The Numbers of Venezuelan International Migration: Reviewing Estimations to Measure Its Worldwide Outflow.

Thaís García Pereiro , Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro"
Victoria Prieto Rosas, Universidad de la Republica

During the last two decades Venezuela has progressively transformed from immigration to emigration country due to the profound socio-economic, political and institutional crisis that began during the government of Hugo Chávez and have accentuated after Maduro’s takeover. How many are they? A brief assessment of the situation through the main web portals of important institutions (UN/OIM, R4V, UNHCR) is enough to find important inconsistencies. Basically, numbers don't add up, are we counting about 2 million, or 4? The need to compare the available numbers and to carefully evaluate not only how the information has been collected but also what use it is intended to make of it thus immediately arises. This research will describe Venezuelan international migration beyond the current circumstances (2013-2017) by highlighting the different stages of Venezuelans emigration since 1990. Special attention will be dedicated to review available estimations as well as methodologies they are built on by considering: i) administrative data (SICREMI, IOM, UNHCR), ii) demographic estimations (UN Migration Data) and other estimations + projections (R4V and OIM), and iii) statistical data sources (census, household surveys, ENCOVI). An important effort will be made to examine differences by data source to identify main issues and caveats they are fraught with and to provide a set of recommendations for users of available estimations (academia, NGOs, governments, UN, OIM). So far, we do not know about the existence of similar contributions trying to approximate the level of congruence of the numbers of current emigration of Venezuelans.

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 Presented in Session 65. Crisis-Driven Migration and Its Consequences