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Donald Trump and his followers have eagerly whipped up anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the US presidential campaign, as a growing number of migrants from Haiti and Venezuela arrive due to continuing crises at home.
Stories about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, have ultimately been proven to be false. And accounts of Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment blocks in Aurora, Colorado, have been called “an incredible exaggeration” by the city’s mayor.
Progressives have rightly challenged such accounts. But the absence of an effective counter-narrative about migration cedes ground to regressive messaging that reduces the complexities of human mobility to a zero-sum game between national populations and migrant-others.
As an anthropologist conducting research with Venezuelan migrants in Chicago, two points strike me as vital to changing the terms of this debate.
The first is that among the Venezuelans I work with – most of whom hold what’s known as temporary protected status – the US isn’t a place they ultimately plan to settle. Their overwhelming focus is on earning enough money to build a life back home. The second is that to truly understand migration, we need to place migrant experiences and motivations in historical context.
Working all hours
Two days after the televised presidential debate in September where Trump made repeated references to immigrants, I shared cold beers with eight young Venezuelan men in the backyard of a rented house on Chicago’s South Side.
Each had his own story of the journey to the US, with most making the perilous walk through the Darién Gap – or la selva (“the jungle”), as they call it – before claiming asylum at the Mexico-US border.
Having eventually been granted the right to work, the men are now employed on the same assembly line in a Chicago factory. Many of them also work as delivery drivers after hours.
“I don’t have to defend myself with words or argue with people,” says Hector, a 24-year-old from San Cristóbal in western Venezuela. “I just need to show that my work is good. In that way, I’m contributing to the better image of Venezuelans.”
Read more: Venezuelan migrants are boosting economic growth in South America, says research
Guillermo, a 38-year-old from Venezuela’s third-largest city, Valencia, works 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. When he isn’t working or resting, he’s on WhatsApp talking to friends and family, many of whom are among the estimated 8 million Venezuelans who now live abroad due to the country’s economic and political crisis.
Each week, Guillermo sends several hundred dollars home to his father, wife and daughter. He’s also been slowly working towards buying a house in his home city, a goal that motivates him amid the many hardships he’s endured abroad.
“I’m a guerrero [warrior],” he jokes as he recounts his journey since he left Venezuela in 2017. In that time, Guillermo has worked as a street vender in Colombia, a taxi driver under precarious conditions in Chile, and has crossed borders from Bolivia to Mexico on foot.
This determination to return is shared by Guillermo’s Venezuelan friends in Chicago, all of whom hope to go home despite recent allegations of electoral fraud against the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. “With Maduro, without Maduro, with whoever is there … eventually we want to return to our country,” Guillermo explains.
Read more: Venezuela: Maduro’s declaration of victory isn’t fooling anyone
Guerrilla redistribution
The reasons for Venezuela’s present situation are complex. Few would dispute the claim that Maduro has grossly mismanaged the economy. But there’s a longer backstory rooted in the deep inequalities between the global north and the global south, as well as the country’s vulnerability as a postcolonial petrostate that has repeatedly experienced cycles of boom and bust.
And then there are the sanctions that were levelled against the country by the Trump administration. According to researchers Benedicte Bull and Antulio Rosales, the sanctions have accelerated Maduro’s transformation of Venezuela into what they term “authoritarian capitalism”.
The bitter irony for the young people I work with is that all of this means they have had to travel thousands of miles to have a chance of building a better life at home. For Hector and Guillermo, the biggest difference between the US and countries like Chile or Colombia is the US dollar, the strength of which means their labour goes much further when it’s sent home in the form of remittances.
In this sense, perhaps a better way of understanding these recent arrivals to the US is that, against all the odds, they’re enacting a form of “guerrilla redistribution” in a profoundly unequal world. For progressives, the urgent political challenge is to widen the terms in which we understand what migration is and what it could be on a more just planet.
The research for this article was funded by the British Academy (SRG2324\240415). The author thanks Ana Mattioli for support with interview transcriptions.
