Manuel Villa decided to leave Colombia in December 2022. He was employed and lived in a small but comfortable apartment in the north of Bogotá. However, while celebrating the Christmas holidays after almost two years of confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he realized that he wanted something more.
“It wasn’t that it was bad, but the truth is that I didn’t see much of a future,” Villa tells BBC Mundo.
So in January 2023, at the age of 33, he took a plane and moved to the United Kingdom.
Villa is part of the almost two million Colombians who have left the country in the last four years, in a trend that peaked in 2022, but is still maintained, with a significant emigration flow.
According to the Colombian Migration office, nearly 370,000 Colombians left in 2025 and did not return. The phenomenon has been sustained since 2022 when more than 500,000 citizens left the country, in what was then seen as an unusual migration process compared to previous years.
The curious thing is that this occurs in a context of certain financial well-being, with macroeconomic figures that many experts describe as stable and positive despite dragging a worrying fiscal deficit and a high degree of labor informality.
By the end of 2025, Colombian gross domestic product grew 2.3% compared to the previous year, similar to the growth of Brazil and above that of Mexico, the two economic giants in the region.
Unemployment, for its part, has remained below 9% in recent months. The lowest figure in 25 years.
However, for many academics, Colombian migration is a phenomenon that has been occurring for more than five decades and will continue in the coming years.
“Colombians have been migrating for more than 50 years regardless of whether there was a boom or we were in recession. First to the United States and Venezuela and, since the beginning of this century, that trend began to include Spain and Chile,” William Mejía Ochoa, Research Coordinator of the Human Mobility Group at the Technological University of Pereira, tells BBC Mundo.
“What you have to understand is that Colombians do not migrate, in most cases, because they are dying of hunger or because they do not have a job. They emigrate because they want to improve their income or reunite with a family member,” he adds.
Thus, one of the reasons behind the increase in absolute numbers is that the network of people who can receive new migrants is increasingly expanding, especially in the US and Spain.
“Currently there are almost a million Colombians in Spain, 1.2 million in the US and about 200,000 in Chile. That, of course, attracts more Colombians because it facilitates their migration,” notes the academic.
Schengen phenomenon
It is estimated that there are four million Colombians living abroad, while the country’s population reaches 52 million.
In addition to the multiplier effect of family networks and compatriots that facilitate new migrations, experts also point out that this phenomenon is impacted by the exclusion of visas for Colombians in the Schengen zone, established in 2015 for short stays, and in the United Kingdom, since November 2022, although the requirement was later reestablished in 2025.
This fact added to the increase in asylum applications. Once they entered European countries within the Schengen zone, many visitors submitted host requests to extend their stay.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Colombians are the third country behind Venezuela and Sudan with the highest number of asylum requests in the world.
Although many of these requests are related to the consequences of the serious armed conflict that the country experienced for five decades, irregularities and abuses have also been recorded.
Governments in Europe and the United Kingdom have reported irregular cases that seek to take advantage of mandatory visa-free access and then present themselves as refugee cases.
It is for this reason that the British government decided in 2025 to cancel the benefit of visa exemption for Colombians. And the Spanish government announced last December that it was declaring Colombia a “safe country,” in order to reduce requests for international protection.
Although the Colombian government has implemented repatriation and return programs (especially law 1,565 of 2012, which contemplates various return plans), these have not had the effect of achieving the massive return of Colombians to their land.
The explosion of 2022
For Colombians, migrating has been a constant and, above all, diverse activity.
“We have done it from farmers and labor, students and teachers to people to open drug trafficking routes, to work as mercenaries, to create the famous ‘gota-gota’ (informal credit providers) in other countries. Everything,” says Mejía Ochoa.
Between 2012, the year records began to be kept, and 2019, the migration flow averaged 150,000 to 200,000 people per year. And, according to the analysis, the most common reason was the search for a better future.
Between 2020 and 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic and flight restrictions, those numbers dropped significantly. However, when travel restrictions were lifted, in 2022 there was a migration phenomenon that would reach record numbers: more than half a million people in 12 months.
In just under two years, between 2022 and 2023, and according to Colombian Migration figures, nearly one million Colombians left the country never to return, which is known as net migration. 2022 was the year in which the most Colombians left their land in history: 540,000 emigrants.
“It cannot be denied that the pandemic had a devastating effect on the country, not only economically but also on the social fabric, but it is not the only reason for the explosion in that number,” says Mejía.
According to several national organizations, such as the Bank of the Republic, the effects of the covid-19 pandemic were very negative at an economic level: the GDP showed a negative balance (-6.8%), poverty reached 47%, and unemployment touched a historical maximum of 21%.
But in addition to the total economic malaise that triggered departure once the confinement was lifted, researchers point out that behind the 2022 migration peak there is also a large number of people who had returned to the country during the pandemic and decided to leave again.
“During 2020 and 2021, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Colombians returned to the country, due to a program offered by the government, and of those, once the pandemic ended, a good number decided to return to the countries to which they had originally emigrated,” says Mejía.
Added to this is that the economic situation at the time strengthened foreign currencies such as the dollar, the euro and the pound sterling against the Colombian peso.
New profile
For some of the migrants interviewed by BBC Mundo for this article, the reasons behind the always complex decision to migrate are very diverse, many of which have nothing to do with the economic situation of the country.
Laura Juliana Melo decided to leave Colombia in 2022 for Spain for one reason: her brother.
“If I start looking for reasons, perhaps the most important one is that my brother told me to come. I had a job in Colombia. It never crossed my mind to live in Spain,” Melo tells BBC Mundo.
She is from Bucaramanga, in the north of the country. Although there have been some drawbacks, he believes it has been a good decision.
“I don’t regret it,” he confirms.
Professor Mejía Ochoa projects that the migratory movement of Colombians abroad will continue stably in the coming years and may even increase in terms of annual figures.
“Currently, a migrant regularization process is being carried out in Spain that will lead to many more migrants obtaining residency or citizenship in that country and in Europe,” he points out.
Daniel Arango, academic and communicator, is part of that group of migrants who left after 2022. The reasons were familiar, but he feels that it will be difficult to return to Colombia in the short term now that he has even obtained Spanish citizenship.
“I had a good job in Colombia and here I have had challenges in that sense, but now I have managed to arrange everything so that it works, so I don’t think I will return soon and I think that is something that happens to many people here,” he explains.
Although many of them do not describe the economic situation they had in their country of origin as difficult, the truth is that in their new destinations they have found a stability that they did not find at home.
“I know that the experience is not the same for everyone, but I came to London to study and here I got a job where I earn much more than what I did in Colombia with a lot of effort, I think that is the difference,” Dayana Peña, who also emigrated in 2022 from Ricaurte, in Cundinamarca, tells BBC Mundo.
Peña is a business administrator, a profession she practiced for 10 years, and also embodies a trend observable in the flows of Colombians leaving. For many experts, migration has mutated from an unskilled one, in which many people did not have completed the high school level, to a much more professional one.
“Today it is an emigration of a higher educational level, where women continue to be the ones who emigrate the most,” Colombian sociologist Fernando Urrea, from the Universidad del Valle, explained to the DW news portal.
This professionalization has meant that, although the United States and Spain are the main destinations, countries such as Germany, New Zealand, Australia and, in more recent cases, Poland, have also become reception centers for Colombians abroad.
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