Precarious systemic resilience : Venezuelan immigration and COVID-19 in the Andean region

Abstract

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants and refugees have played a crucial role as essential workers around the world, often in jobs typically deemed as “low- skilled” (Gelatt, 2020; ODI, 2020). As supermarket workers, caregivers, but also as health care professionals their contribution to crisis responses has been documented in many high-income countries.1 Migrants and refugees also helped dealing with the pandemic in South American countries, which have welcomed most of the 5 million Venezuelan migrants who left in recent years (RMRP, 2020). However, we will argue that their potential has been heavily underutilized.