Venezuela to lose a quarter of its population to migrant floods: OAS migrant superfl
Venezuela to lose a quarter of its population to migrant floods: OAS
Get ready for a migrant superflood.
July 8, 2019
By Monica Showalter
What's news in Venezuela? Well, the story that there are more talks going on between dictator Nicolás Maduro and the legitimate acting president, Juan Guaidó, this time in Barbados. Yawn. We still don't know what these are about or why there's any sense in talking to Maduro. Nothing good is going to come of this.
But some far more consequential stories came and went, and they are haunting.
The Organization of American States reports that a quarter of Venezuelans are projected to flee that socialist hellhole, and the vast flood of refugees will socially destabilize four countries. According to the Caracas Chronicles:The United Nations estimates that a little over 4 million Venezuelans have already left the country. According to David Smolansky, the exiled former mayor of El Hatillo municipality in Caracas, and part of the OAS' taskforce on the Venezuelan crisis, almost 70% of these migrants are currently residing in just four countries: Colombia (1,3 million), Peru (850,000), Chile (288,000) and Ecuador (263,000), creating an extremely complex social crisis for the whole region.
It'll only get worse in the near future, unless a political change takes place in Venezuela. According to the report presented by Smolanky's team in the General Assembly, the organization expects that, by the end of 2020, the number of refugees will double to 8 million people, surpassing the number of Syrians displaced by war and becoming the largest migration crisis in the world.
It would represent 25% of all Venezuelans, and more than the entire population of countries like Paraguay or El Salvador.
Most countries, rather than recognize the need to throw Maduro out, will simply try to shut their doors, Caracas Chronicles' Juan Carlos Gabaldón writes. However, it won't stop the migrant flood. What will happen is that they will try to enter by illegal means. Gabaldón tentatively suggests that maybe they will try more dangerous sea crossings to tiny Trinidad and Tobago. Ummmm...
No, they're going to try to come here. There's little money from the United Nations to help them, and nations that have promised to help Colombia with its refugee flood aren't keeping their promises, as Gabaldón notes.
Guess who has the most unenforceable immigration laws. Guess who has the most liberal asylum laws. Guess who has a wide open thousand-plus-mile border. Guess who can never be deported once they get across, no matter what they do.
And in any case, it doesn't matter. They really are refugees. Unlike most denizens of Central America flooding the U.S. border, who come from countries with functioning democracies, growing economies, stable currency, and free trade, they aren't going to have to rely on asylum loopholes, such as renting a kid, to get in. The Venezuelans are bona fide asylum cases fleeing a U.N.-verified death squad regime that has already engaged in 7,000 U.N.-verified extrajudicial killings. It's also tortured, silenced, and starved for political reasons millions more. They put a political litmus test on who gets ration cards and medical care. That's asylum. It won't be just Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil that get destabilized by the doubling of Venezuela's refugee flood...
Frighteningly, the Venezuelans who manage to get here are going to be the ones with money. There is no money in Venezuela. Well, maybe with one exception: through the drug trade. Some, as a result of this ugly picture, already are joining the Colombian guerrillas, as I noted from Francisco Toro's essay the other day here. What's likely is that Venezuelans seeking to get here will hook up with the cartels in exchange for passage, get inside as refugees, and then pay the piper, effectively spreading the influence of the drug trade across the states. Desperate people do desperate things. The ones who come here may not be the most sympathetic Venezuelans the way the ones fleeing for their lives on foot across the Colombian or Brazilian border are. In fact, even Brazil has seen local conflicts with the Venezuelan migrant surge based on the criminals among them.
Unvetted migrants even with real reasons for fleeing are always a recipe for trouble.
And here we are, with Democrats refusing to do anything to halt the border flood, and every state in the Americas reluctant to hose the socialist hellhole out. It's like standing in the drain tunnel, waiting for the flood.
Image credit: ZiaLater via Wikimedia Commons, public domain CC BY-SA 0.0.
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