Media Rubbish about Venezuelans Who Have Left to Live Abroad

Colombians wait to enter Venezuela at the closed border between the two countries. | Photo: Reuters

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 145,000 Venezuelans immigrated to the U.S. from 1990 to 2011.

Girish Gupta of Reuterswrote in a recent article:

“Around 5 percent of Venezuela's population of 30 million has left the country since [the late President] Chavez came to power in 1999, said Caracas-based sociologist Tomas Paez, who has published papers and books on migration.”

I wrote to Gupta arguing that the claim that 1.5 million Venezuelans have left since 1999 is far-fetched. In his reply Gupta accused me of “cherry picking” a “tangential” piece of his article. Presumably, if he found the claim tangential, he would not have mentioned it. I’ve since discovered the claim to be even more ridiculous than I thought.

Before addressing that, one should note that Venezuela has twice as many immigrants as it has emigrants according to the World Bank figures cited below. Also, according to the UNHCR, about 200,000 Colombians are living as refugees in Venezuela. Less than 237 Venezuelan refugees are in Colombia. People who believe the international media would assume it is the other way around. Venezuela has long been depicted as a hell from which people are desperate to escape, Colombia as an oasis of human rights and prosperity, or at least a country where nothing particularly bad is happening. An Aug. 23 Financial Times op-ed, for example, claimed that Colombia has “emerged as a superstar economic performer.” I’ve written before about the gruesome way Colombia really stands out in the region.

Returning to the claim that 1.5 million Venezuelans have left since 1999, the U.S. has been widely reported as the top destination for Venezuelans who have left their country. The U.S. government has the resources to produce reliable statistics on Venezuelan immigrants and has no incentive to produce underestimates. Combining U.S. Census Bureau with Homeland Security data, it is clear that about 100,000 Venezuelans immigrated to the United States from 2000-2011 and that, overwhelmingly, they have either done so legally or obtained legal residency very quickly. As of 2013, according to U.S. Homeland Security, about 9,500 Venezuelans per year were getting legal residency, suggesting no recent change in the average number arriving. Judging by overseas voting statistics from 2013, it appears that about a third of Venezuelan immigrants live in the U.S. Assuming one out of every three Venezuelans who left since 1999 came to the U.S., the data above would yield an estimate of 392,000 leaving Venezuela by 2013, or about 28,000 per year from 1999-2013.

That figure may overestimate how many left Venezuela to live in Spain, Panama and other countries. World Bank figures ( here and here ) say that the population of former Venezuela residents living abroad grew from 463,759 to 521,000 from 2005 to 2010. That works out to about 12,000 per year leaving Venezuela to live abroad during that period, but even 28,000 per year is a very far cry from 100,000 leaving per year since 1999 – the average rate required for the figure Girish Gupta reported to be accurate.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 145,000 Venezuelans immigrated to the US.. from 1990 to 2011. That figure includes people living in the U.S. legally and illegally, and it represents over 80 percent of all Venezuelan-born people living in the United States as of 2011. According to the U.S. Homeland Security Department, 135,000 Venezuelan immigrants obtained legal residency over the same period. Therefore the number of undocumented Venezuelan immigrants living in the U.S. is possibly as low as 10,000. It is unsurprising, when you consider these figures, that Venezuela has never cracked the U.S. government’s top ten list of countries of origin for undocumented immigrants. Ecuador, which has half Venezuela’s population, has consistently been in the top ten. As of 2012, Ecuador held the number nine spot on the list with 170,000 undocumented immigrants in the USA thanks to the ruinous two decades before Rafael Correa first took office in 2007.

Reporting about Venezuelan emigration has often been terrible. In 2007, a Reuters article uncritically cited “Venezuelan activists” based in Florida who said there were 160,000 Venezuelans “living in the United States illegally or on overstayed visas.” A Huffington Post article counted U.S. residents of Venezuelan origin (which includes about 80,000 people born in the U.S.) as Venezuelan-born people who immigrated to the U.S. In 2011, an article in the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal erroneously reported a 2010 World Bank figure for the total number of Venezuelan-born people living abroad (521,000) as the total number of Venezuelans who left in that year alone. Years later, that glaring mistake stands uncorrected. Perhaps that is why a 2014 article in El Universal vaguely cited “other statistics” that claimed 500,000 Venezuelans lived in the USA.

Girish Gupta, as I noted here, once reported that homicides in Venezuela were creating a coffin shortage. He should be embarrassed to have spread that ludicrous claim. Much more importantly, he should have learned to be very cautious about numbers provided by somebody like Tomas Paez, a very fierce opponent of the government as is obvious from his tweets.

I suggested to Gupta that he inquire if the Tomas Paez he cited was the same person who signed an emphatic letter welcoming the short-lived Carmon dictatorship into power after a coup in April of 2002. The letter was a paid ad placed in El Nacional, a Venezuelan newspaper, and signed by numerous “civil society” leaders including Jesus Torrealba, head of main Venezuelan opposition party (MUD). Gupta replied telling me that he would no longer read my emails.

Judging by all the lousy reporting we see, Gupta’s determination to see only one side of a story is not uncommon among corporate journalists.

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