The MIDICO group will hold a seminar entitled “Skilled Venezuelan Migration in Spain” next Friday, 22 May, at 12 noon, in Room 2A2 of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Valencia.

The MIDICO group will hold the seminar ‘Qualified Venezuelan Migration in Spain’ on Friday, 22 May at 12:30 p.m. in room 2A2 of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Valencia. The session will be led by Dr. Yara Altez, who will present the advances of a qualitative study focusing on the professional situation of skilled Venezuelan immigrants settled in Spain since approximately 2018. The study combines a literature review and semi-structured interviews conducted with eleven participants with diverse professional backgrounds.

The research is based on a key question: whether these professionals have managed to resume their careers and develop their professional profiles in the Spanish context. According to the preliminary results, one of the main findings points to the difficulties of integrating into the Spanish professional labour market, despite the high qualifications of the interviewees.

The work also offers a critical reflection on concepts commonly used to analyse contemporary displacements, such as “skilled migration”, “forced migration”, “voluntary migration” or “economic migration”. Based on the testimonies collected, the researcher points out that these categories are, in many cases, insufficient to explain the complexity of recent Venezuelan migratory experiences.

Yara Altez is an anthropologist from the Central University of Venezuela, with a doctorate in Social Sciences.