State control + human rights : Venezuelan displacement to Colombia and lessons from South American migration governance

The emigration of 5.6 million Venezuelans since 2015 means that South America is undergoing the largest forced displacement in the region’s history. On March 1 2021, the Colombian government, the main receiving country of Venezuelan migrants, issued an Executive decree that made headlines across the world. Decree 216 of 2021 could potentially regularise around 2.5 million forcibly displaced Venezuelans residing irregularly in Colombia. If successful, this would be one of the largest regularization processes in the world. Why did the Colombian government make such a ‘risky’ decision? It did so, I argue, because the Colombian government followed a typically South American ‘state control + human rights’ approach to migration governance, which rests on an understanding of migration as an ‘inevitable’ phenomenon