Miami offers Venezuelans warm welcome

MIAMI — Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States are arriving to this city in soaring numbers — and receiving a far warmer welcome than the Central American migrants President Donald Trump wants to block at the Mexican border.

Last year, 27,629 Venezuelans petitioned U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for asylum, an 88 percent increase from 2016 and up from 2,181 in 2014. So far this year, the number of Venezuelans who have applied — nearly all of them in Miami — is almost three times as great as any other nationality, according to the latest USCIS asylum data.

Unlike the Central Americans who wade illegally across the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to U.S. border guards, the Venezuelans typically land at the Miami airport with tourist and business visas.

They are, in general, wealthier and more likely to have legal representation, an advantage that significantly boosts their chances of being allowed to stay, statistics show. And they have the backing of South Florida politicians, especially Cuban American lawmakers who view them as natural allies in a regional struggle against Latin American leftism.

The Venezuelans are fleeing a near-total societal collapse after two decades of socialist policies as well as years of governmental mismanagement, corruption and waste. The crisis has left nearly 87 percent of Venezuelans in poverty, generated the world’s highest inflation rate, and made food and medicine scarce.

Those who reach Miami are a small and privileged part of a much bigger refugee crisis. According to U.N. data, 180,000 Venezuelans fled their country during the first three months of 2018, compared with 217,000 during all of 2017. Most cross by land into Brazil and Colombia, and the exodus is likely to accelerate if, as expected, leftist Nicolás Maduro wins another six-year term in the May 20 presidential election. The results were pending late Sunday night.

The country’s main opposition parties said they would boycott the vote, citing a looming fraud.

Venezuelans with the means to reach the United States can be confident that they’ll be allowed to stay. The U.S. immigration system considers them “affirmative asylum” cases because applicants who file such claims typically enter the country legally and then request permission to stay.

That differs from asylum seekers who file a “defensive” claim to avoid deportation, a category that would include the larger pool of Central American migrants arrested along the Mexico border. Affirmative applications can be approved by a USCIS asylum officer, rather than an immigration judge.

Central American migrants who traveled in a caravan to file legal asylum requests at the U.S.-Mexico border drew the ire of Trump this spring, and many of those travelers said they, too, were seeking shelter from gang violence and chaos back home. The majority of caravan members were from Honduras, where U.S.backed right-wing president Juan Orlando Hernández was reelected last year in a contest whose results were rejected by international observers.

The percentage of asylum seekers who were denied reached its highest level in a decade last year, and Central American applicants were among the most likely to be turned down, according to immigration data compiled by the TRAC project at Syracuse University.

Michael Bars, a spokesman for USCIS, said the agency can grant asylum to “those who have been persecuted or have a wellfounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion if returned to their native country.”

“Each asylum claim is evaluated on a case-by-case basis and determinations are fact-specific,” Bars said in a statement.

In a city shaped by successive waves of refugees from communist-run Cuba, the asylum officers, immigration judges and wider political establishment are deeply sympathetic to the Venezuelans’ plight.

“If a client has a personal story that hits all the right notes, they will get asylum,” said one Miami immigration lawyer busy with Venezuelan clients. The attorney, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid views, joked that Maduro is “paying for our family vacations” by sending him so much business.

Since Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, wealthier Venezuelans desperate to escape the socialist experiment in a country that used to be Latin America’s richest per capita have transformed South Florida. More than 130,000 Venezuelans now live in the tri-county region from Palm Beach County to MiamiDade County, including thousands who have scooped up multimilliondollar condos and pricey waterfront mansions.

Some effectively bought their way in, obtaining special visas that grant residency to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in the United States. To a lesser extent, upper-class Venezuelans are still coming, with Miami developers still tapping their deep pockets to finance luxury high-rises. Last year, Venezuelans were the fourth-largest foreign investors in Florida real estate.

But added to the mix are a host of middle-class, professional Venezuelans: engineers, teachers, oil workers, small-business owners. Most new arrivals had managed in the past to secure U.S. tourism visas. Now, often they enter legally by plane and apply for asylum once they arrive.

“Out of every Venezuelan now coming as a tourist through [Miami International Airport], I’d guess 80 percent are going to apply for asylum,” said Elizabeth Blandon, an immigration lawyer based in Weston, a city north of Miami now nicknamed “Westonzuela” because of the flood of Venezuelan immigrants.

Entire South Florida neighborhoods have turned into Venezuelan enclaves. In Doral, a mix of urban sprawl and upscale communities in the shadow of Miami International Airport, Venezuelans make up about 22 percent of the population of 58,000, compared with 12 percent a decade ago, according to Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez.

“Cubans [in South Florida] have great empathy for the Venezuelans; they are going through the same thing that our families went through,” said Bermudez, a Cuban American.

The latest U.S. immigration statistics show that Venezuelans are significantly less likely to be deported. Since the start of the current fiscal year on Oct. 1, the United States has sent back only 150, and 248 during the 2017 fiscal year, when more than 74,000 were deported to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Carlos Colombo, an immigration lawyer whose firm has offices in Orlando and Miami, said Venezuelan asylum applicants have a success rate above 80 percent — compared with 50 to 60 percent for his Central American clients. That success rate, however, may begin to drop, he believes, given the surge of applicants, many of whom have fled violence and economic collapse rather than targeted political persecution.

“In the past, I think a lot of Venezuelans were hopeful that things would change, that things would get better in Venezuela, and they really did not want to leave,” he said. “But what we’re seeing now is that to a large extent, they have lost faith in outside pressure from other countries, including the U.S., in trying to have a regime change. The levels of poverty and crime is out of control, and they have lost everything, so people are giving up and leaving.”

Blandon said that, in several respects, they have become the new Cubans — a class of applicants who tend to enjoy high success rates in being granted legal status, in part because of their flight from left-wing, anti-U.S. governments.

Immigration officials, she said, are quick to challenge Central American asylum applicants, suggesting their struggles at home are more related to gang violence than official persecution. “But with the Venezuelans, the first thing they think of is that the government is killing its people. For that reason, the Venezuelans are good.”

One of Blandon’s clients is the owner of a mattress store whose wares were confiscated by the National Guard under Maduro’s Bed and Mattress Plan, which guaranteed that every Venezuelan would have a place to sleep. “That’s official persecution,” she said. “That’s reason for asylum.”

On a recent afternoon in Doral, around the corner from Arepazo, a restaurant known for its Venezuelan exile intrigue as much as its traditional cornmeal cakes, a steady flow of newcomers lined up in the hallway of a storage space where a nonprofit group was giving out food, clothing, small appliances and toys. Every Venezuelan approached by a journalist said he or she was in the midst of applying for political asylum.