Why Venezuelans are turning back home after years abroad

Economic collapse and political repression drove up to a third of Venezuela’s population to flee over the past decade. Some are now returning home and reembracing loved ones on Venezuelan soil. This is not the way it was supposed to happen. Venezuela’s top opposition leader has long vowed to reunite families by restoring democracy. That goal remains elusive. Although the dire economic conditions that fuelled the exodus have eased, the country is still a political pariah and military tensions with the US are rising fast.

Some Venezuelans are making the costly trek home anyway. For many, diaspora life has proved disappointing, even hostile in the US, where the Trump administration is revoking legal protections, rounding up immigrants and accelerating deportations. South American destinations like Chile and Ecuador aren’t as welcoming as they once were either. Venezuelan migrants, their accents softened by years living in places like Chicago, Buenos Aires or Madrid, yearn to see aging parents they left behind. Frustrated by poor job prospects and wary of simmering xenophobia, some are trying to make a fresh go of life back home, often keeping their suitcases open just in case.

Their arduous journeys illustrate the shifting dynamics of Venezuelan migration. It’s often family bonds that beckon. “I learned the hard way to start from the bottom up, but it was a very lonely life,” said Eduardo Rincón, 24, who returned to Caracas with his father and brother in July after two years in Miami. The three had obtained US parole status in 2023 and were working their way up. After a string of gigs, Rincón was earning up to $4,000 a month managing the front desk of a hotel in Brickell, enough to save and help support his mother back home. Then the Department of Homeland Security informed the trio that their parole status was revoked and warned of imminent deportation. “We didn’t qualify for asylum and decided to stick together and return,” Rincón said.

He now earns $600 a month handling communications for a plastics company in Caracas, barely enough to buy a monthly basket of food for a family of five, according to private-sector estimates. Rincón has set a one-year deadline to leave Venezuela again if things don’t improve. “It seems we’re doomed to choose between a better life economically, but without family and friends, and a poorer life, but surrounded by loved ones.” The reverse flow is still modest. In a recent report, the governments of Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia said more than 14,000 US-bound migrants, mostly Venezuelans, had turned around since Trump’s crackdown began in January. In Colombia, usually the last stop for returning Venezuelans, immigration authorities tallied around 12,000 heading back between January and June 2025. Nearly all of these were Venezuelan.

Seven out of 10 Venezuelans arriving in Panama said they wanted to return home, according to a study by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The International Organization for Migration made a similar finding in Central America. In another snapshot of the reverse flow, entries into Venezuela from Colombia accounted for 83% of all observed movements at the border, according to a July IOM study. Family reunification is among the main drivers of the north-to-south migration that UNHCR and other organizations started observing in late 2024. Other motivations include pursuing work in a chosen field, discrimination and trouble legalizing status.

Another is a perception, however tenuous, that Venezuela’s economy is recovering and living conditions have improved.

While strongman Nicolas Maduro has managed to check hyperinflation, the gap between Venezuela’s official currency exchange rate and the black market rate has widened to at least 65%, according to private-sector estimates. Economic data is scarce. The central bank last issued inflation figures a year ago, and the government has locked up economists who dared to publish estimates that challenged the official narrative of a country that has overcome US sanctions. What’s clear is that Venezuela pumps only around a third of the oil than it did in the 1990s, eroding the country’s main source of revenue. And although there are fewer blackouts, water cuts and fuel shortages than before, repression persists. Maduro’s leading foe, Maria Corina Machado, carries the torch for the opposition, from underground.

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have sent many Venezuelans packing. So far this year, more than 13,300 have been expelled on twice-weekly deportation flights, according to Venezuelan authorities. Thousands of others have crossed over from Colombia after enduring precarious journeys on flimsy boats from Panama, desperate to avoid the perilous Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia where migrants are vulnerable to extortion and violence. Smugglers who once ferried migrants to the US are now profiting by bringing them the other way.

Tribune News Service