The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees reports that over 7.7 million individuals have fled Venezuela since 2014, marking the largest mass migration in the country’s history as a result of the crisis.
Whether more Venezuelans will leave the nation is a topic that is raised by the ongoing protests and tensions that have followed Sunday’s election and the deadlock over who was rightfully elected.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Thursday night that the United States has recognized opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia as the president-elect, citing evidence the opposition produced this week.
Though the United States and other nations are pressuring the government to do so, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s administration maintains that he won even though it hasn’t yet made public all of the voting machine tallies to support this claim.
Through spokesperson Vedant Patel, the U.S. State Department stated this week that “everyone can see the results” and that “The international community—including the US—is growing impatient in its waiting for the Venezuelan electoral officials to be forthright and release comprehensive and accurate election statistics.”
Many Venezuelans, both in the nation and abroad, had high hopes for reform following 25 years of despotic leadership.
However, the National Electoral Committee’s (CNE) declaration of Maduro’s victory could potentially deepen the exodus and solidify dejection.
In a poll conducted prior to the election, almost 40% of Venezuelans stated they would think about fleeing the nation if Maduro kept his hold on power.
“I believe there will be days of protests, the regime will try to suppress them or just wait for them to go away” in response to the grievances, Ryan C. Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Axios Latino. At that point, individuals might feel forced to flee.
Due to the Venezuelan crisis, there have been significant migratory movements to the United States. A Pew Research Center survey found that there were an estimated 640,000 Latinos of Venezuelan descent living in the US, a 592% increase since 2000.
About 110,541 Venezuelans entered the country lawfully between June 2022 and January 2023, according to CBP statistics that were made public in July, and they have been given parole. There were 242,700 Venezuelans in the United States with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as of September 2023. When this protection was first extended, an estimated 472,000 more Venezuelan citizens would have become eligible.
According to Mayor Mike Johnston of Denver, the city has received more immigrants per person than any other in the past year.
According to Denver Human Services spokesperson Jon Ewing, state officials in Colorado are already investigating any potential local effects of the Venezuelan crisis, as Axios writer Alayna Alvarez reported on Monday.
According to Ewing, officials do not plan to revert to the practice of offering newly arrived migrants several weeks of refuge if the city experiences another spike in migrant arrivals.
The number of migrants who could actually make it to American towns like Denver, however, is questionable given that Mexico has effectively stopped the flow of people into the country and that President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June that severely restricts asylum requests.
Border crossings have decreased throughout the past two months to the lowest level since Biden assumed office in early 2021.
From immigration to politics in the US
Trump has stated several times that “Countries are shipping criminals to the United States, especially Venezuela,” one such instance being this week’s campaign email.
José Antonio Ibarra, a citizen of Venezuela who entered the US illegally in 2022, was indicted by a Georgia grand jury in May on charges of killing and kidnapping nursing student Laken Riley, age 22.
However, numerous studies have revealed that, overall, both legal and illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans of native birth, as NBC News has reported.
Venezuelans “claimed to have fled Venezuela because of fear for their life, but you know, there has been a decrease in crime there,” according to a June speech by Trump. due to the fact that they have brought all of the criminals here,” he said again in front of a massive crowd during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
But Trump’s assertions are untrue. According to data from the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, the number of violent deaths in Venezuela decreased by about 25% in 2023 compared to 2021 and 2022. However, this decline is a continuation of a trend that has been seen since 2018, during Trump’s presidency.
According to Ronna Rísquez, co-founder of Victims Monitor, which tracks violence, and In.Visibles, which looks into victims of organized crime in Latin America, the country’s reduced population and the unparalleled wave of migration in Venezuela affect “everything,” including death rates from cancer and traffic accidents.
According to Carlos Nieto, coordinator of A Window to Freedom, a group that defends and advances human rights for Venezuelans, some criminals have left Venezuela as part of this exodus and have moved to other Latin American nations as well as the United States. However, criminals make only a small portion of “those millions who have emigrated from Venezuela,” he claimed.
Despite the fact that from 2023 to 2024, 47 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang were apprehended by the authorities on American soil, over 330,000 Venezuelans entered the country illegally last year.
Furthermore, analysts on Venezuela informed Noticias Telemundo that there is no proof of a government initiative to expel convicts from the nation. Nieto remarked, “They’re not really releasing prisoners here to send them anywhere.”
Additionally untrue, according to the Trump campaign, Kamala Harris is “purposefully bringing in millions of undocumented immigrants in an effort to influence them to vote Democratic.”
Trump has claimed that Democrats and Biden are supporting illegal immigration in order to register newcomers to vote, but he has never provided proof to back up his assertion. There is no proof of voter fraud committed by non-citizen immigrants, and they are not permitted to vote.
When Noticias Telemundo asked what immigration policies the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee support or maintain with regard to Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States, such as humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status, Jaime Florez, the Hispanic communications director for both, responded, “the laws in place must be respected.” Florez declared, “The statement from the Trump campaign is the same as that from the Republican National Committee,” and added, “The campaign stays silent on speculative scenarios.”
The Harris campaign’s Hispanic media director, Maca Casado, stated that although she was unable to predict the foreign policy of the Harris administration, Biden extended Venezuelans’ Temporary Protected Status. Casado asserted, citing the administration’s history of “assisting the people of Venezuela and requesting the voting records” of Sunday’s elections, that Harris “She has never abandoned Venezuelans and she won’t do so now.”
Following the disputed election results, political figures from both parties are asking for stronger U.S. sanctions on Venezuela in Florida, where there is a significant Venezuelan American population. Republicans are opposing the Biden administration’s relaxation of some sanctions in 2023. However, political science professor Eduardo Gamarra of Florida International University told Politifact that this misses the reality that Maduro maintained his hold on power in Venezuela in spite of the Trump administration’s harsher sanctions.