Opinion: Are Venezuelan refugees worth less than those from Syria and South Sudan?

By Rafael Osío Cabrices

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) The Brookings Institute, a U.S. think tank, has been following Venezuela for many years, and has been claiming since 2020 that Venezuela’s refugee crisis is severely underfunded. The most recent update by its analysts acknowledges a change of pace in the Venezuelan mass migration due to pandemic-related mobility restrictions, still estimating 700,000 new migrants in 2019 and 2020, which amounts to 5.3 million Venezuelans who had left the country through the end of 2020.

Brookings analysts insist that, amid three massive migration crises in modern history, Venezuela’s comes second in 2020, less than the 6.6 million Syrians who fled since their crisis started, but more than 2.3 million South Sudanese.

However, they say, “in the case of Syria (…) with updated figures as of the end of 2020, there’s been over US$20.8 billion of funding (in total) since the beginning of the exodus. In the case of Venezuela, by 2020, the number was only US$1.4 billion—a much smaller number despite the similarity in the number of refugees. As another point of comparison, we find that international assistance to the 2.3 million refugees from South Sudan totals US$3.2 billion.”

The math confirms their previous claim that the Latin Ameican crisis is being underfunded: “Based on the figures for 2020, total funding per refugee amounts to US$3,150 per Syrian, US$1,390 per South Sudanese, and just US$265 per Venezuelan.”

That is to say, they’re counting every Venezuelan abroad as a refugee, even though hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living abroad are not refugees in terms of what that means for international law, but emigrants or expats who don’t have that status in the host countries and are able to visit Venezuela if they want.

Notwithstanding, Bahar and Dooley chose to extend the “refugee” category given their need to compare with the cases of South Sudan and Syria, and the impossibility, in all three cases, of establishing how many emigrants, exiles or refugees there are within the totality.

The underfunding, Brookings researchers also say, wouldn’t be corrected in the best scenario: if the UN meets the goal of increasing funding for Venezuelan refugees to US$3 billion, it still would amount to about US$600 per person, or more, if we don’t distribute those US$3 billion between all the Venezuelans abroad but only on the refugees on the borders of the countries receiving them.

Bahar and Dooley also analyze the conditions under which that funding is given, and analyze the mutual history of dealing with migrant influx between Venezuela and Colombia, after the latter’s historic announcement of temporary regulations that would protect almost a million Venezuelans in that country for ten years.

As Betica Muñoz Pogossian has been consistently showing, there are many reasons to increase the support for Venezuelan migrants, from a human rights and international cooperation point of view. Colombia, in particular, needs more money to deal with Venezuelans crossing the border in big numbers, as it’s happening: the funds are still lacking, and even opposition leaders have had to remind their international allies of the promises they made. Furthermore, we all know the world has plenty of urgent matters competing for aid funds and the attention of decision-makers.

Why has the Venezuelan migrant crisis, which exerts such pressure on the neighboring states and is propelling xenophobia and human trafficking, failed to mobilize the resources it obviously demands to reduce its impact on the region? What happened to the funds raised by the concert in Cucutá? Was everyone just waiting for Maduro to fall?

We can assume that the European Union has the resources, the institutional network, and the need to spend more money on the Syrian refugee crisis, given that it hits its coasts, roads, and cities directly. But that doesn’t provide all the answers. I can think of a couple of reasons beyond national and international budgets, or weak lobbying, or the influence the Maduro regime and its allies could have on the UN system.

One reason is that Latin America, in general, has become a sort of forgotten place on the map of global sensitivity: Latino migrants tend to be seen as a U.S. problem, not so much Europe’s, Canada’s, or, even Asia’s. I wonder if the Mediterranean drama, with its powerful images of sinking boats and burned cities, makes a rich country reach for its wallet faster—and if a case like South Sudan’s, a new country in the heart of Africa, looks more pressing after the Hollywood-supported cause against the Darfur massacres.

The other reason could be that Venezuela was seen, for decades, as an affluent country, because of its oil – which is of course useless for migrants. We Venezuelans were the rich kid in the neighborhood, until not so long ago. Before we turned into a source of migrants, Chávez was still buying friendships with cheap barrels of oil and suitcases full of cash. Now, we can’t be a petrostate anymore—that’s precisely why many of us left—but the shadow of that lost prosperity may be stronger than the abundant footage of our desperate people crossing the bridge to Colombia or the strait to Trinidad.

Source: Caracas Chronicles