With the sun beat­ing down on their drea­ry faces, hav­ing camped out­side the San Fer­nan­do reg­is­tra­tion cen­tre from Thurs­day night, scores of Venezue­lan mi­grants con­tin­ued to ac­cept Gov­ern­ment’s amnesty de­spite xeno­pho­bic slurs hurled at them from lo­cals.

“Pros­ti­tutes”, “Go back home” and “just now you all will eat grass” were among the re­marks some com­muters trav­el­ling along the SS Erin Road near the Achie­vors Ban­quet Hall in Dun­can Vil­lage shout­ed to the Venezue­lan mi­grants. The two-week amnesty, which ex­pired on June 14, al­lows mi­grants to legal­ly to live and work in this coun­try for up to a year.

While many of them spoke on­ly Span­ish, those who spoke Eng­lish were too shy to speak when Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed. They would on­ly tell of sleep­ing un­der the tents from Thurs­day night af­ter jour­ney­ing from places in Pa­lo Seco, Siparia, Ce­dros and oth­er far rur­al towns in Trinidad to en­sure they were prompt at the reg­is­tra­tion cen­tre. They showed off their doc­u­ments and the num­bers that were marked on their hands. Many of them were fam­i­lies.

Oba­wole Bid­deau, whose wife is a Venezue­lan mi­grant, be­lieves that cit­i­zens should un­der­stand and em­pathise with the strug­gles be­ing faced by their neigh­bours. Bid­deau and his wife Hecdy­mar Dominguez have been sell­ing food out­side the reg­is­tra­tion cen­tre since last week Fri­day, when reg­is­tra­tion be­gan.

Bid­deau was one of the work­ers re­trenched by Petrotrin last De­cem­ber where he spent 12 years as a ca­su­al work­er. Dominguez has two ill chil­dren, ages four and three, back in Venezuela. Seek­ing ways to sur­vive, they de­cid­ed to open a cart, sell­ing lo­cal and Latin Amer­i­can cui­sine. Bid­deau said Dom­in­quez us­es her earn­ing to send mon­ey back to her fam­i­ly in Cumana, Venezuela.

“My wife is Venezue­lan and her chil­dren are very sick. They’re not well and they’re a poor fam­i­ly so she works and sends mon­ey back to them so they can ac­quire things. It’s most­ly food and med­i­cine, which have high prices. Some­times you don’t get cer­tain med­i­cines. An­tibi­otics are quite ex­pen­sive, milk is very ex­pen­sive and the ba­bies need milk. Some­times when cur­rent goes for days, there is no com­mu­ni­ca­tion. She doesn’t know how the chil­dren are and she starts to cry,” Bid­deau said.

Know­ing the strug­gles of un­em­ploy­ment, Bid­deau said that he imag­ined him­self as a Venezue­lan: hun­gry and job­less with lit­tle means of get­ting by. If T&T’s econ­o­my gets as bad as Venezeu­la’s, he too would flee his coun­try.

“I think hu­man na­ture is self-preser­va­tion. I think if you’re in trou­ble and you’re see­ing green­er pas­tures some­where else, def­i­nite­ly hu­man na­ture will tend to lead you some­where where there are green­er pas­tures. I put my­self in their sit­u­a­tion and I said I would have done the same thing. To jump on a boat as a woman and risk your life is not easy.

“Yes, there are a lot of them com­ing and there should be some mea­sure of con­trol­ling the amount. When you look at the num­ber of peo­ple over there as com­pared to here, there is a greater mass. I think that oth­er coun­tries can fall in and as­sist. Oth­er coun­tries like Pe­ru and Colom­bia. All of them (mi­grants) are spread out and they go out to ac­cess to med­ica­tion and gro­ceries. Every day boats come in to trans­port gro­ceries back to Venezuela legal­ly. If you go down to the port, you would see things com­ing, things go­ing back. I said boy if we’re in that sit­u­a­tion, it will be the same thing.”

While sneak­ing in­to T&T may be easy, the UN High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees’ of­fice stat­ed on Thurs­day that Venezue­lans risk land mines and armed groups en route to Colom­bia.