It’s quite something, the immigration crisis you’ve got over in Europe! Anyone with a solution should speak now. Culture clashes, religions, languages, and wars. Compared to that, we are quite lucky here in South America. ISIS isn’t bothering us yet, almost everyone is Catholic, we all speak the same language (Spanish), and once the guerrillas in Colombia are removed, peace will reign once more.
However, not so very long ago, it was a different story. Those same guerrillas caused a huge wave of immigration. According to the registry office, at least 90,000 Colombians came to Ecuador from the early 1990s up until the beginning of this century, of which half were refugees. Many of these immigrants ended up working in the floriculture sector around Quito. Nowadays, Colombia and Ecuador are good friends, and the integration has been pretty successful.
More recently, we had a less successful wave of immigrants. The visa requirements between Ecuador and Cuba were waived due to bilateral agreements, and all Cubans were given free access to Ecuador. They arrived in droves! The trick was to get married within a month, arrange an Ecuadorian residence visa, and get a divorce afterwards. The wedding planning business boomed, although the marriages didn’t have anything to do with love. Fortunately, the visa requirements were rapidly reintroduced, but too late to prevent Quito from having its own ‘Little Havana’.
The wave of immigrants has swept in a different direction too. Ecuador experienced a deep crisis after the devastating El Niňo in 1998, after which many thousands of citizens decided to travel visa-free to Spain and Italy. Abandoned ghost towns in the south of the country are a stark reminder of this. In 2003, the European Union said enough was enough and enforced visa requirements. That helped immediately, and the immigration halted. Well, if only the current problem in Europe was as easy to solve, then we wouldn’t ever have rickety boats rocking on the Mediterranean Sea again.
Victor van Dijk
Manager South America
FleuraMetz
