Comparing Colombia’s and Brazil’s educational responses to Venezuelan refugees and migrants

• In Event: Displacement, schooling, and inclusion: Experiences and comparisons across diverse contexts

Proposal

Nearly 6.5 million of the world’s 7.7 million Venezuelan migrants are in countries within Latin America. Of the Venezuelans in Latin America, those who migrate to Brazil have a markedly different, and likely more difficult, migration experience than those who migrate to Spanish-speaking countries. And yet, over 600,000 Venezuelans are currently in Brazil, with the number expected to increase due to the recent political turmoil related to Venezuela’s 2024 presidential elections. Bordered by Brazil to the south and Colombia to the east, ambulatory migrants who leave Venezuela must go to one country or the other, either as their final destination or as one stop along a longer journey. Therefore, understanding the educational responses in Colombia and Brazil are key to understanding the experiences of Venezuelan students, no matter where they ultimately reside. This presentation will offer an in-depth, comparative review of the educational responses to Venezuelan students in Colombia and Brazil.
Preliminary findings show that Colombia’s educational response to the influx of Venezuelans has been heralded by the international community as the gold standard for receiving and integrating migrants and refugees students. This includes promising migrant children access to public schools, the creation of special stay permits, and entrance exams in the absence of documentation of previous schooling. However, numerous accounts outline barriers to education for migrant students in Colombia such as lack of awareness about the policies, xenophobia, and lack of educational resources.
Venezuelan parents report lack of awareness as a barrier to access. Some parents report not enrolling their children in school because they assume they would not be allowed to due to their lack of documentation (Caarls, 2021). For example, a 2018 study showed that 44% of surveyed Venezuelan migrants in the border regions of Norte de Santander and La Guajira believed that they had to present documentation to enroll their children in school (Norwegian Refugee Council, 2019). Xenophobia is an issue that arises both in and outside of the classroom causing Venezuelans to opt-out of sending their children to school due to its serious mental ramifications. Scholars are findings an “ever-increasing” risk of discrimination and xenophobia targeted at Venezuelan migrant students given their socioeconomic status (which tends to be lower than that of their Colombian peers) and their age (given that they are often older than their classmates due to learning loss and a pause in their formal schooling) (Hernández-Granados et al., 2020, p. 104). An overstretched education system presents another barrier to access for Venezuelan migrant children in Colombia (Oberholzer, 2021). Colombia is one of many “neighboring host countries” which tend to have “over-stretched education systems and fragile political and economic institutions” (Dryden-Peterson, 2016, p. 474). Indeed, Colombia has an “enormous historical deficit of infrastructure and equipment in public education” (Radinger, T., et al., 2018, p. 29). The influx of Venezuelan migrants has further strained this educational system – so much so that Venezuelan students report being turned away from schools due to lack of space and resources to enroll them (Pinto et al., 2019). A cost-analysis of department-level expenditures per student revealed that there was not a statistically significant difference between the spending per student in departments with more or less Venezuelan students. The lack of additional per-child education expenditures in areas with a higher percentage of Venezuelan students reveals that fund distribution is not sensitive to the number of migrant students and, in turn, do not make up for the extra funds needed to enroll migrant students in school (Coombes et al., 2022).
Brazil’s educational response, on the other hand, has neither been celebrated nor scrutinized to the extent that practitioners and researchers have documented on Colombia’s educational response. As was stated before, by the end of 2023, there were over 600,000 Venezuelan migrants and refugees in Brazil, the majority of whom have settled in Roraima, a state in the north of Brazil (UNHCR, 2024). According to a study conducted in 2021, 20% of Venezuelan refugees were children under the age of 20 and only 42% were enrolled in school (Shamsuddin, 2021), which is lower than the global average of 49% of forcibly displaced children enrolled in school (UNHCR, 2023b). While Brazil also opens their educational system to migrant children, with or without documentation, their education system also has limited resources and is oftentimes unable to accommodate the large influx of students. Similar to Colombia, xenophobia is rampant in Brazil, further marginalizing Venezuelan migrants. Relatedly, Brazil fails to make systematic accommodations for the language barrier that exists for Venezuelan students (da Silva Lucena & De Nardi, 2023). For example, in the past, when refugees and migrants from Syria and Haiti arrived in Brazil, they were left with no formal language support, though legally they were promised access to education. Any language support they received often came from NGOs and universities, which offer courses in Portuguese as an Additional Language (Torquato, 2014). Now, as Venezuelans arrive, they are left with even less support because of an incorrect assumption that Spanish is close enough to Portuguese, and therefore, as the logic goes, Venezuelans do not need any language support. A case study from the North of Brazil reveals how the Spanish language occupies a “place of exclusion” in society and in schools (da Silva Lucena & De Nardi, 2023). The researchers report observing instances in which the use of Spanish was forbidden or discouraged within educational spaces. da Silva Lucena and De Nardi (2023) find that the lack of clear policies for schools and teachers on how to integrate Venezuelan students and support their learning has resulted in a “fragile and improvised response” (p. 61).
The comparison between the two countries’ educational responses to Venezuelan migrants illuminates key takeaways for refugee education, including the need for humanitarian action plans aligned with education sector planning, the importance of flexible finance structures that allocate adequate additional funding, and the imperative of preparing educators in culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies.

Authors

• Yasmina Eugenia Haddad, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin-Madison