When you hear Republicans and right-wing media blame President Joe Biden for the so-called “border crisis” and target the growing number of Venezuelan migrants, it’s important to look at the bigger picture.
It’s not a pretty one: Since the country’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro took power a decade ago, more than 7.2 million people have left Venezuela as the country’s political, economic, and humanitarian crisis has worsened. That means we’re looking at a mass migration crisis on a scale with that of Syria and Ukraine.
Two decades ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest country in South America, its economy buoyed by high oil prices. If you go all the way back to 1950, at a time when many countries were struggling to recover from World War II, Venezuela had the fourth-richest GDP per capita in the world, 12 times richer than China, according to the World Economic Forum. So what happened?
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