Migration from Venezuela

Did 7+ million really leave the country to flee socialism?

Daniel Coronel, a journalist with the US-based television network Univision, recently interviewed Colombian president Gustavo Petro. At about the 55 minute point of the interview, Coronel said to Petro that “the misery and repression that Venezuela has suffered at the hands of Maduro’s dictatorship has caused millions to flee.”

This little quip, this off-hand remark, is actually one of the major remaining regime change talking points about Venezuela.

We’ve addressed most of the others - the elections, the constitution, the notion that Venezuela is an “extraordinary threat” to the US - in our book. In a recent substack, we addressed the newest lie: that Venezuela is a meaningful source of drugs to the US.

In this one we address the idea that Venezuela should be destroyed because supposedly seven million Venezuelans have fled socialism.

We believe that anti-Maduro sources have 1. grossly exaggerated the scale of migration from Venezuela since 2015, 2. ignored that US sanctions have caused such migration as did occur, and 3. also ignored mass migration from U.S. client states like Ecuador.

Is this true though?

Pre-2015 lies about the scale and causes of Venezuelan migration

By the time Chavez died in 2013, Venezuela’s GDP per capita was close to achieving the historical peak it reached in 1977, After reaching that peak in 1977, Venezuela went through decades of ruinous decline. By 1992, the New York Times reported that “only 57% of Venezuelans are able to afford more than one meal a day.” But migration from Venezuela, compared to other Latin American countries, was never very significant despite this disaster. Despite outlandish claims in anti-Chavez media, emigration was still not significant while Chavez was in office, enacting policies to enable Venezuela’s recovery from the post-1977 decline.

In 2011, the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal erroneously reported a World Bank figure for the total number of Venezuelan-born people living anywhere else in the world as of 2010 (521,000) - a figure that included people who had left Venezuela in any year - as the total number of Venezuelans who left in 2010 alone.

In 2015, Reuters uncritically cited an anti-Chavez academic (Tomas Paez) who claimed that 1.5 million Venezuelans had left Venezuela since Chavez took office in 1999 - in other words that about 100,000 Venezuelans per year had left between 1999 - 2015. World bank figures at the time suggested about 25,000 Venezuelans per year left Venezuela during most of that period, about one quarter the number Reuters had uncritically accepted from Paez, and one twentieth the number El Universal had reported in 2011. [1]

TABLE 1

2015 - 2017 migration from Venezuela begins to take off for real

As a result of US sanctions and an oil price collapse, migration from Venezuela did, indeed, begin to explode in 2015.

A few months before Hugo Chavez died of cancer in 2013, he urged his supporters to vote for Nicolas Maduro as his successor. They did. Maduro won the snap election that was held in April 2013. But Maduro was immediately hit with violent US-backed protests that year - and then again in 2014 and 2017. Adding to Maduro’s difficulties, in the last quarter of 2014, the high oil prices on which Venezuela’s economy depended collapsed by half, and remained very low for years.

Early in 2015, Obama added to the pressure by imposing broad economic sanctions on Venezuela. Obama’s apologists deny the significance of the sanctions by saying they merely outlawed dealing with seven Venezuelan government officials that the US accused of human rights abuses. But this ignores the problem of “over compliance” with US sanctions, built into their design: scaring investors away from dealing with Venezuela at all. In addition to the sanctions, Obama officials successfully pressured banks not to make low risk loans to Venezuela’s government.

The combined impact of collapsed oil prices and Obama’s malevolence did indeed cause a sharp increase in migration. One way to confirm that migration from Venezuela did indeed begin to take off is to look at the number of Venezuelans arriving only in the US. If the U.S. had some powerful political incentive to do so, it would certainly exaggerate the number of Venezuelan migrants in the United States, but it has no need to do that. Even with the very low numbers of Venezuelan migrants - receiving only 7% of the migration that has been claimed since 2015 - it has treated them in an astoundingly cruel and lawless manner. According to Pew Research, as of 2024, Venezuelans were still only the ninth largest Latino group living in the United States despite the rapid growth in its population in recent years.

According to Pew Research, Venezuelan migration to the USA averaged 7,000 people per year between 2000 to 2013. It increased to 28,000 per year by 2015; then to about 44,000 per year in the 2015-2020 period. [2] Trump caused migration to accelerate when he dramatically intensified US sanctions on Venezuela in August of 2017, and then again in 2018, 2019 and 2020.[3]

TABLE 2:

A suspiciously low level of Venezuelan migration to the US

Today, UN Population Division data claims that 7.6 million people have left Venezuela since 2015. If that were accurate then one should expect to see a vastly higher number of Venezuelan migrants in the US. As of 2021, the UN Population Division claimed that over 5 million had left Venezuela since 2015. But as of 2021 (see below) the number of Venezuelan migrants in the US remained lower than from other Latin American countries that have much smaller populations than Venezuela: El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, and Honduras.

In the case of Ecuador, which has roughly half Venezuela’s population, its migrant population in the US was very close to Venezuela’s in 2021. During the 1990s and early 2000s, migration from Ecuador to the US skyrocketed. As shown in Table 3, between 2013 - 2021 migration slowed tremendously., But as of 2024, Ecuador, which has been under disastrous pro-US rightwing rule since 2017 (as it was during the 1990s and early 2000s) provides the second largest growing Latino migrant community in the US after Venezuela according to Pew Research.[4]

Table 3

Reliable data collection and collaboration with the Lima Group don’t mix

As of 2020, the UN Population Division had been reporting that just under 2 million Venezuelans had migrated from 2015 - 2019, about half the figure other UN agencies were reporting. The much higher figures were the ones widely amplified by western media. But the UN Population Division dramatically revised its numbers upward around the time of a conference that took place in Ottawa on June 17, 2021. The conference was held to raise money for Venezuelan migrants and refugees. It was hosted by the Canadian government “in collaboration with” the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the International Organization for Migration” .

In 2017, the Canadian government spearheaded the formation of the “Lima Group”. Canada recruited rightwing Latin American governments into this group which had the explicit aim of overthrowing Maduro - “reporting democracy in Venezuela” as they put it. After 2019, the Lima Group recognized the US-appointed Juan Guaido as the interim president of Venezuela. The Lima Group was joined by Bolivia in 2020 while the country was run by the US-backed fascist dictator, Jeanine Áñez.

We should not have to explain how damning it is that various UN agencies that provide data on migration from Venezuela were openly collaborating with the Lima Group. Moreover, as Venezuelan researchers with SURES have pointed out, increased estimates of Venezuelan migrants leads to increased budgets for UN agencies and NGOs who work with them. As one of us (Emersberger) observed, other UN agencies, including UNICEF, have made extremely dubious revisions to historical data that appear motivated by a desire to bolster US propaganda.

Ignored Estimates, and trends that would have emptied Venezuela by now

The surveys done by anti-Maduro Venezuelan academics (ENCOVI surveys) suggest about 2.3 million people left Venezuela between 2015 to 2019. (Data in Table 4 below is taken from ENCOVI surveys here and here.) [5] That’s very similar to what the UN Population Division estimated before it drastically revised its data upwards.

Table 4: ENCOVI Estimates

In a February 2019 interview with the BBC, President Maduro gave an estimate of “no more than” 800,000 Venezuelans who had migrated in the previous two years (2017 and 2018).[6] That’s not far off what ENCOVI estimated.

Anti-Maduro Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez noted in a 2024 paper that Venezuela’s economy has been in recovery since 2020 posting four straight years of positive economic growth despite U.S. sanctions. Rodriguez observed that UN agencies have documented a big reduction in the rate of migration from Venezuela since 2020. But their estimates were so high from the 2015-2018 period that they had to come way down regardless of any economic recovery. At the rate the UN Population Division claims Venezuelan migration was accelerating between 2015 to 2018, Venezuela would have been completely empty by 2023 had the trend continued.[7] Despite this, all accounts confirm that there are indeed Venezuelans still in Venezuela.

A Venezuelan researcher explained to us the various problems with double counting that can occur, setting aside deliberate manipulation of the data (which we believe occurred). She told us that a large number of Venezuelans returned during the COVID pandemic - often through uncontrolled points (trochas). People often returned then migrated again creating one possibility for double counting. It is not clear how many people work in border areas near Colombia but actually continue to reside in Venezuela, or get counted as residing in Colombia despite having moved to another country.

We do not deny that there has been a massive and unprecedented amount of migration from Venezuela since 2015, but we do not believe the numbers cited in western media. No one should blindly accept claims made by UN agencies and NGOs that have a track record of serving US imperialism - especially when Washington ramps up the pressure on an official enemy.

NOTES:

[1] The data in Table 1 can be found here, here, here and here.

[2] The data in Table 2 can be found here, here and here

[3] Table 1 of this paper by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez provides a timeline of US sanctions on Venezuela.

[4] 2021 is the most recent year for which we could find data for Latino groups in the US broken down into “US born” and “foreign born” (migrants).

[5] The 2017 Ecovi study found 815,000 emigrated between 2012 to 2017 of which 11.5%, 38.5% and 40.3% emigrated in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively. The figures were then updated to 2019.

[6] See the 3 minute mark of the video

[7] Rodriguez provides annual UN Population Division migration data in his paper. Using this curve fit website, we fit a second order polynomial through the data points for 2016, 2017 and 2018 to establish a trend line. We then projected that trend into future years. By 2023, 29 million Venezuelans would have migrated. The World Bank estimates Venezuela current population as 28.4 million