Venezuelans crossing into Colombia. (Photo: IOM/Angela Wells)
On the surface, Colombians’ attitudes towards displaced Venezuelans seem to have hardened in the decade since millions began arriving in 2015. In the 2023 Latinobarómetro survey, nearly four out of five Colombians said migrants were harmful to their country, with majorities believing immigrants take jobs from Colombians and increase crime. That same year, most Colombians opposed the government’s grant of ten-year residence permits to Venezuelans, according to an Invamer poll, despite the initial solidarity that enabled nearly 2 million Venezuelans to obtain this legal status after it was unveiled in 2021.
In This Article
Venezuelans’ arrival transformed Colombia into Latin America’s largest immigrant-hosting country
Public attitudes in Colombia have been nuanced
Colombians’ anxieties have not necessarily translated into support for greater restrictions
Direct, positive experiences with immigrants seem to have shaped attitudes
Opinions have tended to be more complicated than polling would suggest
Yet these attitudes have not translated into immigration restrictions or a desire to reverse many elements of the warm policy welcome Colombia has offered Venezuelan migrants, for which it has received international praise. Most Colombians still support allowing newcomers to access services such as education and health care, and many also say immigration has benefits, even if these do not always outweigh potential harms. Thus, while topline survey findings often paint a picture of extremes—widespread support for immigrants now shifting toward staunch opposition—most Colombians lie somewhere in the middle. Many simultaneously express compassion toward migrants, pride in their country’s welcoming response, and fear of increased crime or competition for scarce jobs in relation to immigration from Venezuela.
This nuanced dynamic offers a window into which immigration policies the Colombian public is likely to support, even amid escalating fears. Many Colombians indicate feeling a sense of brotherhood and reciprocity with Venezuelans, who comprise the country’s largest immigrant group, due in part to Colombia’s own history with displacement—which is still ongoing in some parts of the country. People may readily endorse allowing migrant children to attend public school while also desiring some limits and clear rules around how and whether people enter and stay in the country. And even when people believe that immigration has negatively impacted their lives, they do not always blame migrants themselves; rather, when probed, many Colombians fault structural and institutional factors including employers’ willingness to exploit low-wage workers and local governments’ limited ability to provide sufficient resources to all residents. Thus, although the region faces a period of uncertainty amidst the Trump administration’s closing of some legal pathways to the United States (which many believe will result in increased migration to Colombia), this has not necessarily produced a blanket desire for immigration restrictions.
This article provides an overview of the nuanced attitudes members of the Colombian public hold toward migrants, based in part on a series of focus groups run by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) involving several dozen Colombians in four cities.
Public Opinion in Colombia
The arrival of nearly 3 million Venezuelans over the last decade has transformed Colombia into Latin America’s largest immigrant-hosting country. This represents a drastic shift for a country more used to emigration than immigration, and one that had a limited infrastructure for receiving immigrants.
National policies remained generally welcoming. At a time when many worried that host communities’ compassion was wearing thin, the government created a landmark ten-year Temporary Protection Status for Venezuelans (Estatuto Temporal de Protección para Migrantes Venezolanos). This 2021 policy was widely celebrated by international organizations and inspired other countries in the region to enact their own regularization programs. The residence permits were regarded as both an expression of solidarity as well as a pragmatic move to bring from the shadows many Venezuelan immigrants who might otherwise have been unable to legally work and access civil services. Notably, large-scale Venezuelan immigration overlapped with the culmination of a peace process ending more than 50 years of armed conflict in Colombia, during which many Colombians were displaced internally, to Venezuela, and elsewhere. These events may have made Colombians simultaneously more compassionate toward displaced Venezuelans, while also provoked a sense of competition between displaced and returning Colombians and new immigrants.  
Colombians’ responses to immigration have oscillated between being welcoming and fatigued, with specific concerns about crime and the economy intermingling with larger fears about distribution of resources, inequality, and corruption. Polling reveals a significant decrease in support beginning in 2020, as the country grappled with the reality that many migrants were there to stay, local resources were stretched thin, and humanitarian aid had begun to shrink. Negative narratives about immigration were amplified by media organizations and politicians. In 2023, nearly three-fourths of Colombians disagreed with the statement that immigrants were good for their country’s economy, while six in ten agreed immigrants “come to compete for our jobs” and seven in ten believed immigration increased crime, according to Latinobarómetro (see Figure 1). That same year, fewer than 5 percent of Colombian respondents believed Venezuelan immigrants had a positive economic impact, according to an Oxfam survey. Similar trends have been seen across other Latin Americas and Caribbean countries hosting large numbers of Venezuelans.
Figure 1. Share of Colombians Agreeing with Negative Statements about Immigrants, 2020 and 2023
Note: Figure shows respondents who both “agreed” and “strongly agreed” with the statements.
Sources: Latinobarómetro, Latinobarómetro 2020 Colombia Study # LAT-2020 v1_0 (Santiago: Latinobarómetro, 2020); Latinobarómetro, Latinobarómetro 2023 Colombia: Distribution by Sex and Age: Study # LAT-2023 v1_0 (Santiago: Latinobarómetro, 2023).
These perceptions of harm or loss reported by Colombians are often expressed at a local level and thus are not easily countered by narratives around the more abstract benefits of migrants to Colombia as a whole. Even though Venezuelans have contributed significantly to their host countries’ economies—the World Bank estimated Venezuelans contributed U.S. $150 million in Colombian tax revenue in 2019—these benefits are not always felt at the local community level. Neighborhoods are rife with stories of individual Colombians losing their jobs or seeing their wages cut, and petty crime and disorder may be more visible in areas with many immigrants, even though research suggests Venezuelan migrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than members of the host society.
At the same time, negative topline narratives tend to obscure more nuanced storylines. Colombians may simultaneously believe both that immigration is harmful overall and that individual migrants deserve rights and dignity. They may have concerns about immigration’s effect on the country’s economy or crime rates, yet they may also be open to giving newcomers legal status and access to government resources. These mixed trends have played out in Colombia, as evidenced by the temporary protection policy and wide support for newcomers’ ability to access schools and health care. However, this welcoming stance has cooled over time, especially as resources have dwindled and competing crises (from COVID-19 to electoral shifts) have amplified citizens’ own sense of precarity.
Figure 2. Share of Colombians Agreeing with Positive Statements about Immigrants, 2020 and 2023
Note: Figure shows respondents who both “agreed” and “strongly agreed” with the statements.
Sources: Latinobarómetro, Latinobarómetro 2020 Colombia Study # LAT-2020 v1_0; Latinobarómetro, Latinobarómetro 2023 Colombia: Distribution by Sex and Age: Study # LAT-2023 v1_0.
Box 1. Focus Group Methods
This article is based in part on a series of focus groups conducted by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in Colombia in November and December 2023. Two focus groups per city were conducted in Barranquilla, Bogota, Cali, and Cartagena (with separate groups for men and women, comprised of five to eight participants in each). Researchers aimed to include Colombians who had diverse relationships with migrants (such as employers, neighbors, and work colleagues) to enable a rich discussion and stimulate conversation.
Groups were divided by gender to enable candid conversations and understand differences in men’s and women’s perceptions. To capture opinions across socioeconomic strata, researchers tried to recruit Colombians with both subsidized and contributory health insurance coverage: Individuals with the contributory regime must earn at least the minimum wage (Col$1,423,500 per month, which is the equivalent of about $330 as of April 2025), whereas individuals with subsidized insurance are typically informal workers who earn less than the minimum wage.
Focus groups were conducted in Spanish. Quotations in this article are translations.
Triggers of Colombians’ Unease
Focus-group conversations with Colombians (see Box 1 for methods) revealed such mixed trends. Concerns about the impact of immigration on economic wellbeing, crime, and culture were prevalent in almost all eight focus groups. Nearly nine in ten participants spoke about how immigration impacted their personal financial position, the most salient topic. More than half raised concerns about crime, and slightly less than half touched on how immigration affected Colombians’ access to social services.
Above all, the most prevalent narrative across all four cities was the perception that Venezuelans take jobs from Colombians. Some respondents said this is because Venezuelans will do the same work for cheaper (“they give away their labor for free,” three women in different cities said) or they take resources from local communities (through competition over these resources, and because Venezuelans are seen as getting more than their fair share by virtue of their status as migrants). Although international funding is typically structured to support both migrants and vulnerable locals, some participants speculated that services funded through international humanitarian donations had been earmarked for migrants by donors. The perception that migrants received more benefits and access to public services was a key trigger of Colombians’ unease. In Cali, one respondent said plainly that migrants received more benefits than Colombians, even those without jobs, and several participants described a zero-sum situation in which health and other services were being redirected toward Venezuelans. “In reality, foreigners have been prioritized more than Colombians—not just here in Bogota but in other regions as well,” said one woman. “Services that Colombians request are denied for them, but [the same requests are] granted for Venezuelans,” said another.
The perception that only migrants received government assistance, to the exclusion of needy Colombians, was shared among returnees who had fled Colombia during its civil war. One man who returned to Bogota in 2017 after living in Venezuela for 36 years stated he could not find a job or receive services comparable to those offered to Venezuelans. Indeed, many of the more than 500,000 Colombian returnees from Venezuela have expressed feeling largely invisible in official migration and integration narratives. While returnees share many of the same challenges as Venezuelan migrants, they have not been a policy priority.
Interestingly, Venezuelan migration was also perceived to threaten Colombians’ culture, even though the countries share ethnic, religious, and linguistic ties (which is not the case in many instances of mass displacement). In a 2021 Proyecto Migración Venezuela poll, 85 percent of Colombians said Venezuelans’ arrival weakened their culture. In the MPI focus groups, several female respondents voiced specific concern that the arrival of Venezuelan women posed a threat to their marriages.
Nonetheless, most focus-group participants also expressed some degree of respect and compassion for individual migrants and recognized some broader benefits of migration. For instance, several Colombians described migrants as reliable or hardworking, and others described them as victims of corruption. The focus-group conversations showed how seemingly contradictory narratives that migrants are a threat and benefit can coexist.
How Mixed Attitudes Translate into Complex Policy Preferences
Importantly, the focus groups revealed that Colombians’ anxieties around Venezuelan migration did not automatically translate into support for greater immigration restrictions. Despite the prevalence of strong threat narratives, Colombians remained largely supportive of migrants’ access to public services and educational and employment opportunities.
Focus-group participants described this duality in several ways. Many desired fairer distribution of resources but argued for increasing resources for everyone rather than taking away benefits from migrants. One woman in Cali said she thought Venezuelans deserved job opportunities—just not at Colombians’ expense. A man in Bogota expressed frustration that Venezuelans are “prioritized” over Colombians, but did not feel they should be deported. Despite feeling limited in their own access to resources, these participants did not call for restricting newcomers’ access. This contrasts with the “us-versus-them” rhetoric that often grabs attention.
Moreover, even when Venezuelans were perceived to cause economic harm or crime, they were not necessarily deemed culpable. Multiple women in Barranquilla said Venezuelans might work for less money because they face huge pressures to send cash back to their families in Venezuela. Some believed Venezuelans might resort to stealing to feed their families. Many noted Venezuelans face significant exploitation in Colombia; “these are our brothers who also need to be supported,” said one participant from Cartagena.
Instead, approximately one-quarter of the focus-group participants blamed employers or the government for a lack of job opportunities. Some said unemployment can make crime “tempting.” A woman from Barranquilla explained that the problem of Venezuelans taking jobs from Colombians “comes from companies, from the administration, from the government, not from Venezuelan people.” A woman from Bogota questioned, “when it’s difficult to find a job, whose fault is it: the person hiring or the person who needs a job?” And in response to the question of whether Venezuelan workers undercut wages—the most prevalent negative trope—some participants claimed employers “would rather hire a Venezuelan and save up.” With respect to the government, many pointed to political corruption and unresponsiveness. In Bogota, one woman said government corruption was one reason why ordinary Colombians did not benefit from foreign and humanitarian aid; the government, she said, was freezing benefits for Colombians. Several participants also felt politicians were unaware of or removed from the situation on the ground. Finally, several participants referred to the fact that many communities in Colombia have long struggled with unemployment, crime, and inadequate health care. “We must not forget that there was already crime [here],” one woman in Bogota emphasized. “Venezuelan migration is adding to this mix of bad economic prospects,” explained another.
Positive Contact Mitigates Support for Exclusionary Policies
Despite the many concerns they expressed, a key factor that appeared to keep Colombians from blaming Venezuelans involved the degree to which individual Colombians reported direct, positive experiences with them. Across Colombia, focus-group participants described connecting with Venezuelan migrants primarily at churches, workplaces, and schools. Nearly half of participants who had interacted with Venezuelans reported positive experiences; only one in ten reported solely negative experiences, and the rest described their interactions as neutral or mixed. About three-quarters of these experiences occurred in social spheres, rather than in the workplace or within families (although some participants also reported having Venezuelan partners or family members).
For many, particular moments stood out as central to shaping their views. For instance, in Bogota one man said an immigrant health worker provided excellent care to his father and thereby won his family’s trust. In these kinds of relationships, shared goals and values—rather than nationality—served as the basis of connection. According to one Bogota woman who worked in a youth-focused organization, “During the program there is no nationality; we are all equal there. We are all working for children.” All employees become “mothers” with a common goal that transcends their differences, she said. Another recurring theme involved connecting over food. For example, a woman in Cartagena lauded a Venezuelan friend’s “spectacular” rice: “I don’t know what it’s called, but if you try it, it’s on another level.” Additionally, one man from Cartagena said his friendships with Venezuelans grew while singing and dancing.
Positive experiences in the workplace were also instructive. One man in Cartagena told how his migrant friend supported him at work. Several employers described Venezuelans as hard workers—sometimes more so than Colombians. One Barranquilla woman suggested the only problems with immigrant workers she had were administrative, faulting structural barriers and the government rather than migrants themselves.
These vignettes suggest Colombians’ responses to Venezuelan migrants are more mixed than pervasive narratives might suggest. The wide variety of direct personal experiences in schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods appeared to have fostered compassion for migrants even amidst broader economic precarity and uncertainty.
More Contact, More Support?
These findings fit with decades of research suggesting that positive, direct contact between members of different groups can reduce feelings of threats and anxieties, foster empathy, and encourage more generous policy support. An unpublished 2023 pilot survey ran by MPI, the World Bank, and Colombia’s National Planning Department showed similar trends, although more research is needed to replicate these findings. Overall, respondents who reported more positive contact with Venezuelans also more strongly believed that Venezuelans brought benefits to Colombia and deserved equivalent access to health care, education, and work opportunities; these Colombians were also less likely to say immigration should be controlled. While not fully representative of Colombian public opinion, these survey findings reinforce the focus groups’ suggestions about the power of positive, direct contact.
Together, these two studies offer preliminary evidence that contact with migrants can help host communities facing large-scale population change envision mutually beneficial policies. Yet there is still a considerable gap in analysts’ understanding of the type, frequency, and quality of contact that occurs between members of host and migrant communities, in part because opinion surveys rarely ask about these experiences in any systematic way. This gap is important to fill, both to augment the existing evidence base and because not all forms of contact are equal; indeed, episodic, casual, or transactional encounters are not likely to have the same benefits as contact experiences that are deep, meaningful, and sustained over time.
What Poll Numbers Do—and Do Not—Say
In light of these findings related to contact’s effects, opinion polling tends to offer a fairly simplistic view of how immigration shapes public opinion. Overall, polls typically suggest that immigrants’ presence can lead hosts to feel threatened and support immigration restrictions. Yet public viewpoints are often much more nuanced and dependent on individuals’ personal experiences with migrants in local communities. While Colombians often feel uneasy about immigration’s impact on the economy, crime, and social order, they do not necessarily blame immigrants for these conditions. Instead, they held responsible employers (for paying low wages and exploiting informal workers) and government actors (for structural inequality, enduring poverty, and limited responsiveness to community needs). Even when Colombians felt personally disadvantaged, they tended not to advocate for penalizing immigrants or restricting their benefits; instead, they argued for increasing opportunities for everyone, Colombians and Venezuelans alike.
These trends reveal an underlying solidarity with migrants’ experiences—and one that is not always evident in polling. Through the focus groups, Colombians expressed both concern for Venezuelans and ambivalence about their presence, even as they faced economic insecurity themselves.
The recognition that Venezuelans “are just like us,” is especially poignant and may be particularly resonant in Colombia, given the long history of cross-border relations and movement. But similar findings may be evident in other displacement contexts. Attitudes towards immigrants and immigration are complex, shifting, and often dependent on deeply personal experiences and beliefs that are easily obscured by overly simplistic calls to either liberalize or securitize borders. Opinion surveys can offer revealing insights into individual preferences and national trends at a given moment in time, but they are not always effective in revealing how people make meaning to form narratives and understandings about their lives and communities. This includes where (and upon whom) people assign responsibility or attribute blame, and what types of experiences and programs might mitigate fears and anxieties. Such complexities in perspective are crucial to take into account as policymakers work to identify openings for creative and effective responses to major migration flows.
The authors thank Diego Chaves-González for his support conducting fieldwork in Colombia and Ana Alanis and the team of UMass Amherst researchers who helped analyze data from the pilot survey and focus groups, including Cierra Abellera, Maite Elacqua, and Anais Clinch.
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Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan is Deputy Director of MPI’s International Program.
María Jesús Mora is an Associate Policy Analyst with the Latin America and Caribbean Initiative at MPI.
Linda R. Tropp is Professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A recipient of distinguished research and teaching awards from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the International Society of Political Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, she has partnered with civil society organizations around the globe to bridge group differences and address social division. She has also authored and edited several books, including The Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict (Oxford University Press). She holds a PhD from the University of California Santa Cruz.
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