Venezuela's Resource Curse, Monroe Doctrine and Embargo-Blockade
So, Title 42, the Trump-era anti-migration, anti-migrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights bill, expired last night. The US media is awash with alarmist reports about the coming "flood" of asylum seekers, and the Biden-administration's stern warnings that, although the anti-refugee law is gone, it will be even tougher for asylum seekers to gain the right to stay in the US. There is also the usual extreme-right drivel about gangs of "criminals and (potential) terrorists" coming.
When it comes to human interest stories, told both from the extreme-right and the liberal middle, (there being no system-critical "left" media in the US to speak of), Venezuelans are featured prominently. It is an indication of how useful Venezuelans are for current political purposes in the US are that, when Florida governor de Santis illegally pilfered state funds to transport freshly arrived refugees from Texas to Martha's Vineyard (a high class resort town in Massachusetts), the people so tricked into that humiliation were refugees who had arrived from Venezuela, of all places.
Venezuelans serve well symbolic purposes, both from an extreme-right and centrist-liberal point of view, because they are, ostensibly, coming to the US "to flee communism." The numbers that circulate are truly amazing: A whopping 7.2 million people have left the country; that's almost 25% of the population of Venezuela. Much more rarely is it pointed out that Venezuelan entrants in the US are only a fraction of that number. A very informative background study produced by the Migration Policy Institute reports that, based on census data, that, in 2021, 516 thousand people of Venezuelan origins (approximately one in fifteen of those who left Venezuela) lived in the US. The US media almost never points it out that much bigger numbers of Venezuelans are in Colombia, Peru and Chile than in the US (ibid.). Contrast that to the 45 MILLION people who are foreign-born in the US. Venezuelans constitute a mere 1.1% of that.
More interesting, overall, when it comes to the Venezuelans in the United States, "Venezuelan adults have higher rates of educational attainment than both the native- and overall foreign-born populations" (ibid.), and about "74 percent of Venezuelan immigrants ages 16 and older were in the civilian labor force in 2021, compared to 66 percent and 62 percent for the foreign- and U.S.-born populations, respectively" (ibid.). In other words, the US has had, clearly, "human / educational capital" gains from Venezuelan immigration, and it can be said, just on the basis of those cursory indicators about Venezuelans in the US, that Venezuela is experiencing an equivalent loss, something that could be called an "educated people's drain."
The background to all that is actually quite complex. I will try to say something about the Venezuelan context through a comparison of Venezuela against the backdrop of my "native" Hungary (think of it as just another semiperipheral society, in another part of the world, subject to slightly different, but no less pervasive, external geopolitical pressures throughout its longue-durée history), based on data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators online dataset.
To start with, throughout the entire post-world-war-2 period, Venezuela has had a greater global economic weight than Hungary.
The Hungarian story is that of a pretty much secular decline, dropping from ~.45% to ~.2% of the world economy, followed by a slow and moderate "wave" pattern. In contrast, Venezuela starts just above ~.5%, reaches a whopping ~.78% in 1977, followed by several periods of precipitous decline.
Aligning those lines with political history, Hungary's state socialist period shows tiny, almost immeasurable upswings (as between 1955 and 1959). The Chávez period shows a major drop followed by an upswing. After Chávez's death, Venezuela experienced a very precipitous decline. Between 2013 and 2019, Venezuela's share in the world economy was more than halved from (~.6% to ~.26%).
The post-Chávez economic disaster followed with a few years' delay the imposition of the now infamous, powerful US sanctions--in effect culminating in a total embargo, coupled an economic blockade--on Venezuela, the latter resulting in the outrageous denial, in a London court, of Venezuela's access to its foreign exchange and gold reserves, an scandal of global proportion.
The oil production figures suggest that Venezuela's remarkable performance in terms of global economic weight had everything to do, at least during the first half of the period since 1950, with its strong position in the world as an oil exporter. Dependence on a single resource commodity can, however, be a double-edged sword. This is quite well known in the historical sociology of dependent development. In that sense, that has little to nothing to do with "Communism" as a socio-political system per se. (Or with the extremely complex question of the extent to which any country, let alone specifically Venezuela, can be "Communist" in the current world. Or what it means to use that enormously heavy-handed label on any specific country in the world today. As a historical sociologist, every atom in my body is irritated by that vulgar simplification.) It is more a result of the geopolitical pressures put on a country, so-labeled by the western extreme-right and liberal media, by the US government and its closest allies.
Partly a result of the embargo-and-blockade, possibly prompted by other contributing factors in the global oil markets, Venezuela's figures in oil production (the country's main source of revenue) dropped precipitously. This seems to indicate clear presence of a resource curse--in this case, the disastrous effects of over-dependence on exports of a single raw material or energy resource.
As a result, per capita GDP--a widely used approximate measure of personal income--dropped precipitously.
Venezuela, a country that had, until the early 1980s, a per capita GDP one and a half times to twice that of Hungary, dropped below Hungary in 2002 and fell, by the end of the period, to ~56% of the world average (contrast that to Hungary's ~135%).
The per capita income dynamics align well with the historical periodization. Hungary's per capita GDP, which dropped from around the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, climbed back, ever so slowly, following a bit of a cyclical pattern. In contrast, Venezuela's per capita GDP dropped-and-climbed under Chávez, and underwent a catastrophic meltdown under the post-Chávez US embargo-and-blockade.
In short, the "spheres of influence" policy for the Americas Monroe Doctrine worked in the case of Venezuela. In a certain way, Venezuela's story today shows what would happen if Cuba, another major object of the sanctions-embargo-blockade treatment, moved to releasing the travel ban on its own citizens as part of its ostensible "opening up."
Put differently, it is a breathtaking simplification of reality to say that "Venezuelans are fleeing Communism to the US." It is a distortion, basically, on every part of that statement:
- It is not "Venezuelans in general" but the most educated (likely, also, the most privileged) people who are leaving,
- they are not simply "fleeing Communism" but the precipitous drops in living standards owing to the externally imposed sanctions-embargo-blockade on their economy, and
- they are not primarily going to the US but to other countries in Latin America.
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