A sur­vey of just un­der 1,000 Venezue­lan mi­grants liv­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go has found high lev­els of un­em­ploy­ment due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic leav­ing mi­grants more vul­ner­a­ble to evic­tions and home­less­ness.

The sur­vey, con­duct­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Mi­gra­tion (IOM) in it’s an­nu­al Dis­place­ment Track­ing Ma­trix al­so found that Venezue­lan mi­grants were be­ing ex­ploit­ed for their labour.

Guardian Me­dia spoke to IOM’s T&T head of of­fice, Jew­el Ali, who said the most crit­i­cal find­ing from the DTM was the high lev­el of un­em­ploy­ment. The DTM in­ter­viewed 950 mi­grants liv­ing in T&T by phone due to re­stric­tions brought on by the pan­dem­ic.

“Pri­or, in 2019, we would have al­ready known there was a high lev­el of un­em­ploy­ment with­in the Venezue­lan pop­u­la­tion and what we have seen in this study is that at least 68 per cent of per­sons who were un­em­ployed who were in­ter­viewed, were un­em­ployed be­cause of COVID,” Ali said.

She said al­though this sta­tis­tic was alarm­ing, it did not come as a sur­prise.

“Many oth­er NGO’s and in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners work­ing on the Venezue­lan re­sponse have seen in­creas­ing calls for very ba­sic needs—we’re talk­ing food and shel­ter and it makes sense from the fact that we see there are very  high lev­els of un­em­ploy­ment and that was made worse by COVID-19.”

The DTM found the high­est rat­ed need of the re­spon­dents was food. It al­so not­ed, “A clos­er re­view of the in­ter­vie­wees’ food cir­cum­stances though, re­vealed that 41 per cent of them ‘skipped meals or ate less than usu­al’ dur­ing the sev­en days be­fore the in­ter­view.”

Ali said the DTM al­so re­vealed a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of mi­grants in­ter­viewed had been ex­ploit­ed for their labour or knew some­one who was ex­ploit­ed for labour.

The re­port states: “More specif­i­cal­ly, it was dis­cov­ered that 47 per cent of the re­spon­dents were aware of some­one in their mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty who worked with­out re­ceiv­ing the agreed up­on pay­ment and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 62 per cent of these in­ci­dents were re­port­ed­ly in the con­struc­tion sec­tor.”

The re­port al­so stat­ed 93 per cent of re­spon­dents work­ing in the in­for­mal sec­tor and 65 per cent of the re­spon­dents work­ing in the for­mal sec­tor had not signed con­tracts for em­ploy­ment nor had proof of pay­ment for their ser­vices.

Fifty-four per cent of re­spon­dents work­ing in the in­for­mal sec­tor and 36 per cent work­ing in the for­mal sec­tor re­port­ed be­ing paid less than min­i­mum wage.

Ali said IOM on­ly col­lect­ed this da­ta but it could be used by oth­er agen­cies with the au­thor­i­ty to act.

“This is cer­tain­ly in­di­ca­tions that needs to be in­ves­ti­gat­ed for pos­si­ble ex­ploita­tion—it is def­i­nite­ly point­ing us in the di­rec­tion be­cause very of­ten when we speak about ex­ploita­tion, there is an overem­pha­sis on sex­u­al ex­ploita­tion,” she said.

The re­port al­so stat­ed Venezue­lan chil­dren had re­duced ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion.

“The da­ta showed that 59 per cent of the chil­dren liv­ing with the re­spon­dents did not have ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go and over half of the in­ter­vie­wees iden­ti­fied lack of doc­u­ments and costs as the main rea­sons for this in­ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty. There were four cas­es where ‘work­ing’ was in­di­cat­ed as the rea­son for no ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion and one case of ‘ear­ly mar­riage/ preg­nan­cy’.”

Eighty-four per cent of the re­spon­dents re­port­ed not ac­cess­ing re­pro­duc­tive and sex­u­al health ser­vices with one quar­ter of preg­nant moth­ers not hav­ing ac­cess to pre­na­tal ac­cess.

The re­port al­so found 59 per cent of re­spon­dents ex­pe­ri­enced xeno­pho­bia.