Where Data Tells the Story
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🇨🇴 📊 Colombia is now hosting more immigrants than China, India, France, and Germany. For a developing nation of 50 million, this is unprecedented. Here's what's happening ↓
A quarter-century ago, the idea of millions of people moving to Colombia would have certainly raised some eyebrows.
This was a Colombia recovering from the narco-violence of the early 1990s and still facing both government corruption and FARC-related guerrilla violence.
A Colombia which had seen millions of its own citizens moving overseas, especially to the United States, Spain, and Venezuela.
In a tragic twist of irony, the last of these countries changed everything for Colombia, beginning a decade ago.
With Venezuela’s descent into economic devastation and government repression under the regime of autocrat Nicolás Maduro, the country has entered the worst migrant crisis in the Americas.
Roughly 7M of the Bolivarian Republic’s citizens have fled overseas in search of work, stability, and freedom—a mass exodus largely unparalleled in contemporary peacetime.
Unsurprisingly, nearly half of these have gone to neighboring Colombia, leading to the country becoming the top destination for migrants in Latin America.
So what happens when the exodus suddenly reverses course?
Like most refugees, a majority of Venezuelans would like to return home once they are able to. Yet their current predicament has forced countries around the region to adapt.
For Colombia, a country of just 50M people, the millions of new arrivals have meant needing to be proactive.
The Colombian government has set up a program to grant legal residency and formalization for Venezuelan migrants, hoping to avoid the sort of administrative and regulatory problems faced by undocumented immigrants.
While hosting such a dramatically large immigrant population in a developing country comes with serious challenges, many in Colombia do remark on the somewhat poetic irony of the situation.
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