The Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that 1,203,521 Colombians stated that they reside abroad through the Consular Registry. This initiative sought to collect data from those who voluntarily reported to the consular missions of their country of residence.
According to the National Administrative Department of Statistics (Dane), during the first quarter of the year 1,046,162 Colombians had registered with the consulates. In other words, in the remaining seven months of 2022, the number of self-reported migrants from Colombia abroad grew by 15.3 percent.Also read: Captures of Colombian migrants at the US border increased 1,147% in 2022
The countries in which there is a greater presence of connational migrants are United States (307,566), Spain (280,147) and Venezuela (215,448). Only in these three countries are 66.6 percent of reports. In addition, the regions with the fewest reports of Colombians are the islands of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
Of the total number of Colombians registered abroad, 54.7 percent are women (659,588), while 44.5 percent are men (536,657). The remaining number of Colombian migrants did not express their gender. Of the total registered, 917,115 are between 20 and 60 years old, that is, 76.06 percent. They are followed by people over 60 (219,689) and those under 20 (63,812).
Faced with the schooling of Colombians abroad, 70% did not indicate having any level of education. Likewise, 11.7 percent said they had finished high school and only 6.9 percent finished their professional career. Of the total, 2.7 percent had some type of postgraduate degree.
In 2022, the Dane published the first Migration Statistical Report. Through the Statistical Base Population Registry, it found that during 2020 there were 1,715,354 Colombian migrants. Of them, 55.4 percent left from Valle del Cauca (400,796), Bogotá (349,607) and Antioquia (199,923).. The difference between the figures registered by the entities is mainly due to the high flow of emigration and illegality.You may be interested in: The network behind the ‘death trips’ of migrants in Colombia
Colombia: among the nationalities that request the most asylum in the world
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recorded that in 2021 Colombia was the fourteenth country in the list of asylum requests worldwide. Colombian migrants fleeing threats registered 34,380 applications last year alone. It was also the fourth country in Latin America, only behind Nicaragua (112,239), Venezuela (95,870) and Honduras (60,789). Of the total number of asylum applications, 77 percent were rejected by destination countries in the same period of time.
The figures for migrants abroad differ from the asylum application due to the nature of both processes. According to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the first case there is talk of a heterogeneous phenomenon in which people seek, mainly, access to better job opportunities, higher wages and access to educational offers. In the second, according to the Acnur, they are people who They ask for the recognition of their refugee status due to the threats, conflicts or generalized violence in which they live.
Therefore, the general figures of Colombians abroad are only estimates, since there is no mechanism to account for all the people who have moved to other countries illegally. Given this, the census carried out in 2005 by Dane showed that an estimate of Colombians residing abroad was 3,378,345. While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2016 registered about 4.7 million national migrants.
Also read: The plan of Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica in the face of the migratory crisis towards the United States.
Currently, the country is making progress in the implementation of the Comprehensive Migration Policy with which it is expected to update the number of Colombian migrants and returnees through the Migration Statistics Information System (SIEM).
ANDRES PINEDA.
EL TIEMPO SCHOOL OF MULTIMEDIA JOURNALISM.
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