Scholars of Excellence Workshop – Complex migration motivations: Venezuelan pathways in Latin America and the Caribbean

The Venezuelan socioeconomic collapse over the past two decades has caused more than seven million migrants to seek refuge in neighbouring countries, leading to one of the largest displacements of people in the world. Neighbouring countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean have turned nearly overnight from emigration senders to immigration hosts as well as transit countries. There has been significant research on processes of reception and integration, as well as on the challenges, marginalization and anti-immigrant xenophobia experienced in the region, as well as on regional migration governance processes and comparative perspectives. On the other hand, there has been less attention given to what can be learned from similar processes in South, Central and North America when it comes to managing cross-border mobility and building informal structures for solidarity and integration. The aim of this workshop is to develop such comparative insights, bringing together four papers focusing on very different countries: Chile and Argentina, two traditional migration destinations in South America, and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) of the southern Caribbean including Trinidad & Tobago, Aruba, Curacao and Guyana which have been transformed through Venezuelan migration in the last decade.