Venezuela held an election this week; President Maduro says he won, while the opposition and independent observers say he lost. Disputed elections like this are fairly common across the world, but where Venezuela really stands out is not how people vote at the ballot box- it is how they vote with their feet.

Reuters notes that “A Maduro win could spur more migration from Venezuela, once the continent’s wealthiest country, which in recent years has seen a third of its population leave.”

I don’t think we emphasize enough how crazy the scale of this is. After every US Presidential election, you hear some people who supported the losing side talk about leaving the country, but they almost never do. Leaving your home country behind is a dramatic step, one people only want to take if they think things are much better elsewhere. The US, even with a party you don’t like in power, has generally stayed a good place to live. The total number of Americans who have moved abroad for any reason (I would guess most feel more pulled by the host country rather than pushed by the US) is about 3 million. That is less than 1% of all Americans; by contrast more than 46 million people have immigrated to the US from other countries, and many more would come if we allowed it.

Even in poor countries, seeing anything like one third of the population leave is dramatic, especially when almost all the migration happens in only 10 years as in Venezuela:

This makes Venezuela the largest refugee crisis in the history of the Americas, and depending on how you count the partition of India, perhaps the largest refugee crisis in human history that was not triggered by an invasion or civil war.

Instead, it has been triggered by the Maduro regime choosing terrible policies that have needlessly and dramatically impoverished the country:

I hope that the Venezuelan government will soon come to represent the will of its people. I’m not sure how that is likely to happen, though I guess positive change is mostly likely to come from Venezuelans themselves (perhaps with help from Colombia and Brazil); when the US tries to play a bigger role we often make things worse. But what has happened in Venezuela for the past 10 years is clearly much worse than the “normal” bad economic policies and even democratic backsliding that we see elsewhere. People everywhere complain about election results and economic policy, but nowhere else have I seen such a case of people going past simple cheap talk, taking the very expensive step of voting against the regime with their feet.