Faces of The Venezuelan Exodus

 The country suffers a brain drain as professionals flee a crumbling economy  “They’re all here driving Ubers, washing cars, anything”

- Margaret Newkirk and Nathan Crooks

The newest members of the Venezuelan diaspora can be found every Friday at the Value Store It Self Storage in Doral, Fla. On the fluorescent-bright fourth floor, four units are stacked to the ceiling with donated sheet sets, towels, dishes, toys, clothes, and, on this day, 60 boxes of floral slip-on women’s shoes. The recipients begin arriving at 2 p.m.: a public accountant and his journalist wife, a veterinarian, a registered nurse with her baby and 10-yearold daughter in tow. All have been in the U.S. for mere months. “I didn’t know there were places like this,” says Idianna Diaz, the nurse, who started to cry after collecting some kitchenware and a microwave.

They’re mostly young, educated professionals and have been arriving in greater numbers as they flee political persecution or the collapsing economy. In Doral, a Miami suburb where Venezuelans and Americans of Venezuelan extraction represent more than a third of the population, Patricia Andrade says she began fielding desperate calls in 2015. “There were so many of them,” says Andrade, who emigrated from Caracas in the 1980s. “They needed everything.” To help the new arrivals get on their feet, she founded a charity that solicits donations from the community. Her organization now stages the weekly giveaways.

There are no official statistics on how many Venezuelans have emigrated, but according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, they ranked No. 1 among asylum seekers in the fiscal year ended in March, with 14,525 applications filed—up from 2,181 in 2014. Data compiled by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security show that the number of Venezuelans who overstayed their travel visas jumped 78 percent, to 12,729, in 2015 from a year earlier.