We were forced to leave our home in Venezuela after government supporters attempted to kill my mother. I cut short my undergraduate degree and travelled to Germany, where I sought refuge.
I was determined to continue studying, convinced that education would be my way forward. But the German system made it hard for someone like me to get in. My Venezuelan high school diploma wasn’t equivalent to a German one. I could only access university by taking a year-long preparatory course, which required passing a competitive entrance exam.
On exam day, I stood in line with dozens of non-European students. Another Venezuelan there had studied at the Humboldt School, one of Caracas’s most elite institutions. Around us were students from Lebanon, China, Nigeria, Brazil – graduates of international schools, fluent in German and English, prepped to circulate globally.
I didn’t make the cut. Only a small number of places were available, and they went to those who’d had access to the very best education in their countries of origin. What struck me most wasn’t the rejection. It was the realisation that the same unequal systems I had seen in Latin America were also present in Europe.
Meritocracy, I learned, had prerequisites: elite schooling, language and cultural fluency, the right kind of passport. Those lacking these forms of capital were turned away at the door, barred from continuing our education. Instead, we were rerouted into low-wage labour.
I took a manual labour job on a production line at an industrial bakery. Hired through a subcontracting agency, I worked shifts before dawn, packaging bread. Many coworkers were Syrian refugees with similar language barriers. We were rotated in and out, denied long-term contracts, benefits, and permanence.
Labour migration magnifies divisions, exacerbating rather than ameliorating inequality
Our presence caused tension among the permanent staff. Many were migrants* as well, and they seemed to think our presence threatened their relative security. This micro-hierarchy showed me that in competitive systems, social distinctions get reproduced even between migrant groups. Germany’s labour market, like its education system, sorts migrants by their accumulated resources: diplomas, accents, skin colour and legal status. To the bakery, we weren’t students or refugees. We were just cheap labour. But the workforce had sorted itself into a clear pecking order.
Not just hard work
Two years later, I found a way out. An American liberal arts college in Berlin accepted my Venezuelan diploma, offered English-language programmes and provided scholarships. As part of my college application, I submitted short stories I had written to reflect on my life as an immigrant in Germany. My fluency in English and literary interests – forms of cultural capital shaped by my middle-class upbringing – were finally legible. Bard College Berlin (BCB) offered me a way to bypass the gate that had so far kept me out.
BCB is a fantastic crack in a closed system, recognising forms of value other German institutions had ignored. I had time to think, read, and write for the first time in years. It was a turning point for me. But it also showed me that migration isn’t only about mobility – it’s about class and position too. Mobility alone means little without opportunities for security and progression.
People think that labour migration is a way for people to beat social hierarchies (or cheat them, depending on your politics). But labour migration just as easily magnifies divisions, exacerbating rather than ameliorating inequality. Those culturally and economically equipped to navigate global hierarchies move forward, while others stall. I experienced this in my first two years in Germany, and I see the same patterns in my research with Venezuelan migrants in the US.
Since Venezuela’s political and economic crisis began in 2014, more than 7.9 million people have fled – most of them to Latin American and Caribbean countries. Those people have not experienced their exile equally.
Some carry convertible capital, like cultural competence (e.g. linguistic proficiency, socialisation and the right clothes), as well as light skin, professional networks and transferable experience. These migrants have higher chances of entering countries like the US, as well as finding secure work and housing once they get there. Others are forced to take the Darién Gap on the Colombia-Panama border, one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. They wait for months in poor conditions in shelters, navigate dangerous and precarious deals with smugglers, and sell their labour in informal markets.
Migrants defy socio-economic expectations, not by escaping labour exploitation, but by enduring it long enough to change their status back home
I met Cindy** in New York. She’s a Venezuelan woman who crossed the jungle, arrived undocumented, and, unable to find other work, turned to sex work to support her children. She told me she’d broken down in tears after seeing her first client, but persisted because she needed to earn a living. She now lives in Queens, has saved enough to bring other family members to the US, and has bought a house in Venezuela.
William, another person I met during my research, used to sell coffee outside his migrant shelter on Randall’s Island, New York. Within six months, he’d saved up enough to move out of the shelter and rent a room in the Bronx. The income from the coffee stall isn’t much, but William is still able to save for the future. He plans to go home to Venezuela one day and open his own coffee shop there.
Cindy and William’s stories are not unique. Along with many others like them, they’re trapped in precarious labour regimes in the Global North. They’re also accumulating economic and symbolic capital previously out of reach for them in Venezuela. They defy socio-economic expectations through migration, not by escaping labour exploitation, but by enduring it long enough to change their status back home.
In Venezuelan society, where poor and racialised people are rarely imagined as employers or property owners, returning with branded clothing and dollars to start a business or buy a house confers on them a form of class realignment. But these gains are built on invisibility, precarity, and exploitation abroad. And they do not dismantle the global structures that rendered these migrants’ lives disposable in the first place.
What success hides
Cindy and William’s stories don’t illustrate the power of migration to redistribute opportunity. They show how migration deepens global divisions of labour. Elites – migrant and non-migrant alike – flourish. Meanwhile, poor and racialised individuals – like many of my colleagues at the German bakery – migrate from one exploitative system into another, but this time with the added weight of surveillance, racism, deportability, and uncertainty.
This may, for some, generate upward mobility at home later on. But that ‘success’, however real, depends on accepting exploitation and expendability abroad first.
I was lucky to find a way out. I eventually gained credentials, then recognition, then access. My story could be read as a narrative of escape from these global regimes of cheap labour production – proof that migration is a global mechanism for levelling up. But it’s rather a story of class and racial privilege. I bypassed systems of labour extraction not only through effort, but through the cultural capital my class and light skin afforded me. It didn’t have to be that way. Many of the other migrants who worked with me at the factory are still packaging bread.
Migration, I’ve come to learn, is not a rupture from the inequality and exploitation back home. It is a global reorganisation shaped by borders, race, class, vulnerabilities, and labour relations – dynamics which affect us at home and follow us abroad too. To understand labour migration today, we must ask not only who crosses borders, but also who is permitted to exit global systems of cheap, expendable labour – and who is kept inside.
* I use ‘migrant’ to refer to people who move to another country for any number of reasons. I use ‘refugee’ for people formally granted protection by a host state because their life or freedom are at risk back home due to war or political persecution.
**Names changed to protect identities.
Explore the series
- Disposable yet indispensable: refugees in the global economy
Aslı Salihoğlu and Cameron Thibos - The search for self-reliance: refugees and the informal working poor
Evan Easton-Calabria - Ten years on, Venezuelans still face precarity in Colombia
Isabel Ruiz - Displacement from Venezuela taught me that class has no borders
Erick Moreno Superlano - How Ukrainian refugees hit a glass ceiling working in Poland
Jan Bazyli Klakla - Exploitation embedded in the business model of refugee support
Georgina Ramsay - Refugees caught in Jordan’s campaign against informal work
Solenn Almajali, Katharina Grüneisl and Katharina Lenner - Kurds increasingly deported after Japan closes ‘loophole’ law
Chiaki Tsuchida - Refugees in Brazil: Marginalised despite legal protections
Angelo Martins Junior - Brazil refugees: Forming collective resistance where policy fails
Clarissa Paiva, Beatrice Jemeli Chelimo and Mariana Zawadi Kitenge Mukuna - Sudanese in Uganda: ‘Life didn’t stop with the war’
Haidar Abdalla Adam Ahmed - The world doesn't care about Sudan. It's up to us to rebuild
Hind Taha - Neither student nor worker: how Rohingya youth rebuild in exile
Abel Vijayakumar - ‘No way out’: the closing spaces for Rohingya livelihoods
Kyaw Thura
Erick Moreno Superlano is a Ph.D. candidate in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility in New York.
