Migration Seminar Series – “Transnational Migrations to the Americas and Venezuela”

Understanding the Venezuelan Displacement Crisis in times of COVID-19: By mid 2020, over 5 million people had fled Venezuela due to its political, economic, and social crisis. Most chose Latin American destinations, given the elevated economic and administrative costs of migrating to destinations in the global North:  1.76 million Venezuelan citizens officially resided in Colombia, 830,000 in Peru, 455,000 in Chile, 363,000 in Ecuador, and 265,000 in Brazil. This talk gives a broad overview of Venezuelan displacement and policy reactions in Latin America both prior to, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

Universal Citizenship and the Quest for Educational Access among Colombian Refugees in Ecuador: Under Ecuador’s constitutional notion of universal citizenship, youth are not required to have previous academic records to enter the equivalent of K-12 education, regardless of their migratory status. Despite these constitutional guarantees, refugee youth still have great difficulty enrolling in school in Ecuador. In this presentation, I analyze how access to school for Colombian refugee youth is shaped by the official and unofficial rules that regulate the formal education system.

Panelists
	Luisa Feline Freier Associate Professor of Social and Political Science Associate Editor, Migration Studies Universidad del Pacífico		Diana Rodriguez-Gomez Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Education Policy Studies
Lesley Bartlett, Professor of Educational Policy Studies; Faculty Director, Institute for Regional and International Studies; Editor, Anthropology and Education Quarterly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison