2017 population. By October 2022, estimates had risen to 7.1 million.

Today, more than 7.9 million people have emigrated.

The Underfunded Crisis No One Talks About

Despite its staggering scale, the Venezuelan refugee crisis has received far less international attention and funding than other humanitarian emergencies.

The Norwegian Refugee Council, the Brookings Institution, and the Organization of American States have all pointed to the same troubling reality: this is one of the most underfunded refugee crises in modern history.

Why? Perhaps because it lacks the dramatic images of war that accompanied the Syrian crisis. Perhaps because Latin American countries have quietly absorbed millions of Venezuelans without generating the political backlash seen in Europe during its migrant crisis. Perhaps because the Venezuelan government has actively denied any crisis exists, claiming that the United Nations and others are simply trying to justify foreign intervention.

But the crisis is real. The suffering is real. And the numbers keep growing.

A Perverse Success Story

There is one grimly ironic statistic buried in all this data. Venezuela's murder rate actually began declining after 2017.

Why? Not because the government suddenly became effective at fighting crime. Not because social conditions improved. The murder rate fell because so many potential victims—and potential perpetrators—had left the country. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory explicitly attributed the declining death toll to mass emigration.

When millions of people flee, even the murder rate improves. That tells you everything you need to know about the scale of the disaster.

No End in Sight

In July 2024, Venezuela held presidential elections. Many hoped for change. Instead, the results were contested, triggering a national and international political crisis. The Maduro administration cracked down on dissent.

A poll taken in August 2024 found that more than 40 percent of remaining Venezuelans intended to leave the country soon. The polling firm Meganálisis estimated 600,000 planned to emigrate by mid-September, with another 930,000 hoping to leave by December.

Countries throughout the Americas—many already strained from absorbing millions of Venezuelan immigrants—are bracing for another wave. The United States worries about exacerbating its own border crisis. Latin American nations that once welcomed Venezuelans with open arms now struggle with the economic and social costs of integration.

The reversal of fortune continues. A country that once welcomed the world's refugees has become one of the world's largest producers of them. And the people who promised to help Venezuela's poor have instead driven them from their homeland by the millions.

Eight million people and counting. One in five Venezuelans. The largest refugee crisis the Americas have ever seen—and it's still not over.