Mauricio Rodríguez, Head of Mission of the Venezuelan Embassy in Spain, dismantles news published by the newspaper El Nacional in which they headline that Venezuelans and Colombians are the main asylum seekers in Spain.
El Nacional supports its thesis in the study More than figures published by the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) on the asylum data granted by Spain during the past year, which reflects a very different reality from that raised by the right middle.
Through his Twitter account Rodríguez expresses that “despite the sustained political campaign to make believe that Venezuelan emigrants do it for political reasons, the data in this graph show that the Spanish authorities responsible for making decisions regarding Asylum seekers have considered that Venezuelan immigrants who have arrived in Spain have done so for economic reasons, not political ones.”
In his Twitter thread on this topic, Rodríguez shows one of the tables from the CEAR study and explains: “In the graph it can be seen that of the 15,637 responses related to Venezuelan applicants, only 10 of them have been granted the Statute of refugee, 2 other people have been granted Subsidiary Protection. In the Colombian case, we can observe that 1,169 people obtained recognition as Refugees, out of 19,836 applications answered”.
He explains that the data from the CEAR show that for “Humanitarian Reasons” fundamentally this condition has been granted to Venezuelan citizens: 12,817 of 12,936 resolutions in this regard.
The Head of Mission of the Venezuelan Embassy in Spain points out that “this condition (Humanitarian Reasons) is granted to citizens whose asylum application files do not show suffering any type of persecution for political, racial, sexual discrimination reasons, etc., but Those responsible for the decision believe that people, if they return to their country, would have economic or health difficulties and, therefore, they are granted temporary residence in Spain, under the conditions established in the Immigration Law that governs the conditions of immigrants in Spain”.
After this analysis it is “demonstrated that the headline of El Nacional has a clear political intention by placing the emphasis on the word Asylum and on the verb applicants, when what is observed in this Report (which I will put at the end) is that it is of a phase already closed, where the immigrants have already changed their status and the responses of the Spanish State, as we have explained, show that the existence of any type of persecution has not been considered”.
Rodríguez highlights the data from the graph referring to the fact that “12 Venezuelans received the Refugee Statute or Subsidiary Protection by the Spanish authorities in 2021, while in the Colombian case the figure amounts to 1,169 people.”
Before closing his thread, Rodríguez gave the coordinates of the complete report of more than numbers published by the CEAR this Tuesday and insisted on “THE IMPORTANCE OF GOING TO THE SOURCES AND NOT STAYING WITH REDUCTIONIST AND INTENTIONAL HEADLINES.”
