By Gregory Scruggs
PORT OF SPAIN, July 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Underneath a sign reading “Jesus was a refugee”, a line of Venezuelan asylum seekers 30 people long stretches in front of a Catholic church in Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain.
They have fled their homeland, where a political crisis and crippling recession have left people in the once-prosperous South American country jobless, battling poverty, and struggling with chronic shortages of food, medicine and other essentials.
Miguel Vegas, 39, was an ambulance driver in Aragua state. He left after armed men hijacked his vehicle and held a gun to his head for a ride across town.
Last August, he flew to Trinidad, began working in construction and applied for asylum.
He and his wife, a former healthcare worker, sat on the curb with their two sons, waiting for Living Water Community, Trinidad’s reception centre for refugee and asylum applicants, to open.
“We just want permission to work. We want to pay taxes,” Vegas told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I’m simply looking for a basic quality of life for my future, which is my kids.”
The family are among about 3,300 Venezuelans who had petitioned for asylum in Trinidad and Tobago as of April – more than in any other Caribbean country, according to the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR).
The twin-island nation is an increasingly popular destination for middle-class Venezuelans looking for a fast exit, as it is just a 30-minute flight from the eastern part of their country or a couple of hours by boat.
Once in Trinidad, a stable oil and gas-producing state with the highest per-capita GDP in the region, many don’t look back.
“I’m a refugee in the sense that I don’t want to return to Venezuela,” Vegas told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I can’t deal with the unemployment, the crime, the abandonment.”
Whether Trinidad wants them is less clear.
The nation faces the existential question of whether a small island can absorb significant numbers of refugees.
Despite signing onto the U.N. Refugee Convention in 2000, the country has yet to adopt an asylum law.
In April, the government deported 82 Venezuelans in a move the UNHCR called “a breach of international law”.
Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Keith Rowley bristled at the criticism. He told local media his country was “a little island” with limited space and 1.3 million people, and could not be turned into “a refugee camp” by the United Nations.
Trinidadian independent researcher Michele Reis said the country has “systematically failed to have an adequate migration policy”, despite its multi-cultural demographics reflecting historic waves of newcomers, from European colonisers to enslaved Africans and indentured Indian labour.
