Venezuela's problem is that it's basically a one horse economy, OIL. When the price of oil drops, Venezuela catches a cold. This time around it's pneumonia.
My sister, who lived in Caracas for nearly 35 years, has repatriated herself back to the states, along with her son and his family. Her husband, a Venezuelan citizen, is still back home trying to sell some property (they own an apartment that the son and his family were living in as well as their penthouse apartment). I think they managed to sell the smaller apartment, at a steep discount but to someone who was willing to close the deal in the US so as to keep the money here. The penthouse is a bigger problem so I don't know what they'll be able to do about that. They've been trying to get their money into the US for years, moving as much as possible in cash whenever my sister would come to visit (my brother, the priest, has been managing her American bank accounts and investments and has been doing a pretty good job so she is not completely without assets).
Her problem is now that's she's here, even though she's 65 years old she can't get Social Security nor Medicare since it's been too many years since she's worked in the US. She might qualify for some absolute minimum benefit but that's all.
The good news is that her son, who's a US citizen of course, is a graduate engineer and he's gotten a good job with a robotics company in Detroit that does a lot of work in Mexico and South America and so both his education and the fact that he's totally fluent in both English and Spanish (when he was at university he was listed as having TWO first languages) was a big factor in him getting the job that he did. When Emily's husband thinks that he's done all that he can in Caracas he plans to move here permanently as well. He's also a graduate engineer with degrees from schools in both Europe and the US and has worked his whole life designing and maintaining refineries and other petroleum-related facilities, so he could potentially do some consulting. While Nicholas, their son, will likely stay in Detroit, Emily and her husband, if he can manage to get a permanent status here, would like to move to either Texas or Florida (despite the fact that Luis got his Master's in Michigan he does like the snow or the long winters).
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