Venezuelan migration to Lima, Peru: Challenges of employment integration for the immigrants in the capital

• In Event: 30821 - Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8

Abstract

Peru is the country with the second-largest population of Venezuelan residents. While Colombia has the largest population, Lima has the most significant urban population of Venezuela outside of Venezuela, with more than 1.1 million people. There has come out multiple articles and reports in recent years about Venezuelans in Peru facing discrimination and many obstacles to finding jobs, stable incomes, and housing. This project seeks to understand why Venezuelans stay in Peru despite these challenges, with a particular focus on employment.
The research objective is to understand more about the labor trajectories of Venezuelan immigrants who have settled in Lima, Peru, in recent years. Given how large the Venezuelan migration has been, it is relevant to comprehend how they adapted to the places they migrated to and the challenges they faced to integrate into Peruvian society. Furthermore, I point out their strategies to find jobs and stability for themselves and their families. From a qualitative approach, I conducted fourteen semi-structured interviews with Venezuelan immigrants, men and women who have settled in Lima in the last five years, before the endurance of the Peruvian immigrant Laws in 2019. In order to explore these job trajectories regarding their accessibility to papers to work in the city.
My study shows that Venezuelans create and configure particular and creative strategies to improve their economic situation in the Peruvian capital, such as accepting jobs in new and unknown fields, self-training to accomplish a task, and constantly networking regarding their high soft skills. By focusing on Venezuelan immigrants with previous work experience and professional background, I show how they transition from low- to high-skill jobs as entrepreneurs and freelance consultants, among others.

Author

• Rodrigo Mezarina Muriel, University of Florida