Medellín, Colombia – President Daniel Noboa on Tuesday made changes to Ecuador’s migration policy, rescinding amnesty for Venezuelan migrants searching for a legal pathway to residency in the country.
The move disrupted decades of immigration cooperation between the two countries and came just days after Noboa criticized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for rejecting flights of Venezuelan citizens deported from the United States.
As of December 2024, 7.89 million Venezuelans have left the country, with the majority having ended up in neighboring Colombia, but an estimated 445,000 have settled in Ecuador as of last year, according to the Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela. (The numbers were higher before recent security and political unrest in Ecuador).
Following years of mass migration out of Venezuela due to political and economic instability, in 2022, Ecuador took steps to make it even easier for Venezuelan refugees to normalize in Ecuador, a move that was lauded at the time by the International Organisation for Migration (IMO) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
According to Voice of America, Noboa’s recent decree is a break with his own immigration policy, having signed a decree in August 2024 to make regularizing of Venezuelan migrants easier.
The decree will apparently:
- Repeal Executive Decree No. 370 of August 23, 2024, which Noboa had signed and expanded the regularization process for Venezuelans in Ecuador.
- Order the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility to denounce a migration statute that Ecuador has had with Venezuela since 2011.
- Mobilizes different government ministries to begin executing the decree.
The decree also mentioned an official letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility which reportedly stated, “In recent weeks, there have been suspensions and cuts in various sources of funding for programs that support Ecuador in migration matters, channeled through the International Organization for Migration and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which financed the regularization process of Venezuelan citizens…”
According to the decree, it seems, these funding cuts may be an excuse for making the adjustments to Ecuador’s migration policy, “so that the previously signed bilateral agreements reflect the reality of the citizenry.”
Organizations that aid Venezuelan migrants took to social media to denounce the president’s decree. “Migrant organizations in Ecuador express our concern over the repeal of Decree 370 by Decree 560. Thousands of Venezuelans are left vulnerable, without access to regularization or fundamental rights,” a collective of immigrant organizations said in a statement.
Featured image credit: via Scalabrini International Migration Network, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
