Venezuelan refugees getting far less foreign aid than those of Syria. It’s a scandal — and a shame | Opinion
Colombian President Ivan Duque didn’t go as far as to call it an international scandal when I asked him about the miserly amount of foreign aid Colombia has received for taking in 1.8 million Venezuelan refugees. But that’s exactly what this lack of international solidarity is — a scandal.
Consider: The number of Venezuelans who have fled from their country’s dictatorship in recent years is nearing the size of the Syrian refugee crisis that made world headlines a few years ago. But while the international community has donated about $2,000 per Syrian refugee, it has only contributed $200 per Venezuelan refugee, Duque told me in an interview this week. He said his figures came from a 2019 report from the Organization of American States.
“In Syria, we saw a huge mobilization of the international donor community,” Duque said. But, in the case of the Venezuelan refugee crisis, that hasn’t happened. Colombia has had to pay for “90 percent of the costs” associated with admitting the refugees, he said.
Duque took the bold step this month of announcing that he will give residency papers to almost 1 million of these refugees, bringing to 1.8 million the number of legalized Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. This means that the vast majority of Venezuelans who have sought shelter in his country will be able to get better jobs and have easier access to healthcare and education services.
Duque is asking countries around world to support Colombia’s humanitarian effort. With Venezuelan refugees legalized, “We’ll know exactly who they are, where they live, in which conditions they live, and we’ll have much more capacity to ask the international community for help, starting with the most basic things, such as help in the process of vaccinating migrants,” he told me.
“While in many countries you see xenophobia or negation of these (mass migration) phenomena, I think that Colombia, without being a rich country, is showing that you can carry out a coherent, responsible, humanitarian and, above all, intelligent migration policy,” Duque said.
Since the OAS’s 2019 report, international aid to both Syrian and Venezuelan refugees has risen, but the gap between the two remains huge.
According to Dany Bahar, a Brookings Institution’s international economist who has written several reports about the Venezuelan refugee crisis, Syrian refugees have received international aid totaling about $3,000 per refugee, while Venezuelans have received or have been promised about $800 per refugee.
“In other words, Syrian refugees have received more than three times more than Venezuelan migrants,” Bahar told me. “And the figure for Venezuelan migrants includes funds that have been promised, but not yet disbursed.”
Making things worse, the Venezuelan exodus soon is likely to become larger than Syria’s refugee crisis.
While 5.4 million Syrians have left their country for Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, nearly the same number of Venezuelans have left for Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and other Latin American countries, as well as the United States and Spain, according to the United Nations.
But the number of Venezuelan refugees may rise to 8 million, as their country’s extreme poverty rates and repression continue to rise, Bahar said.
You could argue that most Syrian refugees fled to wealthier countries in Europe or the Middle East, which could donate more funds. You could also make the case that, unlike what happened with the Syrian exodus, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted world attention away from the Venezuelans’ crisis.
Still, something is very wrong when the international community gives three times more money for Syrian refugees than for Venezuelans.
Former President Trump, who — to win votes at home — claimed to be a hard-line foe of Venezuela’s dictatorship, didn’t even grant Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelan refugees in the United States and only gave limited resources to neighboring countries that accepted them.
President Biden should take a page from Colombia’s example. He should fulfill his campaign promise to grant TPS status to Venezuelan refugees in this country and provide aid to Latin American countries that are absorbing the bulk of the economic impact of this refugee crisis. And, perhaps most important, Biden should lead an international campaign to restore democracy in Venezuela, before that country’s refugee crisis gets even worse.
Don’t miss the full interview with Colombia’s President Iván Duque on Sunday at 8pm ET con CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera
