Over the past two decades, Latin America and the Caribbean have reduced their traditional role as a migrant issuing region, going from a net emigration rate of 2 people per 1,000 inhabitants in 2000 to just 0.5 in 2022, mainly due to an increase in intraregional immigration.
This phenomenon has been driven largely by the Venezuelan migration crisis, which led to an increase in Venezuelan migrants from 210,000 in 2015 to 6.8 million in 2024. Chile has positioned itself as the country in the region with the largest migration flow proportional to its population, multiplying its number of immigrants by ten in the last 20 years.
If previously predominated migrants from Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, since 2015 the composition changed towards Haitian, Colombian and especially Venezuelan migrants, who represent 38% of the total number of immigrants in Chile in 2023. Although most are concentrated in the Metropolitan Region, the highest rates of relative immigration are recorded in the north of the country. The migrant population in Chile is predominantly young, increasingly educated, with high occupancy rates, although since 2020 it faces higher levels of informality and an improvement in its relative economic position against the Chilean population.
