Anales del Congreso ALAP
Anales del X Congreso ALAP

The forced migration from Ukraine and Venezuela are the largest contemporary external displacement crises worldwide. By the end of March 2022 more than 6 million Venezuelans and 3.86 million Ukrainians have left their countries. Moreover, these humanitarian crises are far from over: they still have a high potential for intensification, leading to major challenges in the receiving countries and regions. In this explorative and conceptual paper, we investigate and identify the main coping strategies of recent Venezuelan and Ukrainian refugees, taking two major destinations – Peru and Poland – as case studies. In our study we mostly rely on the qualitative approaches, namely on the in-depth interviews with refugees in both countries and most important stakeholders – institutional actors, intermediaries, representatives of tertiary sector etc.
Our explorative findings demonstrate that both population movements share some common characteristics: while Ukrainians are fleeing from war caused by Russian invasion and Venezuelans from political and socio-economic problems of their home country, two nations are de-facto refugees who usually do not get registered as refugees in the major destinations. There are substantial differences when it comes to the level of the development of host economies: while Latin American countries are usually middle-income developing economies, the Central and Eastern European countries are high-income economies and members of the European Union. Thus, the Ukrainians have – at least in theoretical aspect – higher potential for successful socio-economic adaptation at the destination. The shallowness of the Peruvian labor market and relatively high poverty levels imply that Venezuelans in this country pursue rather short-term survival activities, very often connected with irregular employment or business activity and the relatively high occurrence of overeducation problem. At the same time, Ukrainians benefit from high growth of Polish economy, but also overeducation is a problem among refugees – many highly-skilled migrants cannot find jobs which match their qualifications.