By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--February 16, 2018
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As the collapse of Venezuela’s economy deepens, the number of those fleeing is accelerating. Nearly 3 million Venezuelans—a 10th of the population—have left the oil-rich country over the past two decades of leftist rule. Almost half that number—some 1.2 million people—have gone in the past two years, according to Tomás Páez, a Venezuelan immigration expert at Venezuela’s Central University. Some 550,000 Venezuelans were in Colombia at the end of 2017, a 62% increase from a year before, according to the Colombian government, with another 50,000 entering so far this year. Those numbers mirror the 600,000 Syrian asylum seekers in Germany, and the 650,000 Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in last year’s brutal crackdown. “By world standards Colombia is receiving migrants at a pace that now rivals what we saw in the Balkans, in Greece, in Italy in 2015, at the peak of [Europe’s] migrant emergency,” said Joel Millman, a spokesman for the United Nations’ migration agency. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos last week announced his government would stop issuing border-crossing cards that had been granted to 1.5 million Venezuelans to come and go on short trips. He ordered 2,000 soldiers be deployed to control illegal, dirt-path entries into Colombia. The president said Colombians “should also be generous to Venezuelans,” noting that when Venezuela was prosperous in the late 20th century, it opened its doors to more than a million Colombians. The migration is taxing Colombian border localities and raising the specter that Venezuela’s social upheaval will spread here. Colombia has long had troubles of its own, including integrating former Communist guerrillas from a civil conflict that only ended recently.
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