What Migration Really Looks Like When You Have Lived It From the Inside

I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, in a country that understood something most countries forget. That people in motion are not a problem to be managed. They are the story of how the world actually works.

After the Second World War, Venezuela opened its doors to Europeans fleeing devastation. Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Lebanese families, Jewish communities seeking safety. They arrived. They stayed. They built. And Venezuela became one of the most genuinely multicultural countries in Latin America, not by design, but by welcome. By the quiet, daily act of recognising the humanity in an unfamiliar face.

My own family is a small map of that history. My mother's line is French Martinican. My father's is Bolivian Spanish, with roots in the Aymara people. I was born in Caracas, first generation Venezuelan, shaped by cultures that crossed continents before they crossed me. My husband is Dutch. My children were born in the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland. When people ask where I am from, the honest answer takes a while.

I am not telling you this to be exotic. I am telling you this because I have seen, from the inside, what migration actually is. And it is not what the headlines say it is.

I arrived in Ireland in 2002 on a student visa. Nineteen years old. I came to study English and I stayed because this island became home. I was not fleeing anything. I was a young woman following an opportunity, as millions of people across history have done. I have been thinking about applying for French nationality through my mother and grandmother's line. Migration runs through my family in every direction, across generations, across oceans. It always has.

And yet I keep watching how quickly every story gets flattened into one story.

Here is what that flattening looks like, and here is what it hides.

"They are taking over."

In the entire Causeway Coast and Glens area, people seeking asylum represent less than a quarter of one percent of the population. Less than the capacity of a medium-sized sports hall. The fear is real. The scale is a fiction.

"They are living in luxury hotels."

Picture a hotel where the gym is closed, the restaurant is a dormitory, and you are given less than ten pounds a week for food, clothing, toiletries, and transport. That is not a holiday. That is managed poverty with a hotel sign outside. What we call luxury is what we would call survival if we looked clearly.

"They chose to come here illegally."

For most people seeking asylum, there are no legal safe routes. You cannot apply from a distance. You must be physically present. The journey is dangerous not because people are reckless, but because there is no other path. When the door is locked, people climb through the window. What would you do?

"Not all migrants are like that."

You are right. I am proof of it. I came on a student visa. I could have had the French nationality because of my mother. My husband arrived in Northern Ireland as a European citizen. Migration is not a single category. It is a human condition that has shaped every civilisation on earth, including the one you grew up in. It has certainly shaped me.

The country I grew up in knew this. Venezuela welcomed the displaced, the ambitious, the hopeful, and the lost. It was richer for all of them. That generosity is woven into who I am.

It is also why I founded The Humanitas Initiative. Not to lecture. Not to perform guilt. But to do the work that only stories can do: dissolve the illusion that we are more different from each other than we are the same. To create the conditions where real understanding becomes possible. To build the bridge, carefully, between where we are and where we could be.

Because once you know someone's actual story, the headline loses its power.

After all, we are all humans. And most of us, arriving somewhere new, are hoping for the same thing: to be seen for who we actually are and to be given an opportunity to contribute to society, live peacefully and grow.

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