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That's about 5 percent of the entire country's population, and bulk are ending up on the doorstep of Colombia

More than 1.2 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past two years



More than 1.2 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past two years How bad has it gotten in the socialist paradise of Venezuela. Well, lest you forget why the one-time communist countries behind the Iron Curtain in eastern Europe put up walls to keep people in, Venezuela is experiencing a level of migration so astonishing it's almost never been seen in the Western Hemisphere. And it's becoming quite a burden for the magnanimous souls in Colombia, who want to welcome desperate Venezuelans but are finding it difficult to keep up with the onslaught:
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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Lacking the vacant housing to absorb all the Venezuelan migrants, even if they did have the money to buy homes or rent apartments, Colombia is trying to cope by opening up public buildings and gymnasiums where the Venezuelans can sleep on floors, cots, benches or whatever is available. Many are stuck sleeping outside. It's warm in Colombia, but you're still without shelter and potentially vulnerable to attack. Still, the migrants from Venezuela figure it's better than remaining in the chaos wrought by socialist strongman Hugo Chavez and his hapless successor Nicolas Maduro. Unlike the Soviet satellite regimes of the Cold War era, Maduro is probably just as happy to see these people flee Venezuela. The shortages of goods caused by the regime's socialist policies make it impossible for everyone to meet basic daily needs like food and even toilet paper. If Maduro can dump millions of people on Colombia's door, that's a million fewer people who might rise up in the streets or expect to be able to find food somewhere. And if he is ever forced to hold a fair election, Maduro stands a better chance of surviving if the most unhappy people have left the country. But that doesn't appear to be in the cards for Venezuela in the foreseeable future. The only thing Maduro seems interested in is more iron-fisted political brutality and more economic corruption that prioritizes the survival of the regime above all else. That's what you get with socialism, which is government so big and all-encompassing that nothing is more important than its own self-perpetuation. Just like Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton would give us here if they could.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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