Venezuelan Immigration Crisis Costs Colombia

According to Colombian President Iván Duque, the World Bank will release a report this week pointing to the loss of 0.5 percent of Colombia’s GDP due to mass immigration of Venezuelan refugees into the country. Colombia Reports says that it is a fraction worth roughly $1.5 billion dollars.

Reuters estimates that around 1 million Venezuelans have entered Colombia over the past 16 months. The Vice President of the Council of the Americas, Eric Farnsworth, has stated that Colombia will be increasingly strained by the influx of the refugees, citing the host country’s dip in economic growth in 2017: their slowest pace of expansion since the global financial crisis, according to Bloomberg.

Venezuelans are fleeing the collapsing economy of their country, lacking basic amenities such as food and water; According to Devex, hyperinflation is set to hit 1 million percent this year. The refugees have entered other South American countries, but the mass of the exodus leads to Colombia, due to the shared frontier and previous leniency with refugees: a week before leaving office, former President Juan Manuel Santos granted 440,000 undocumented Venezuelans in Colombia permanent work and residency papers, reported the Miami Herald.

Such policies, however, appear to have taken a toll on the economy, as the country battles issues of its own such as corruption, drug trafficking, and constant guerilla threats from the FARC and ELN, despite the peace treaty signed in 2016.

Duque recently spoke at the UN General Assembly, stressing the need for a global response to the crisis. He reasserted the same views he had expressed in an interview with BBC when he said, “The most important thing at this moment is that if the dictatorship does not end, the migration will not stop.”