For many years, Venezuelans understood instinctively what was meant when someone invoked la situación in conversation. The rich started leaving the country because of la situación. One would be crazy to drive at night, given la situación del país.
Empires and nation-states are remembered for their monuments, but they also leave behind plenty of miniatures. Inside the Egyptian pyramids, within the chamber where the pharaoh’s mummy rests, stand collections of little statues—wooden figurines of mummified servants, clay hippos painted turquoise—to remind the ruler how the world once looked. Academics have complained that miniatures suffer from scholarly neglect.
The first generation of immigrants wants to survive, the second wants to assimilate, and the third wants to remember, the sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen wrote in 1938. The fourth, fifth, and sixth? Apparently they now want to go on a luxury vacation to visit the Welsh coal mines their ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
So-called heritage tourism has grown into its own travel category, like skiing and whale watching.
Migration, I like to tell myself, is the opposite of inertia. I left Venezuela on August 28, 2014. President Hugo Chávez had died the year before, bequeathing power over his dictatorship to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Around this time, supermarket shelves were emptying and resourceful Venezuelans were creating WhatsApp groups to tell one another where to find medicine, toilet paper, flour.
Two Republican governors last month sent asylum seekers to the two most Democratic places they could think of—Martha’s Vineyard and the doorstep of Kamala Harris’s house in Washington, D.C. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have made no secret of the message they were trying to send: Immigrants are a burden, and one that Democratic states should share.