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February 16, 2021

Have You Read?

As Colombia Emerges from Decades of War, Migration Challenges Mount

Digital Litter: The Downside of Using Technology to Help Refugees

As More Migrants from Africa and Asia Arrive in Latin America, Governments Seek Orderly and Controlled Pathways

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New from MPI

Back on the Table: U.S. Legalization and the Unauthorized Immigrant Groups that Could Factor in the Debate
By Jessica Bolter, Muzaffar Chishti and Doris Meissner

Rewiring Migrant Returns and Reintegration after the COVID-19 Shock
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Media Corner

Historian Julius Fein writes about the French response to people fleeing Germany before World War II in Hitler's Refugees and the French Response, 1933–1938.

Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System, by Elliot Young, examines U.S. immigrant incarceration.

Psychiatrist and researcher Lynne Jones uses firsthand testimony to explore migrant and refugee crises in Europe and Central America in The Migrant Diaries.

Anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz offers a family’s memoir of migration from Eastern Europe to Latin America to Israel to the United States in Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation.

Harsha Walia adopts a new lens for examining large migrant and refugee influxes in Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.

In The Coloniality of Asylum: Mobility, Autonomy and Solidarity in the Wake of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, Fiorenza Picozza marries border studies with decolonial theory.

Feature
The Eurasian Economic Union: Repaving Central Asia’s Road to Russia?
In recent decades Russia has been increasingly reliant on Central Asian migrant workers. Those workers, in turn, have sent back remittances that have been crucial for their countries of origin. Since 2015, many of these ex-Soviet countries have come together in the Eurasian Economic Union to solidify their bonds and ease migrants' passage to Russia. This article explores the bloc and how it reflects Russia's role in the region.

Spotlight
Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States
Have a question about U.S. immigration trends and the country's immigrant population? This article collects in one place the most sought-after information about the world's largest immigrant population and how it has changed over time. Drawing from a wide array of authoritative data sources, this article provides an up-to-date snapshot of the immigrant population, visa and enforcement statistics, and information on emerging trends, including slowing immigration and changing origins.

Editor's Note

A landmark policy shift is happening in South America.

The government of Colombia announced a major reform this month, providing a ten-year temporary protection status to the approximately 1.7 million Venezuelans in the country, more than half of whom are currently in irregular status. The move will, among other things, allow migrants to obtain residency permits and legally work, study, and access health benefits—an especially crucial development in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, it was just December when Colombian President Iván Duque declared that unauthorized immigrants would not be eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations. The new policy will allow Venezuelans to get immunized.

People who are in the country illegally will be able to apply for ten-year protected status, and those who are there under temporary measures will be able to extend their stay.

The magnitude of the move is hard to overstate. The head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, called it “one of the most important humanitarian gestures made on this continent” since the 1984 signing of the regional Cartagena Declaration on Refugees. For migrants themselves, the policy will mean a life-changing opportunity to come out of the shadows.

An estimated 5.4 million people have left Venezuela in recent years, driven to emigrate by political and economic crises. One-third of them are in neighboring Colombia, but large numbers have moved across the region. And a small subset have headed to the United States, where they have comprised the fastest-growing immigrant population in recent years; check out this article for more.

In addition to the humanitarian crisis, the invisibility of many migrants has meant logistical impediments for the Colombian government. Not knowing who migrants were, where they lived, or what they needed “doesn’t allow us to have a clear social policy,” said Duque. "It's a bad situation because it doesn't allow us to have a clear security policy.” Still, it remains unclear whether most Colombians, who have at times bristled at the arrival of large numbers of Venezuelans, will support the move.

Since 2014, migration from Venezuela has been the region’s largest displacement crisis and one of the Western hemisphere's most pressing issues. The move by Colombia certainly does not resolve the underlying instability and economic issues in Venezuela, nor will it solve every problem faced by Venezuelan migrants in the country. But it is certainly the beginning of a new era, one that ends the legal limbo for large numbers of Venezuelan migrants.

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]

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The Migration Information Source is a project of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide.