By Daniel Nardini

By an executive order, U.S. President Joe Biden has said that Venezuelans who had fled their country can stay in the United States on a temporary basis. It is a kind of refugee status that certain groups of people can be granted solely by executive order. This executive order is both good and necessary. There were an estimated 145,000 Venezuelans who were in danger of being deported back to their country. The odds were those deported would have been imprisoned, and maybe even executed. But even if these things did not happen, they would be back in a country where there are food shortages, having the single worst rate of inflation in the world which has made the local currency worthless, and where crime and police repression are an everyday reality.

This will mean that families will not be split apart, that they will not be sent back to a brutal socialist dictatorship, and that those Venezuelans who had fled with their lives will not have to live in fear in the United States. With Venezuelans now able to stay in the United States, they have a safe haven for speaking out against the socialist government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. While they may not be able to change the government, through networking those Venezuelans in the United States would be able to provide information to their families and friends about how good things are in the United States. At the same time, their families and friends in Venezuela would be able to provide the realities of life in that country so those Venezuelans in America will be able to publicize this information to the world. If a dictatorship cannot be taken down all at once, then maybe there are ways to gradually chip away at its power. This is what the Venezuelans in the United States want to do, and are trying to do. But first, they had to be given legal protection so they could stay, and thankfully this has happened.