Permanent Residence
According to the Colombian government, more than 100,000 Venezuelans emigrated to Colombia in the first half of 2017. In the run-up to the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly elections, Colombia granted a Special Permit of Permanent Residence to Venezuelan citizens who entered the country before July 25; over 22,000 Venezuelans applied for permanent residence in the permit's first 24 hours of receiving applications. By the end of November 2017, over 660,000 Venezuelans were in Colombia, twice as many as there had been in June. At the end of 2018, there were more than 1.2 million Venezuelans in Colombia. Between April and June of the 2018, Colombia registered more than 442,000 Venezuelans who were irregularly in the country through a registration process called RAMV. Beginning in January 2020, the Colombian government announced it would offer work permits to hundreds of thousand of Venezuelans living in Colombia, allowing them to integrate into the formal economy. The influx of refugees has caused an increase in xenophobia by some Colombians, who blame the refugees for rising crime, unemployment and the spread of COVID-19. In December 2020, President Duque announced that undocumented Venezuelan migrants would not receive vaccinations for the coronavirus despite concerns from refugee agencies.