In recent years, Venezuelan migration to many Latin American countries has turned some cities in the region into places of transit and migratory stay. The objective of this article is to show the methodological and empirical contribution of the "Ethno-survey of recent immigration in Latin American host contexts" (LAMP-ENIR 2021), focused on the living conditions and migratory, labor and social history of people arriving in a country. The challenges and advantages of an interdisciplinary, longitudinal and multilevel project to access migrant populations in a city are discussed and made visible through the analysis of Venezuelans in San José, Costa Rica, where family adjustments, social networks and the migratory project are examples of the migratory complexity rarely shown in censuses and surveys.

The crises that we are seeing in the Mediterranean, on the northern and southern border of Mexico or in South America, derived from the massive mobilizations of people fleeing their countries, force us to reflect on the role that the States in the face of the arrival and / or transit of displaced persons and refugees, in the face of what appears to be a regressive global policy, based on the externalization of borders, restriction and selectivity.