ABSTRACT
Contemporary migrations feature a wild diversity of types, causalities, and motivations for people to move that hardly fit current legal categories. This chapter examines the complexity of current flows of Venezuelan migrants in Latin America and the challenges for States to address migrants’ rights and needs. The Venezuelan experience shows that rather than exclusionary terms there is a continuum between voluntary migrant flight from poverty and forced migrant flight from insecurity and violence. However, States have been reluctant to recognise this complexity and still frame their responses in binary terms. We thus need to think of economic migrants and asylum-seekers as unstable categories that change over time and acknowledge that the distinction between choosing to migrate or being compelled to migrate is largely insufficient to face the challenge posed by contemporary migrations such as Venezuelans. Instead, a multidimensional understanding of Venezuelan migration is urgently needed to build more adequate State responses that take into consideration both social protection policies and long-term development interventions.
