[News]Colombia seeks to regularize one million undocumented Venezuelans

[WilkerCSBD]

The Government of Colombia intends to regularize about one million undocumented Venezuelan migrants who are already in its territory through a temporary protection statute valid for 10 years. The project ratifies the policy of reception and migration flexibility that the country has maintained through thick and thin, with a roadmap to integrate Venezuelan families that have settled throughout its territory in recent years. It also becomes a gateway to the offer of State services, on the eve of the start of the mass vaccination that from next February 20 seeks to immunize the po[CENSORED]tion in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.

"We make public the decision of our country to create a temporary protection statute in Colombia, which allows us to carry out a process of regularization of those migrants who are in our country," declared President Iván Duque, after meeting in Bogotá with the high UN Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi. "We are not a rich country, we are a middle-income country and we have made a great fiscal effort to face this situation," the president recalled. He pointed out that he hopes that other countries in the region will follow that example, and that the international community will contribute resources and tools to serve the migrant po[CENSORED]tion. "With this, Colombia reaffirms its love and support for all the Venezuelan people who have been victims of this tragedy," he concluded in reference to the regime of Nicolás Maduro.

More than five million Venezuelans have fled their country driven by hyperinflation, insecurity or food and medicine shortages in recent years, a massive flow that has intensified with the deterioration of the economic crisis and the institutional blockade in Caracas . Of them, a third have settled in search of opportunities in neighboring Colombia, with which Venezuela shares more than 2,200 kilometers of a porous border with many informal crossings known as "trails." At the end of 2020, there were 1,729,537 Venezuelans on the other side of the border line, of which 966,714 were in an irregular situation —that is, they have entered the trails, or have exceeded the terms of the permit granted—, in accordance with the Colombia Migration figures. During 2019 the number in an irregular situation multiplied by two, and stabilized at that point during the first third of 2020, when the pandemic completely changed the expectations of all the inhabitants of the region.

The legal mechanism announced —complementary to the international refugee protection regime, as explained by the Colombian authorities— essentially seeks to achieve a single registry of the Venezuelan migrant po[CENSORED]tion —which the authorities plan to start operating in just over three months— granting the temporary benefit of regularization and eventually facilitate their transition to the ordinary immigration regime. The measures include all regular Venezuelan migrants, those who are in Colombia in an irregular situation by January 31, 2021, and those who enter Colombia through a migration checkpoint during the first two years of validity of the nascent Temporary Statute. of Protection for Venezuelan Migrants (ETPV).

"It is an emblematic humanitarian gesture for the region, even for the whole world," said Grandi, the head of UNHCR, noting that it represents a commitment to human rights and will allow, among others, greater vaccination coverage in the midst of the pandemic care. "This important act of solidarity will allow approximately one third of the five million Venezuelan refugees and migrants in the region to formally access services and contribute to the Colombian economy," underlined a statement by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres.

The pandemic has exposed the precarious conditions of Venezuelan migrants scattered throughout Latin America. In Colombia, by far the main host country, they are among the sectors most exposed to the coronavirus. The vast majority, especially those without papers, are part of the vulnerable sections of society that have felt most strongly the onslaught of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic —nu