The 23-year-old was resting by the roadside after a day’s walk into Colombia, eating a tamale that a local had given him. The Venezuelan’s goal was to make some money to send home to his wife and newborn so that they could eventually take the bus to join him on this side of the border. The tamale, rice and chicken stuffed in a banana leaf, was the heartiest meal he could remember eating, he said.

“I thank all the Colombians for having received us Venezuelans so kindly,” he said before resuming his journey, heading down a mountainous highway alongside thousands of his countrymen.

Colombia has never tried to stop people like Colón from coming in. Officials knew they couldn’t. The border between the countries, much like the one dividing the United States from Mexico, runs more than 1,000 miles through open country and is punctuated by hundreds of illegal crossings.

From the very start, the national migration authority here worked to document the new arrivals, but struggled to keep up. It issued hundreds of thousands of identity cards to Venezuelans, allowing them to come and go freely within a specially designated border zone, though not further inland, and created a new immigration status applicable to Venezuelans already in the country. More than half a million Venezuelans were given the right to work. Though officials extended the registration period three weeks past its scheduled conclusion, the program expired in late December 2018. Officials say they are adapting the program; analysts say this is likely because they expected the influx would have slowed by now.

According to Felipe Muñoz, a former official at the Inter-American Development Bank who is now the Colombian official in charge of running the border zone, his country wants to shift the migrant issue from a humanitarian situation to “a process of development” whereby Venezuelans “can produce and earn income.” The Colombian authorities, he said, “are developing policy to help them earn.”

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This influx could present an opportunity for economic growth in Colombia. If properly registered and settled, the new arrivals could start small businesses, generating employment and income across the country. “There is vast literature in economics showing how migrants are entrepreneurs at a much higher rate than locals,” said Dany Bahar, a Venezuelan-born economist who studies migration at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The act of migrating itself is an act of risk taking, and that’s the kind of profile of an entrepreneur.”

Colombia has also made a major effort to get Venezuelan children in school. The government understands, aid groups often note, the long-term dangers that result when a generation of youths have to fend for themselves on the streets in a country that already struggles with drug trafficking and violence. In 2017, a decree allowed all foreign children to study in Colombian primary schools.