The Foreign Service Journal, April 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2019 39 ALEXCOCOPRO/CCBY-SA4.0 minerals, but also human, with thousands of young, well- educated Venezuelans returning from government-spon- sored scholarships abroad ready to work, and international investors looking for opportunities in a growing and stable market. It was the paradigm of New World opportunity. Hundreds of thousands of working-class European immi- grants—from Portuguese and Spanish fleeing dictatorships to Italians fleeing economic hardship—had been welcomed over the previous decades, helping to build a country that became a beacon of democracy and economic growth in Latin America. Indeed, Venezuela seemed to have it all compared to most of Latin America. Interviewing dozens of visa appli- cants every day for an early career consular assignment, I quickly learned which Latin American countries were functioning well and which were not. The visa refusal rate for Venezuelans was well under 10 percent, since few had any reason to stay illegally in the United States to do menial jobs. In fact, back then Venezuelan culture and cuisine were all but unknown in the United States—a source of annoyance for my Venezuelan wife—since there were so few immigrants from the classes that promote it. While the rich, Miami- villa-owning classes had always gone abroad, they had little interest in the foods, music and customs of the masses that define an ethnic culture. This was part of the problem, as I will explain. By contrast, in the visa line the “huddled masses” of Latin America who had found refuge in Venezuela during the days of Cold War-inspired dictatorships had obvious reasons and plans to stay illegally in the United States, and so had to be denied visas. The Dominicans, Ecuadorians and Peruvians were fleeing economic distress; the Colombians were fleeing Venezuela of Venezuelans protest the Maduro government on Feb. 2, 2019, in Caracas.