Spencer Colby Photography

So Close. So Far: Venezuelan migrants adapt to new chapters in Trinidad and Tobago.

Photos and words by Spencer Colby

LA ROMAIN, SAN FERNANDO, TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO - Angie Ramnarine lives only a stone’s throw away from an Immigration Division building in San Fernando, one of Trinidad and Tobago's largest cities.

Although concrete numbers vary, roughly 40,000 Venezuelans live on the twin-island of Trinidad and Tobago but for many who’ve made the dangerous and sometimes deadly 24- kilometer journey across the Gulf of Paria, life in Trinidad is far from ideal.

According to the UNHCR, Trinidad and Tobago saw a 234 per cent increase in the number of Venezuelan nationals seeking asylum from 2020 to 2021. This is the largest increase since record-keeping began.

“I believe that we were never prepared to be a host country for this kind of migration that is occurring,” Ramnarine said.

Ranking in as the fifth wealthiest country by gross domestic product in Latin America and the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago is host to approximately 40,000 Venezuelans.

Ramnarine runs the on-the-ground effort of La Romaine Migrant Support (LARMS), a grassroots humanitarian-focused organization aimed at helping mostly Venezuelan migrants adjust to life on the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad.

“Co-founder, coordinator, I am told I need to be called something. My committee said I should be called president,” Ramnarine described as she sat at her small living room table for a late breakfast of a local staple: Doubles.

Help from LARMS comes in all shapes and sizes, ranging from non-perishable items, baby formula, diapers and vital antibiotic medicine. Dozens of countries around the globe have enacted visa restrictions on Venezuelan citizens. “That's what leads Venezuelans to choose to arrive in Trinidad and Tobago using boats,” Leomil explained.

On Feb. 5, a Venezuelan women was injured and her nine-month-old child was killed by an officer from the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard following an attempted transit from Venezuela to the south coast of Trinidad. In a statement related by the Coast Guard, the migrant boat used “aggressive maneuvers” against the TTS Scarborough vessel as it attempted to stop the boat.

With the absence of national law for the protection of refugees and asylum seekers, those seeking protection are subject to provisions under the Trinidad and Tobago 1976 Immigration Act but refugee status determination and case risk assessment remains with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “The only way to claim asylum in a country is to arrive on that country’s soil and ask the federal authority for asylum,” explained Carleton University PhD student Luiz Leomil, whose dissertation focuses on refugee policy in Latin America.

Enacting a visa policy requires Venezuelan nationals to go to the Trinidad and Tobago embassy and request a visa, but with the current economic and political instability in Venezuela, the government knows that once in Trinidad, Venezuelans may seek asylum.

According to VisaIndex.com, a directory for countries that require visas for a range of nationalities, 101 countries require visas for Venezuelans including China, India and the United States.

Venezuelans can still claim asylum before an immigration official “by expressing your fear to return to your country of origin,” according to the UNHCR.

“But in some countries like Trinidad and Tobago, either because the government does not have the capacity or because it does not want to, it will try not to have its own asylum system,” said Leomil. “Ideally the government should have the structure, the government should be the one who has a bureaucracy for you to apply for asylum.”

From May to June 2019, the government of Trinidad and Tobago began a campaign to register Venezuelans who entered the country and according to the government, 16,523 Venezuelans were registered. In a news report by the Guardian the government had “made it clear if Venezuelans didn’t want to be registered, then they could not stay in this country,” said Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Keith Rowley. Ramnarine said that before the COVID-19 pandemic, LARMS was effective at providing people the help they needed.

“We were getting to a point where parents were working and they felt that sense of dignity that, ‘now I'm earning, I can buy my own food, I can look after my immediate needs.’”

That changed when COVID-19 hit.

“People lost their jobs, they were being evicted, they were moving God knows where,” explained Ramnarine. With capacity restrictions in place at LARMS’s centre for operation at St. Benedict’s Church in La Romaine, Ramnarine moved operations to her home.

“It was very convenient because of its proximity to the immigration office. I have instances where the immigration officers themselves in processing people have felt a sense of compassion and actually directed people here if they wanted food and so on.”

As Ramnarine described the work of LARMS, Venezuelan migrant Willmer Marquez entered her home, introducing himself as he sat down on the nearby sofa. Marquez fled the north-eastern city of Tucupita, Venezuela to San Fernando in 2020. Marquez credits the work of LARMS as being invaluable and reaches out to Ramnarine for help every two to three weeks. But Marquez said life in San Fernando is “very stressful.”

“So many problems to deal with,” Marquez said. “There are a lot of Venezuelans looking for work so there's a lot of competition.”

A Costly Catch-22

“We leave our farm to come here for better living,” said Venezuelan migrant Roxanne Gonzale as she stood in her living room, flanked by members of her family sitting on a pair of couches which doubles as beds during the night. Gonzale, like Marquez, said life in Venezuela is very hard and they came to Trinidad in hope of better living.

Gonzale now lives with 21 other family members under the same roof in La Romaine, a small-town south-west of San Fernando where they pay TT1,500 dollars ($221 USD) in rent.

“We are living like, how they say, match in a box,” she explained, saying that her and her husband sleep on the ground outside with her child in a chair. Like many migrants in San Fernando and the surrounding area, paying rent is difficult.

As she spoke, tears rolled down her eyes. “We have to leave,” Gonzale said. “This morning they [landlord] come and said we had to go.” Like Marquez, Gonzale credits the work of Angie in helping her family but going back to Venezuela would be punishment, explained Gonzale.

For many migrants, successful integration into society is key.

“Labour market prospects are better and stronger if you do speak whatever is the national language,” explained Patti Lenard, a professor of applied ethics at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. “It is also true that the more support the welcoming country gives for language learning the faster that integration will happen.”

Lenard argues that failing to provide settlement support leads to poor integration.

In a 2019 field report by Melanie Teff at Refugees International, Teff outlined a “lack of access to public education for refugee children will result in constant fear and hopelessness about the future for Venezuelans living there.”

Ramnarine is calling for the education of migrant children to be different. “We have a system geared towards exams at age 11 and all this academic pressure and so on. Migrant children need to be in a different kind of school which helps them through the traumatic transitioning process, gives them classes in language acquisition but for skills they need every day.”

Many Venezuelan migrants working in Trinidad work in blue collar jobs, ranging from construction to house cleaning and with Trinidad and Tobago’s official language being English the use of smartphones is a “very important device to them,” said Ramnarine.

The Rise of Xenophobia

Reports of xenophobia against Venezuelan migrants has risen in recent years prompting calls for actions by local organizations. “There is a significant percentage of people who don't see that Venezuelans are welcome here” Ramnarine explained.

During the second wave of COVID-19 in the country, there were growing reports that Venezuelans were being held responsible for a rise in cases and that landlords were evicting Venezuelan families as they feared persecution from local authorities.

Ramnarine says you only have to read the Facebook comments to recognize the hate and lack of empathy for the migrants.

“We may have been the wealthiest country in the Caribbean economically [but] we may have not be so rich in our consciousness in our work ethic and how we view things”

A UNHCR report released in a Jul. 2020 report.

A Jul. 2020 released by the UNHCR emphasized a need to create “sensitivity awareness campaigns to combat xenophobia and discrimination” and develop remote language program and formal employment opportunities according to the report’s author.

For Ramnarine, the day ends when her cell phone stops ringing and her older model Toyota shifts into park one last time. “It's very hard to get committed volunteers,” Ramnarine said. “I’ve just accepted the fact that I have to do this myself.”

For Gonzale and her family, the day ends in uncertainty about the future. The only certainty is help from Ramnarine. “God give her help and strength. She must continue helping the Spanish people,” Gonzale says.