Looking Things Over

Like many of his companions, Fernando arrived with a tourist visa to “look things over.” With a job offer, he now is eligible to apply for a transient visa, which will allow him to work. In one year he will be eligible for a resident visa.

Venezuela, whose population is 12 million, has had no sizable immigration since the nineteenfifties when the dictator Marcos Pérez Jimenez relaxed strict laws to allow nearly half a million peope, mostly Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese, to enter. Immigration began to decline in 1957.

Since then, the most numerous and constant immigration has been from Colombia, this country's western neighbor. Nearly 800,000 Colombians are thought to live and work in Venezuela, nearly three‐quarters of them illegally.

Now Venezuela's oil earnings —$10‐billion in 1974—and 16 years of political stability are attracting other Latin Americans.

“Beginning in mid‐1974, the increase in the number of Latin Americans, especially from the southern part of South America, is surprising,” say Miguel Espidel, secretary general of the National Immigration Department. “They come mainly from Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, countries which now have problems.”