To recover, Venezuela needs its people back. Will they return?
To recover, Venezuela needs its people back. Will they return?
W ith Nicolás Maduro in U.S. custody, Venezuela’s future is looking much brighter than most could have imagined just a few weeks ago. Since 2015, around 7 million Venezuelans have left the country as the country’s economic crisis deepened and political repression increased. Now, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. To be sure, many questions remain to be answered, including over who leads the country; if some form of the regime and its accompanying oppression remain in place, it seems unlikely that people will want to return. But one thing is very clear: If Venezuela is to recover, it needs its people back.
Today, many people around the world who are granted asylum never return, even once it is safe to do so. This is particularly true of those who have sought asylum in Western countries. In Bosnia, only 42 percent of those who left — chiefly to wealthier, Western European countries — during the Bosnian War had returned by 2018, more than 20 years after hostilities ceased. Sri Lanka’s civil war, too, saw dismal return rates upon the conflict’s end.
In Syria, just one-fifth of those who fled during the country’s civil war have returned since the Assad regime fell a little more than a year ago. There is little indication that Syrians not resident in neighboring countries are keen to return.
Sluggish return rates constitute a more serious problem than most seem to realize: Third-world migrants, especially in the West, tend to be disproportionately educated and professionally successful compared to the population they left behind. War, in addition to all its other horrors, causes brain drain. When return rates are low, that means the “brains” don’t return.
Brain drain can present serious, long-term problems for the migrants’ home countries. The merciful act of granting asylum can end up having the unintended effect of making those left behind even poorer. And considering that those left behind are already on average weaker and poorer than those who had the means to get out, this changes the humanitarian calculus.
In some cases, a one-time event triggering emigration can spur emigration that continues long after the event has subsided. This most famously happened to Ireland, which saw 2 million emigrate during the 1845–52 famine. Not only did the emigrants not return once the famine was over, but emigration never returned to pre-famine levels, as those who survived the famine increasingly opted to join family members already living abroad instead of trying to rebuild their homeland.
While Irish emigrants have been a great blessing to the countries that received them, the story was far less pleasant for those left behind. Chronically elevated emigration levels meant a chronic brain drain that hamstrung Ireland’s economic development. In fact, from 1845 onward, Ireland would not have a single year of net positive migration until the 1970s — more than a century after the last blighted potato had been found in Irish soil.
This cannot be allowed to happen to Venezuela.
If and when a popularly elected government takes power, focus must immediately turn to repatriation, with a particular focus on those who have arrived since 2015. These repatriations, however, will have to be organized, and ideally coordinated between the United States and other countries that host large numbers of Venezuelan migrants.
Though estimates of the size of the Venezuelan diaspora vary, in January 2025 around 607,000 Venezuelans were covered by the Temporary Protected Status granted by the Biden administration, with most of that group having arrived within the past ten years. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans also made it to Europe; between January 2023 and June 2025 alone, over 190,000 Venezuelans applied for asylum in the EU. And millions more have moved to nearby countries in Latin America, where mass immigration from Venezuela has become a source of significant political tension.
To be clear, hasty and disorganized mass deportation efforts would risk causing chaos in Venezuela, and could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Seven million people cannot return overnight. Future aid to Venezuela must target the kind of infrastructure needed to sustain a rapid population expansion to help the country prepare for the gradual repatriation of its citizens. It is likely that additional housing will also be necessary, though of course many migrants left empty homes behind. The goal should be to have carefully staggered yet speedy repatriations to allow Venezuela to cope. This will require international coordination.
In the United States and Europe, incentives should be provided to encourage voluntary return. In a move unrelated to recent developments in Venezuela, Sweden is launching a 350,000 kronor (approximately $38,000) “repatriation grant” to encourage refugees to return to their now-safe homelands. Families can receive up to 600,000 kronor ($65,000).
To immigration hawks, such schemes may seem unnecessarily generous: Why pay people to leave when you can just deport them? That, however, is easier said than done. Deportations are not free, and they are also time-consuming. Many migrants have minimal financial resources and would struggle to rebuild their lives in Venezuela, giving them strong incentive to evade deportation.
If returnees do come back empty-handed and become a burden on Venezuela’s already heavily strained social safety nets, this will almost certainly cause strife between returnees and those who never had the opportunity to leave. Repatriation grants can also provide a much-needed cash injection into the struggling Venezuelan economy, aiding its recovery from destructive socialist policies.
Repatriation grants should be paired with a major advertising campaign targeting the diaspora, with hotlines set up to help those interested in returning, i.e., by answering common questions and offering practical advice. Once a democratic government is in place, it should be asked jointly by the EU and the U.S., as a condition of continued foreign aid, to actively court repatriation — for example, through presidential trips to diaspora-heavy regions abroad, where the president could issue compelling calls for his countrymen to return.
None of this is to say that involuntary deportations won’t be necessary. In the previously mentioned case of Sweden, the repatriation grants are by no means a stand-alone measure — their launch has been paired with an increase in forced removals. Yet it is better for everyone involved if as many as possible can be convinced to return of their own free will. Indeed, the best way to encourage migrants to take the repatriation grants is to limit them to those who return voluntarily, mirroring Sweden’s approach and recent U.S. efforts to encourage illegal immigrants to self-deport. Furthermore, if grants were to be available only within a certain window of time, the message would be clear: Either leave of your own accord and take the money, or wait for us to round you up later and return home with empty pockets.
While it is neither feasible nor reasonable to provide the same repatriation grant to the millions of Venezuelans who left for nearby countries, Venezuela and its neighbors should receive support in coordinating their orderly return as well.
A large-scale repatriation of Venezuelans, if it occurs under a restored and successful democratic government, could serve as a blueprint for the future repatriation of other migrant groups who have settled in the West. With migration pressures mounting in both the U.S. and Europe, cross-national collaboration and mutual learning could prove invaluable.
Venezuela’s most valuable resource is not its oil, but its people. The nation’s recovery now depends on bringing home the millions who fled authoritarian socialism’s ruin. Swift, coordinated repatriation efforts, backed by generous incentives and firm deadlines, could reverse the brain drain, help fuel a genuine national recovery in Venezuela, and relieve pressure on Western countries strained by mass migration. The West needs to seize this moment to help Venezuelans rebuild their nation, rather than remain as permanent guests in ours.