This week marks World Refugee Day. It is a date that should generate a lot of shame in the Miraflores palace, in Caracas. The repressive policies and economic failure sponsored by Maduro have inadvertently built what a previous article described as a machine for generating migrants.
The data falls like a slab on the back – but not on the conscience – of Chávez’s successor, who, far from worrying, has seen it as an opportunity to stay in power without the pressure of showing his face to those more than 7 million Venezuelans who have fled and who are unequivocally critical of his misrule.
Those who could not leave and those most faithful to Chavismo remained, those grateful stomachs easy to satisfy with a public position, a perk or a CLAP bag. But according to electoral polls, even many of those who once supported him see the arrival of Edmundo González as the ray of light of hope.
While the flow of Venezuelan migrants to the US does not stop. 1.4 million people have traveled so far this year trying to reach the United States. And of them, the largest group, with 380,000 people, came from Venezuela. These are data from the National Immigration Institute and show that if Chavismo remains in power, Venezuela could become the only country in the world inhabited by a single person: Nicolás Maduro Moros. Will it be able to remain in error at the risk of thinning its population to the limit?
Biden’s policies on immigration do not look very effective either. Announced with great fanfare in this election season, stopping asylum seekers, closing the border or granting the path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants married to citizens seem nothing more than cosmetic measures, launched to scratch votes among Hispanics with the right to suffrage.
The solution to the problem of the uncontrolled entry of immigrants into the United States seems to only lie in the security measures implemented in the White House, but this is not the case. In the case of Venezuela, a survey by the company Delfos assures that 25% of Venezuelans are considering leaving the country but 2 out of 3 of them would desist if Maduro were defeated in the presidential elections. So the first thing to tackle is the political problem, laying the foundations for a democratic transition in the country.
The second objective would be to convert Venezuela into a country of business and opportunities. Both for its citizens and for foreign companies that want to invest with the legal security that the end of the Chavista regime would entail. Nobody emigrates for pleasure, this maxim applies to Venezuela or any Latin American country. If the US worked more on the economic development of the countries from which undocumented immigrants leave, we would have a different story.
Two years ago I made a documentary in the Guatemalan city of San Cristóbal Verapaz. The main idea was to tell how in this place, unlike others nearby, people’s dreams did not involve emigrating to the United States. The reason lay in a shoe factory that employed 800 local people and had a positive impact on many others. Curiously, many of the boots made were for American brands. People have jobs and a home. It’s that simple. Dreams are sometimes just around the corner and the new tenant of the White House should work in that direction. When the migrant reaches the border, the problem is already unsolvable. The solution is not in the harshness of the agents in Texas, Arizona or California. It is that the migrant has a reason to stay in his land.
