Global atlas

Latin America · data through 2024

Venezuela

Venezuela is the origin of the largest displacement situation in the Americas, with most people hosted by neighbouring countries in the region.

Twenty five year view

Movement in both directions

These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.

Why people move

Leading documented drivers

  • • Collapse of income, healthcare, and food security
  • • Regional regularisation schemes that allow legal stay
  • • Family reunification with earlier arrivals
  • • Onward movement north when regional work is unavailable

Economic collapse, hyperinflation, and the breakdown of health and food systems drove one of the fastest growing outward movements anywhere. Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador host the largest communities, with regularisation programmes of varying strength.

Connections

Where movement connects

Common destinations

Colombia, Peru, United States, Brazil, Chile, Spain

Common origins

Colombia, Ecuador

Adapting and finding support

What helps

Professional qualifications are widely held and rarely recognised. Regularisation status can change with each administration, which makes long term planning difficult.

Regional regularisation and documentation programmes are the decisive step for work and schooling.

Use the support guide

Research that explains this pattern

What the scholarship says

Behavioural economics

Loss aversion and the reference point

People judge a possible future against the life they already know, and a loss weighs far heavier than a gain of the same size.

Families stay longer than a purely financial calculation would suggest, then move suddenly once the home situation itself starts to feel like the loss.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory, 1979

Anthropology

Why corridors keep themselves alive

Each person who arrives lowers the cost and risk for the next, through housing, jobs, information, and trust. The route becomes self sustaining.

Corridors persist long after the original cause has faded, and policy alone rarely closes them.

Douglas Massey and colleagues, cumulative causation and network theory

Psychology

Acculturative stress

The strain of language, status loss, discrimination, and unfamiliar systems produces a measurable load on health, distinct from the trauma of any journey.

Distress often peaks one to three years after arrival, not on the first day.

John W. Berry and colleagues; later clinical work on migrant mental health

Read the full scholarship library

Support inside and beyond Venezuela

Organisations people actually use

R4V, Response for Venezuelans platform

Coordinated regional information on services, shelter, documentation, and integration.

Venezuelans across Latin America and the Caribbean

Open

UNHCR Help

Country by country guidance for refugees, people seeking asylum, and stateless people.

Refugees and people seeking asylum

Open

IOM country offices

Assistance, voluntary return, reintegration, and counter trafficking support through the local office.

Anyone moving, arriving, or returning

Open

These are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.

Ask for support in Venezuela

This is guidance and connection to organisations. It is not legal advice and it is not an emergency service.

Sources and reading

Venezuela data in the UN DESA International Migrant StockVenezuela data in the IOM World Migration ReportVenezuela data in the Migration Policy Institute data hubUNHCR Global Trends

Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.