Abstract
Massive migrations have become increasingly prevalent over the last decades. A recent example is the Venezuelan migration crisis across South America, which particularly affects neighboring countries like Colombia. Creating an effective response to the crisis is a challenge for governments and international agencies, given the lack of information about migrants’ location, flows and behaviors within and across host countries. For this purpose it is crucial to map and understand geographic patterns of migration, including spatial mobility and dynamics over time. The aim of this paper is to uncover mobility and economic patterns of migrants that left Venezuela and migrated into Colombia due to the effects of the ongoing social, political and economic crisis. We analyze and compare the behavior of two types of migrants: Venezuelan refugees and Colombian nationals who used to live in Venezuela and return to their home country. We adapt the gravity model for human mobility in order to explain migrants’ dispersion across Colombia, and analyze patterns of economic integration. This study is a first attempt at analyzing and comparing two kinds of migrant populations in one destination country, providing unique insight into the processes of mobility and integration after migration.
Highlights
The Syrian Refugee crisis (Bakker et al 2019) and the displacement of millions of Venezuelans across South America (Palotti et al 2020) are two recent examples of massive migrations taking place around the world
Our results show that the internal distribution of migrants and returnees in Colombia follows patterns that are consistent with international migration
In this paper we explained and compared the mobility patterns of two different migrant populations in Colombia: Venezuelan migrants and Colombian nationals who return to their home country from Venezuela
Summary
The Syrian Refugee crisis (Bakker et al 2019) and the displacement of millions of Venezuelans across South America (Palotti et al 2020) are two recent examples of massive migrations taking place around the world. Efforts by governments and international agencies often focus on delivering effective responses to the humanitarian crises that arise from forced migrations (Bryant 2005). While tending to migrants’ urgent needs is undeniably important in the short-term, building the foundations for the future of these communities will have more permanent effects on the well-being of both migrants and natives (Alba and Nee 2009). The design of long-term policies to tackle migration crises should be rooted in a deeper understanding of the complexity of these events. Recent studies on international migration show the benefits that host countries can reap from the inflow of newcomers (Tabellini 2020). Some studies establish a link between migration and innovation (Kerr 2010), investment flows (Docquier and Rapoport 2012), and diversification of skills available in the host country’s labor force (Reitz 2005). Quantifying the attractiveness of specific cities for internal and international migrants is a current challenge for migration studies (Prieto-Curiel et al 2018)
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