The Scale of Venezuela's Exodus

Comparisons to Ireland's Great Hunger or the Syrian civil war are not absurd

Venezuelans eating garbage in Caracas, 2018; photo by NoonIcarus

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On the eve of the Great Hunger, Ireland’s population was over 8 million. Beginning in 1845, the blighting of the Irish potato crop and the famine that followed killed on the order of a million people, and over the decade that followed something like a quarter of the population of the country—about 2 million people—fled, primarily for Great Britain and its colonies and for the United States. The population of Ireland has still to this date not exceeded its mid-19th century peak, and, given recent trends in fertility, it likely never will. Meanwhile, the Irish diaspora had a major impact on culture across the English-speaking world, with upwards of 100 million people worldwide having some significant Irish ancestry.

On the eve of its recent civil war, Syria’s population was over 22 million. Over the course of the war, which killed over half a million people and displaced over half the country from its homes, nearly a third of the population—around 6.5 million people—fled, primarily to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, but also to other Middle Eastern countries and to a number of European countries, Germany being by far the largest recipient on that continent. It’s too soon to know the prospects for Syria’s recovery, but the refugee crisis altered the politics of Europe in a serious way.

I have, of course, been aware of the ongoing economic catastrophe in Venezuela, and the consequent tide of people leaving the country. But until the Biden Administration’s recent decision to allow half a million Venezuelans living in the United States who either entered illegally or are claiming asylum to seek legal employment, I did not realize that the exodus from Venezuela is of a similar scale to those other catastrophes. The population of Venezuela in 2014 was around 30 million people. Something like 7.5 million Venezuelans have fled the country since then. The vast majority have gone to other countries in Latin America, but hundreds of thousands have made their way to the United States, and it is likely, given the many difficulties in establishing a stable life elsewhere in the region, that many will continue to migrate north.

This feels like something new to me. Venezuela is not being torn apart by a horrific civil war that has laid waste to its major cities, nor is there mass death on the anything like the scale of Ireland’s Great Hunger. I do not think I am minimizing the suffering of Venezuelans to note those truths. But life in Venezuela has gotten so hopeless, with so few prospects for improvement, that an enormous percentage of the country sees leaving as the only sensible option even though leaving may involve an extremely hazardous journey that often enough proves fatal.

Of course, it’s not new that some people make such a decision—people have been flying poverty, violence and oppression for generations, and there’s been a statue in New York harbor since 1886 that encourages such people to come here. It’s the scale of emigration as a percentage of the population, in the absence of civil war or something similar, that feels extraordinary to me. A quarter of a country just walking away, and the remaining population outright declining (Venezuela’s population is estimated to have dropped by nearly 14% since its 2016 peak)—I honestly don’t know how plausible it is for a country to come back from something like that. At a certain point, expectations of further decline become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t really have a policy conclusion here. I think supporters of immigration are generally a bit blithe to the sheer numbers potentially involved, and opponents are generally a bit blithe to the difficulty of preventing determined people from entering (note the trouble that the far-right Giorgia Meloni is having trying to decide what to do about Lampedusa). But this is a post about the other side of the coin, about emigration. I usually think of emigration as coming primarily from countries experiencing demographic expansion but unable to generate adequate economic opportunity for the growing population (Mexico’s situation in the 1990s), or from countries newly integrated into a larger economic and political structure where emigration for economic reasons becomes much easier (Poland’s situation after joining the EU in 2004). Venezuela, though, is a story about mass emigration from a failed society. The sheer scale of that emigration in the absence of war startled me, and made me wonder how many other countries might experience something similar: a collapsing sense of hope severe enough to prompt a huge percentage of the country just to leave.

I doubt Venezuela will be the last.