Colombia will allow expired-visa Venezuela‘ nationals to cross the border in a view of the difficulty over renewing travel documents in Venezuela in the midst of the nation’s political and economic crisis, the migration agency reported on Friday.
According to Reuters news reports, as many as 1.2 million Venezuelans have crossed the border to Colombia in recent years, suffering food and medicines shortages as well as a complex of political crisis, overtaxing the country’s already-limited public housing, utilities and healthcare. Many have arrived in Colombia without a visa due to the inability to renew passports.
Christian Kruger, the head of Colombia’s migration agency, said passport renewals in Venezuela are “nearly impossible because of the high cost of the document, because of a lack of primary materials to make them and because of other actions from the Venezuelan side to curb the exit of Venezuelans”.
In a statement, Kruger said that now Venezuelans will be able to use their old passports for some two years once it gets its expiry date.
The statement added the development is a major part of the recent agreement made by the lima groups of the nations in order to provide migrants security and further prevent them from doing any illegal trafficking gangs in order to enter Colombia via border.
Kruger said, “There is nothing more dangerous for a country than not to know who is within its borders. Shutting the frontier and demanding official documents from a population that is fleeing a dictatorship because of hunger and want only incentivizes irregularities.”