WILLEMSTAD.- Since 2013, the number of people from Venezuela who requested a legal stay in Curaçao and who have been honored in their petitions amount to 9,752. Well, these are people who followed their legal journey to ask for a permit and got it too. This according to statements by the Minister of Justice, Dr. Quincy Girigorie at the meeting of the Central Commission of Parliament yesterday morning, this also agrees with a very limited estimate that the judicial authorities made, the number of people who are undocumented, they are in the order of approximately 16,000 people. This is based on the calculations of people who either stayed after their period of stay ended or people who entered our country through unusual or illegal routes.
It is known that at the moment that the situation in Venezuela broke down, a diaspora of people decided to leave the country in search of better welfare in other places and many of them entered illegal or became illegal, or others entered by sea illegally. Most people try to work to send money to Venezuela and help their families.
It is estimated that a group of 16,000 thousand people are illegally on our island. This means that, of our entire population, 9.82% or almost 10% are people who are here as a direct consequence of the difficult situation that the neighboring country is going through. From this we can conclude that the impact of the situation in Venezuela is much greater than that of other nations living in our region, taking into account the magnitude of the diaspora. If you take as an example a country like Colombia, which is one of the countries that has felt the greatest and most direct impact of the massive excess of Venezuelans, since it is stuck to Venezuela and many Venezuelans have chosen it to go there , here they have taken as 1 million Venezuelans that would be 2% of the total population of Colombia. In Colombia itself, they already have some problems to handle the situation of the surplus of Venezuelans moving. For if one should compare the impact that one or the other has on Curaçao, then it was something very big.
If we had to choose the situation in Holland, our big brothers in the Kingdom, they took 250,000 refugees, which is equivalent to 1.45% of the total population of the Netherlands. Again here in Curacao we speak of almost 10%, of which 3.73% is illegal based on a limited estimate and those illegal are around 6%.
