Venezuelan Anti-Immigration Protests 

On September 25, 2022, Venezuelan migrants in Chile faced fiery anti-immigration protests after new Venezuelan settler camps showed up in Santiago, Chile. Thousands of Chilean locals marched with anti-immigration slogans aiming to push away all the new migrants. Locals became upset after the police cleared a camp, and set fire to the Venezuelan migrants belongings and tossing their clothes and mattresses into bonfires on the streets. In the city of Iquique, Chile, 1,400 kilometers away from Santiago, more than one hundred migrants settled in tents inside of the city square. Migration rates in Latin America became increasingly high after large numbers of Haitian migrants formed a border camp outside of the Mexico-U.S. border. Migration rates increased by 44% since 2009 in South America because of poverty, violence, and food insecurity. The marches estimated an amount of 5,000 Chileans protesting with their “No more migrants” placards. Protestors insisted that the government take harsher measures to stop the increasing number of migrants from entering the country. Jaqueline Rojas, a Venezuelan migrant, states, “They yell at us, ‘Go back to your country. What are you doing here?’ They yell at us a lot of ugly things.” Rojas also adds, “It makes us sad, because the truth is that we are not all the same. There are some people who come to do bad things and others who come to look for work I am coming south to look for work, with my daughter and my brother.” This is still an ongoing problem inside of Chile with the migration rate in Latin America still increasing.