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

The economic, political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela intensified in the last few years and has led to the largest migration crisis in the region’s modern history. Since 2015, the number of migrants from Venezuela has increased strikingly and the composition of the major destination countries has changed fundamentally. This paper investigates what factors determined the choice of destination country of Venezuelan migrants in the pre- and post-2015 period. Exploiting United Nations migration data for 230 countries from 1990 to 2017, this paper applies 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 due to its high economic standard of living 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 close countries.