Washington, DC — A new paper published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) casts serious doubt on recent claims that US economic sanctions do not contribute to increased Venezuelan migration to the United States.

The paper, “Did Sanctions Relief Drive Venezuelan Migration to the US? A Reappraisal of the Bahar and Hausmann Results,” by Francisco Rodríguez, David Rosnick, and Giancarlo Bravo, scrutinizes recent analysis by Dany Bahar and Ricardo Hausmann published by the Center for Global Development. Bahar and Hausmann argue that higher Venezuelan oil revenues — a proxy for sanctions relief — correlate with more migration to the US, implying that sanctions may actually reduce migration.

The CEPR paper finds that this surprising result is driven by a coding error. The original study used a twelfth-difference operator — an unconventional and unjustified transformation of the data — that distorts the statistical relationship between sanctions and migration, and introduces erratic noise. When the data are properly differenced year-over-year, the reported effect disappears.

But the problem goes deeper than a coding mistake. The CEPR paper also shows that the original analysis fails to control for a major omitted variable: US labor market conditions, which improved significantly over the study period and are strongly correlated with global oil prices. The authors argue that what appears to be a causal effect of Venezuelan oil revenues is in fact a spurious correlation, reflecting the influence of US demand-side factors on migration flows.

“The claim that sanctions reduce migration is built on shaky ground,” said Francisco Rodríguez, one of the report’s authors. “Not only do the conclusions derive from a coding error, but the analysis ignores the most obvious driver of increased Venezuelan migration to the US: the recovery of the US labor market. That omission renders their conclusions unreliable and deeply misleading.”

The CEPR authors caution that public debate on migration and sanctions policy should be grounded in robust empirical evidence. They argue that the dataset used by Bahar and Hausmann — 48 monthly observations of Venezuelan encounters at the US southwest border — is too limited to support conclusions about the effects of sanctions, while other peer-reviewed research has found that sanctions significantly worsen living conditions in target countries and are a key driver of migration out of these countries.

The authors warn that relying on flawed or narrowly framed empirical arguments can obscure these broader realities and mislead policy-making.

“There is growing recognition that economic sanctions help to drive migration,” paper coauthor David Rosnick said. “These sanctions are generally intended to punish the economies of target countries. More economic suffering ― the more people have to struggle to provide food, medicine, and other essentials for their families ― means more people will leave. Flawed studies will not change that fact.”

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