The population of Colombia is estimated at 48.1 million people as of May 2015.26 Official data on the
number of Colombians living in a foreign country is only available from the 2005 Censo General (that is, the national census), which at the time calculated there were 3.3 million Colombians abroad (Khoudour-Castéras 2007; Mejía 2012).27 On the other hand, data from the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reveals an alarming trend of increase in the number of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Colombian territory. 525,000 people were forced to leave their homes and move to other regions or departments within Colombia in 2001. The number almost doubled in 2002 and was estimated at 2 million for 2005 (UNHCR, 2005). By July 2014, the number of IDPs had rocketed to 5.7 million which represents over 8% of the total population in Colombia’s territory (UNHCR, 2015). The armed conflict presents itself as one of the main causes for such massive movements of people. However, there are other factors that also prevail, such as the historical social inequalities, a weak system of law and justice unable to protect the population, and a lack of real government and state projects that aim at improving Colombians’ quality of life. With both data on the number of internal and international migrants it is difficult not to think that a large portion of the latter may have actually shared the causes of migration that led IDPs to leave their homes in rural Colombia. Even though my focus is on the immigration of Colombians to Australia the research encompasses an analysis of the recent migration waves to Australia that have brought individuals with much more diversified social, economic and political identities. Within that context, migration has changed from a unidirectional phenomenon that charged rich countries with the need to import labour from
26 DANE (2015).
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impoverished regions to a phenomenon that sees more complex webs of mobility as social inequalities are also seen in developed countries (Castles 2003) and therefore internal mobility is also at stake. For Castles (2003) countries worldwide sustain areas of growth and decline, both social and economic, producing conflict and forced migration, and therefore distinguishing the latter from economic migration is increasingly more difficult. Thus, there is a clear ‘asylum-migration nexus’ given the difficulty to attest separately economic and human right motivations that forced and ‘voluntary’ migrants have for their mobility (17). Yet, this nexus is more difficult to problematize when the actors involved are either unware or reluctant to acknowledge the structural reasoning that has led them and many of their fellow country people to migrate. It is therefore easier to attribute their international migration to economic or social mobility reasons rather than offering reflections on the underlying influence internal conflict and weakness of the state have had on their migration decision-making.
My aim in this chapter is to discuss the motivations that have led Colombians to immigrate to Australia and offer a work-in-progress description of their mobility here by drawing on the social and historical past of Colombia which necessarily puts forced displacement in the scenario of migration of Colombians. I review part of the history of violence in Colombia and the lack of State action in order to contextualise the factors that may lead Colombians to migrate, internally and abroad. The extant research on Colombians in the US, Canada and the UK has illuminated the history and trends of their emigration and brings to the fore the social, political and economic enclaves that can also be seen attached to their mobility to Australia. In this chapter, I present the official data available on the features of the Colombian community in Australia followed by results from a socio-demographic survey exercise that serves to describe the pool of people who participated in my study and which sheds light on the on-going task of describing the wider community of Colombians here. Finally, I present the profiles of five of the forty-four Colombians who completed the survey as an introduction to the narratives of life experiences of Colombian immigrants in Australia which are analyzed thoroughly from Chapters 4 to 7.
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Colombians’ Internal Displacement and Emigration
The few studies that approach the flows of Colombian migration, regional and international, coincide in attributing such phenomena to a set of internal and external factors. These are summarized by Mauricio Cárdenas and Carolina Mejía (2006) as economic factors, social networks, migration policies, armed conflict and violence. Tracy Vunderink argues that the specific case of forced migration is due to ‘severe historical inequalities and injustice, lack of state involvement in matters of justice, policing and territorial control in many areas of the country, and the socio-political fragmentation of the population’ (2005: 1).
There is a structural inefficiency of the state in providing Colombians, specifically in the peripheral areas, with minimum guarantees of their legal rights. Garcia Villegas and Espinoza (2013) analysis of the ‘institutional capacity’ in Colombia, looks at two of its dimensions, justice and administrative provisions in 1,103 municipalities of the country (43). They demonstrate that in 60% of the territory, inhabited by over six million people, representing 14% of the total population, there is an insufficient, if any, presence of the state. That is, in these areas there is not an effective judicial and law enforcement system that can ‘guarantee the exercise of fundamental rights’ (43)28.
The social and political dynamics in the country have caused different streams of violence that have degenerated from the left peasant guerrilla groups in the late 1950s to today’s incommensurable and uncontrollable ‘delincuencia común’ or common crime. Violence is so deeply embedded into the daily lives of Colombians that the public opinion has lost the sensitivity to grand acts of violence. In fact, as Daniel Pécaut explained in 1997:
Violence has become a mode of society functioning […] very few acts of violence are able to cause a generalized shock (918; my translation).
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Certainly, grave violations of human rights in the hands of all armed forces in conflict (that is, guerrilla, paramilitaries and the military) appear so frequently and in so many different forms that there seems to be no lasting surprising factor amongst the general public. Mass media report such events alongside rather trivial matters (for example, soap operas, reality shows and beauty contests) that work as smoke screens to hide the cruel reality that encumbers the nation and that people face either directly or indirectly. A large section of Colombians have been left behind by the local and national lack of government and justice which is called by Garcia Villegas and Espinoza as ‘an institutional apartheid’ (2013: 120).
Daniel Pécaut and Liliana González’s (1997) observations on the ‘kaleidoscopic apprehension of violent acts’ by the public opinion could not be more valid for today’s state of affairs almost 20 years later. Since colonial times violence resulted from the unequal land tenure system for which
encomenderos, or the Spain-born, and the high caste nobility, were granted large tracts of land whilst
Indigenous peasants had to labour there. The system is still at work in modern Colombia, with an inequitable distribution of land that affects many Colombians, particularly low-income farmers, Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities. Land reform initiatives have been scarcely put in place and only after decades of displacement perpetrated by illegal forces, especially the paramilitary, peasants have the hope of returning home with the Victims and Land Restitution Law (Ley de Víctimas y de Restitución de Tierras, Law 1448, June 2011). But the problem is deemed to persist given the high concentration of land ownership by a rather small section of the total population. The early liberal guerrilla movements fought against this and for other social causes and were lined up with more people defending their own lives after La Violencia, or violence era, struck in 1946. The power battle between the Conservador and Liberal political parties took its bloodiest turn after Jorge Eliecer Gaitan’s assassination on 9 April 1948. One of my participants, Oscar, who had to join the armed peasant groups explains how La Violencia escalated to massive murder across Colombian territory. He summarises the conflict arising for political power and makes a strong assertion on the reasons why such atrocities were not as publicised as the deaths caused in other South American countries in times of military dictatorship. Oscar attributes these murders as sponsored and praised by the Catholic Church and ultimately the Conservatives. I do not intend to discuss further such claims; instead, I use Oscar’s
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narrative to illustrate with the voice of one of my participants the intersection between forced and voluntary migration of Colombians. He claims to have fled Colombia precisely because of the social inequalities and economic endurances he continually faced even years after ‘La Violencia’. His father was murdered by the ‘chulivitas’—the death squads of the time—he then joined an armed group to defend his life. Oscar’s internal migration path continued as he left his hometown in the North of Valle del Cauca looking for a job in the region’s capital Cali, and then Bogotá and Amazonas. He should be accounted for as an internal displaced person, but in 1970 he managed to find financial aid that he calls ‘limosnas’ or charity to make his own way out of the country. His venture was facilitated by an Australian migration system that was importing skilled labour. He was able to migrate to Australia, yet, without his wife and twelve-year-old son. He fled Colombia, but before he had fled the countryside and for many years did not find himself at home until he settled in Sydney reunited with his family.
Continuing with the history of ‘La Violencia’, the National Front—the bipartisan agreement to alternate power turns in the presidency and official posts—did nothing to solve the already sabotaged social system in Colombia. Indeed, the bipartisan division imposed has generated a perennial impeding of national movements and social vindications for which other forms of violence emerged and continue unopposed. The violence that has reigned in Colombia since the late 1940s, with varying climaxes of force, can therefore be associated with three contexts (Pécaut & González 1997) or levels of understanding that revert into the past and most recent phenomena: ‘El contexto inmediato, es decir, las circunstancias políticas invocadas por amplios sectores de opinion […] para explicar la consolidación de la violencia. El contexto más lejano, aquel constituido por un pasado que permanece presente en todas las memorias y es designado por todos con el nombre de la violencia […] Y finalmente el contexto aún más remoto, aquel que se inscribe en la perspectiva histórica y se relaciona con las condiciones de formación de la nación y de su unidad inacabada’ (Ibid, 900). This spiral of elements eventually opened a space for the economy of drugs to fulfill what Pécaut calls ‘el deseo de acceder al consumo’ (that is, the desire to have access to consumerism) to overcome poverty or satisfy personal desire. This evokes an ultimate problem, according to Pécaut, which is the ‘absence of public opinion on the issue of drugs’ (Ibid, 900; my translation). However, reducing the exacerbating economy of drugs in all social and economic spheres to a lack of public opinion on drugs alone leaves unaccounted for the longstanding
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social inequalities that have made narcotics such sought after business. Beyond the perception of the public the problem has to do with the lack of governance and comprehensive public policy that prioritises the wellbeing of all Colombian citizens. Therefore, the essential problem might be the lack of public opinion, and action, on the role and effective work of the government at all levels, local regional and national. With this context, it will be easy to affirm that the international migration of Colombians is in large part due to the episodes of violence and absence of justice and law enforcement from the state and government institutions, in summary, the lack of social and economic equity and the perpetuation of violence. However, these are only part of the factors that appear recurrently in the picture of the migratory moves from Colombia. Likewise, internal forced displacement and emigration collide and it is difficult to quantify the percentage of migration that has been caused directly or indirectly by the violence and social chaos in Colombia. It is even more difficult when migrants do not acknowledge such reasoning outside their very familiar circles and when there is not sufficient research addressing their migratory experience beyond socio-demographic and economic factors which overall tend to swipe the colonial history that shaped the nation and its institutions and the current state of affairs in Colombia.
Colombians in the World
William Mejía (2012) in his review of the developments of Colombian migration explains that the first destination for Colombians abroad has been Venezuela where 16,976 Colombians were recorded in the 1941 census there reaching 684,040 in 2011. Migration to the bordering country was mainly due to the oil industry peak between 1973 and 1982 (Mejía 2012: 190). A slower and almost insignificant emigration of agricultural workers and labourers from Colombia to Ecuador inaugurated a higher influx only in 1982; when the internal conflict escalated in Colombia. 93,237 Colombian nationals were accounted living in Ecuador in 2011 (Mejía 2012: 192). Mejía also pinpoints that the history of migration to the United States, which places it as the second country of destination after Venezuela, developed in two periods, between 1880 and 1889 with migrants of privileged social classes, and from
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the 1960s with the arrival of a more diversified group of migrants: professionals, skilled labourers, middle class landowners, and small entrepreneurs. In the first ‘wave’ metropolitan New York, New Jersey and southern Connecticut and in lesser degree the south of Florida, were the main destinations for Colombian migrants who, at large, held university degrees (Guarnizo 2008: 13). While the second wave of immigrants to the U.S. was visibly more diverse, Europe continued to be a destination for privileged sectors of Colombians and increasingly for ‘political refugees, intellectuals and artists’ well into the 1980s and the more recent arrivals were pulled by the labour migration policies in the United Kingdom (14). Traditionally the migration of Colombians to the UK and more specifically to London had been restricted to the richest minorities who could afford travelling to pursue further studies, for example (11). Yet, more recent flows of migrants – which are counted between 50,000 and 70,000 in the London area – are indeed more heterogeneous and reflect Colombia’s own social, cultural and political diversity (12). Luis Guarnizo explains that the change from a very place-specific concentration and social origin of Colombian migrants to the multi-destination and rich diversity of today’s migrants is due in part to the unstable national economy. Colombia’s production market was opened for international competition through imports tax exemptions in the early 1990s causing the closing of thousands of private local companies and the privatization of public assets, diminishing on a large scale the social investment programs of the Colombian State (15). Rising unemployment and the coffee crisis of that followed boosted the exodus of Colombians of all social and economic origins. The peak of Colombian migration to Spain, for example, is attributed to these factors. 71,575 new arrivals were recorded in 2001, adding to a total of 118,148 Colombian residents in Spain in the same year’s census (Mejía 2012: 196). In alike fashion, Colombians who arrived between 1990 and 2004 to the UK assign part of their reasons to migrate to the overflow of professionals’ unemployment in Colombia and the ‘labour death’ for those older than 30 due to the increasing number of young workers hired as cheap labour (Guarnizo 2008: 15). Other factors have contributed as well to an even broader diversification of the destinations Colombians choose to migrate. When the United States started to narrow its paths of legal migration Colombians found opening doors in Canada, Spain, England, Italy and Germany, without mentioning the permanent flux to bordering and more nearby countries in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Based on the International Migration Database there has been an important increase in
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the migration to Chile, Italy, Germany, Mexico and Australia among others since 2005, as well as in the number of returned migrants (Mejía 2012: 198). Even though these figures show there is a large pool of Colombian mobility abroad only a few research works have focused on Colombian migration in the US, Spain, the UK, Canada and France (Bermúdez 2003, 2011; Blain 2005; Guarnizo & Díaz 1999; Guarnizo 2008; Lamela et al 2009; Landlot & Goldring 2010; Mas Giralt 2011; Pozniak 2009; Riaño-Alcalá and Goldring 2006) and much more research needs to be done in different countries.
The study of Colombians in London by Luis Guarnizo draws on the socio-demographic description of these migrants and their participation in the local labour market as part of their ‘integration’ and the transnational relations with Colombia. Following data from the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Colombia (Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs), there are 90,000 Colombian migrants in the UK (Guarnizo 2008: 24). Yet, the author estimates that the anti-immigration policy in the UK has narrowed to three the paths for legal migration there: asylum seeking, high skilled migration and family reunion (Guarnizo 2008: 24). Given the increase in the number of Colombians seeking refuge in the UK, the process has been tighten up and it is more difficult to prove claims for protection. Between 1996 and 2004, following Guarnizo, only 6.5% of the 5,390 asylum applicants were recognised and granted refugee status. This undoubtedly alienates people and deters them from seeking legal status as refugees leaving a large section of migrants unaccounted for by official agencies and without government support.
Official Data on Colombians in Australia
Amongst the little information that can be found on the early immigration of Colombians to Australia there is the section “Colombians” in James Jupp’s (1988) The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of
the Nation, its People and their Origins, which acknowledges their numbers were ‘insignificant until
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The Department of Immigration and Border Protection, DIBP, (formerly known as DIAC29) offers two
important sets of data describing the Colombia-born community in Australia at large. First, their publication The People of Australia (DIBP 2014), which includes a comparison overview of the number of Colombians in Australia recorded in the 2006 and 2011 censuses (3). Second, Net Overseas
Migration (DIBP 2012), reports on the specific visa categories Colombia-born migrants held upon
arrival to Australia in the year ending 30 September 2012. Following the first report, the 2006 census recorded 5,609 Colombian-born people living in Australia. In 2011, only five years later, this figure had increased by 98.2% accounting for 11,318 Colombian migrants.30 Precise data is not available as
to the current Colombia-born population in Australia and will not be until the August 2016 census data are released. Comparative census data rank Colombia as the twelfth country of birthplace with fastest growth in Australia between 2006 and 2011, overtaking Brazil (14th) and Mexico (18th), and only
outstripped by Venezuela (10th) (DIBP 2012). The rapid growth of the Latin American communities in