Understanding the global patterns of Venezuelan migration: determinants of an expanding diaspora

ABSTRACTThe economic, political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela intensified since 2015 and has led to the largest migration crisis in the region’s modern history. In parallel, the composition of the major destination countries has changed fundamentally. This paper investigates the factors determining the choice of destination country of Venezuelan migrants in the pre- and post-2015 period. Exploiting the United Nations migration dataset (for 230 countries from 1990 to 2017), we apply a Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator to a modified gravity model of migration. The results suggest that Venezuelans were generally choosing a certain destination country based on economic criteria in times of relative stability (1990 to 2015). However, this determinant loses its importance during times of crisis (2015 to 2017), when Venezuelans were primarily immigrating to geographically proximate nations. Consistently for both periods Venezuelans appear to migrate in larger numbers to destinations with an already established network of compatriots.