Venezuelans get a boost, but eye US
Despite visas from Colombia, financial struggles continue
BOGOTA, Colombia — Food shortages triggered by Venezuela’s economic collapse pushed Victor Rojas onto a bus and across the border to Colombia. But soon after arriving, he was in a state of shock.
He had quickly gone from studying music at a university in Caracas, Venezuela, and performing in orchestras to playing violin for tips on the streets of Bogota.
But within months of arriving, he had received a special residency permit meant to address a surge of Venezuelan migrants. Eventually, his street performances led to regular gigs at weddings and graduations and the permit allowed him to formalize the growing business and gain an economic toehold.
The permit program, created by Colombia in 2021 and supported by the United States, was hailed as innovative and generous, particularly for a country with little experience with mass migration flows, and was seen as a potential model for large-scale displacement in other regions.
In the United States, which contributed over $12 million to the program, the effort came to be seen by policymakers as one way to address the migration crisis at the U.S. border.
During a visit to Colombia two years ago, 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 Ivan Duque — a conservative ally of the United States — grants temporary protected status to nearly all Venezuelans in Colombia, allowing them to live and work legally for 10 years, including many with no photo identification.
Rojas, 26, said his residency status “changed absolutely everything, ” adding he had access to health care and banks.
By one measure, the program has been a major success — more than 2 million Venezuelans have registered for Colombian residency.
But by other measures, the policy is falling short, and many Venezuelans have left Colombia bound for the United States, contributing to a record number of Venezuelans who arrived at the U.S. border in 2022.
While there is no data on how many Venezuelans with a Colombian permit have migrated, many Venezuelans making their way north say they decided to abandon Colombia because they could not earn enough to support their families.
Though Rojas has found financial stability in Colombia, he said he had 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.
Since 2016, Venezuelans fleeing economic ruin under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro, have settled mainly in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. But when word spread that Washington’s lack of diplomatic relations with Venezuela made it difficult to turn away migrants, many decided to risk a dangerous trek through the Darien Gap, a jungle linking South and Central America, creating a humanitarian and political crisis for President Joe Biden.
Venezuelan migration to the U.S. border exploded in recent years to more than 189,000 crossings last year, from roughly 4,500 in 2020. This has made Venezuelans the second-largest migrant group, after Mexicans, entering the United States illegally.
For the United States, Colombia’s temporary visa program came to be seen as one way to address the surge, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
“Over time, it acquired greater visibility as a means of managing migration in the hemisphere,” he said.
But in October, the Biden administration started expelling most Venezuelans, using a pandemic-era public health rule. At the same time, the administration created a new pathway that allows Venezuelans outside the United States to apply for humanitarian parole, though critics say the process is cumbersome.
Since the United States started stopping Venezuelans trying to enter the country, the number of Venezuelans encountered at the border dropped to less than 100 a day in January from roughly 1,100 a day the week before the Biden administration’s October announcement, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
More than 7 million Venezuelans, one-fourth of the country’s population, have left since 2015 — the second largest migration in the world after Ukraine — and about one-third have ended up in Colombia. The two nations share deep linguistic, cultural and familial ties, and the approach toward the growing migrant population was quickly one of inclusion.
When Venezuelans started arriving in large numbers, officials adopted an open-door policy by distributing various types of visas, before establishing the broader temporary permit program.
Rojas, for example, first received a residency permit in 2018, before he got temporary protected status in 2021.
It has not been without hiccups. Reaching applicants in rural areas without internet access or documentation was difficult, said Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher at Rosario University in Bogota who has studied the permit program. Many employers, bank workers and health care providers do not recognize the permit, he added.
There have also been long delays. While 2.5 million Venezuelan migrants have registered for the permit, less than 1.6 million have actually received one.
Experts cite these shortcomings as contributing to Venezuelans choosing to leave Colombia.
But many Venezuelans suggest a bigger reason: that even a seemingly generous migration policy cannot solve the low wages, lack of upward mobility and high inflation plaguing Colombia and much of Latin America.
“They are not leaving because of immigration policy,” said Ligia Bolivar, a sociologist from Venezuela based in Bogota.
On a corner outside a hamburger restaurant in Cedritos, a north Bogota neighborhood nicknamed Cedrizuela because of its large concentration of Venezuelans, a group of delivery workers, all of whom were from the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, were gathered.
They all had similar stories. They said they had gotten temporary permits, but had dreams of living elsewhere. They had worked in car washes, fast-food restaurants and bars. None paid more than enough to scrape by.
Santiago Romero, 39, has lived in six countries in Latin America over the past four years. But his ultimate goal is the United States; he has started the application process under the new parole program and hopes to join his brother in Las Vegas.
“He tells me, ‘Things are better here,’ ” said Romero.