Is There Xenophobia in Medellín? Real Discussion Time.

Añadido: 2026-05-10

[00:00:01]We're going to talk about something important today. Nope. No. Look right at the camera. We're going to talk about something important today. And um I'm expecting a little bit of hate for it.

[00:00:11]So, I'm wearing my appropriate shirt for the moment. So, stick around. We'll get into it. Let's go.

[00:00:25]>> [music] >> You can feel it now in many the tensions. It's not everywhere. It's not all the time, but if you spent enough time in this city, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Foreigners feeling increasingly blamed for everything, locals feeling increasingly pushed out of their own neighborhoods, and everybody online is angry. And somewhere in the middle there's a question that people keep dancing around instead of actually answering honestly. Is there xenophobia in Medí? Because depending on who you ask, either foreigners are destroying the city or they're being scapegoed for problems that were already growing long before they arrived. And to be honest with you, I think both sides are missing what's actually happening here.

[00:01:14]The easy narrative right now is uh gringoes are causing gentrification. And that's the simple version. And simple versions spread fast online like wildfire because they give a clean villain. But to be honest, reality is a lot messier than that. And yes, foreign money attracts people who affect the prices. Yes, Airbnb affects inventory.

[00:01:38]Yes, some foreigners absolutely come here trying to exploit the exchange rate and live way above their means. That stuff is all real. But here's the part nobody wants to talk about. Almost nobody wants to talk about publicly.

[00:01:52]That foreigners, gringo, extraos are not the ones listing their apartments and their their places at absurd prices. The property owners are. And a huge percentage of those property owners are wealthy Colombians.

[00:02:08]And they're participating in the biggest gold rush that Median's ever seen, even bigger than the8s era because that was one person getting rich. This is a lot of people. And once you see that exact thing, once you see that gold rush in in effect, it changes the entire conversation around xenophobia. It starts looking a lot different than it did. Because think about what's happened over the last few years here in Medí. Medin's become a globally famous city almost overnight.

[00:02:41]Digital nomads, tourism channels, Instagram, remote work, passport bros, travel influencers. Suddenly people from everywhere in the world are looking at Medine and thinking, "Wait, I can rent a luxury apartment here for a fraction of what I pay back home." Hm. That demand absolutely changed the market. But demand alone does not explode prices like what we've seen here. Greed does.

[00:03:10]And I hate to say this everyone, but greed exists on both sides. You have foreigners who are trying to maximize their purchasing power and live cheaply here and consume. But you also have property investors, developers, landlords, Airbnb operators, and wealthy Colombians aggressively raising prices because they know foreigners can and will pay more. That's not xenophobia.

[00:03:36]That's capitalism. And I think a lot of regular Colombians are being manipulated into blaming foreigners for a game that wealthy investors are profiting massively from. Because ask yourself something. Who benefits the most from skyrocketing property prices? The gringoes moving here or the people holding multiple apartments in Polonis?

[00:04:00]And this is where the conversation gets a little uncomfortable because many of the loudest anti-forigner voices online completely ignore the role that the Colombian elites play in this whole situation.

[00:04:16]The fact is developers love foreign demand. Luxury rental operators love foreign demand. Landlords, they absolutely love foreign demand. Entire businesses are built on attracting foreigners here now. But when local frustration rises, suddenly the narrative becomes, well, the foreigners ruined everything. Look, look what these gringoes are doing. That's convenient because it redirects anger away from the people actually making enormous amounts of money off the transformation of the city. Again, that does not mean that foreigners have zero responsibility.

[00:04:53]Some absolutely not just contribute to the problem, but they are a big part of the problem.

[00:04:59]I'm speaking especially the people who are treating med like an arbitrage opportunity instead of a real city full of real people. But if we're going to have an honest conversation, then everybody involved in this deserves some scrutiny.

[00:05:12]And I think this is one of the reasons resentment is getting so dangerous.

[00:05:17]People are angry at the symptoms while the people quietly making the biggest profits disappear into the background.

[00:05:24]Oo, look over there. Don't look over this way. There is no wizard behind the curtain.

[00:05:30]I guess I'm old if I say that.

[00:05:33]Now, let's talk about the emotional side of this because economics only play a part in this story. The deeper issue is psychological. A lot of locals feel like Medine no longer belongs to them and that feeling absolutely matters. When your neighborhood changes quickly, the people start to become emotionally territorial. You hear people speaking more English than Spanish. You hear you see prices changing. You see business, nightlife, dating culture, all changing rapidly, very quickly. And for those that live here, that creates fear. And fear always searches for a bad guy. It needs a scapegoat. And foreigners become the visible target because they're easy to identify. Kind of makes you feel a little differently when you are the evil foreigner, doesn't it? But again, the systems, the deeper systems that are behind the changes, they're much larger than just tourism. It's global capital, it's remote work, it's real estate speculation, it's social media exposure, foreign investment, it's all of the social stuff that's going on right now.

[00:06:42]And Median is not the only city dealing with this. You see it in like Lisbon, uh, Mexico, Mexico City, Bali, Barcelona.

[00:06:52]But the difference between this city and those is that median transformations happened incredibly fast and a rapid rate change like that causes massive social instability.

[00:07:05]And at the same time, foreigners are arriving here emotionally vulnerable.

[00:07:11]And that's that's a another truth that nobody wants to really talk about because a lot of people are moving to Medin. They're burned out. They're lonely, feeling financial pressure, socially disconnected, and they arrive here thinking that this city will solve all of their deeper emotional problems.

[00:07:28]And that fantasy creates dangerous situations, not just crime, distorted expectations, overconfidence, uh transactional relationships, and ironically, isolation. And when reality hits hard, a lot of foreigners start to get defensive. and locals see that defensiveness and the resentment grows even more. So now both sides are they have a growing distrust for each other and that's the real danger here. It's not the tourism itself, it's not the people moving here, it's the social fragmentation amongst Colombians and also with the people that are coming here as well.

[00:08:05]And this next part is probably going to piss off both sides, but here we are. If you're a foreigner living in Medí and your entire mindset is how cheaply can I live here compared to back home, then yeah, you're contributing to that pressure. If you do nothing for the city other than buy things and consume, you are part of the pressure. Especially if you're flaunting wealth in a city where a lot of people are really struggling economically.

[00:08:35]But if you're a wealthy landlord raising rents aggressively because foreigners can and will pay more all while publicly blaming gringoes for the raising price rising prices and uh yeah that hypocrisy also deserves some criticism. Sorry. And honestly, I think that regular Colombians need to start asking questions, harder questions about who's actually profiting from Medium and becoming an international destination because the average working Colombian is not becoming wealthy from this. Men are actually getting squeezed. It's becoming the exact opposite. And I think the conversation around xenophobia is incomplete. I don't think that it's I don't think that it's something that a lot of people are paying a lot of attention to. Some resentment is cultural, some is emotional, and some of it is economically manipulated. I think manipulated populations almost always end up fighting each other instead of the systems that are actually driving the problem.

[00:09:34]And meanwhile, the conversation keeps getting more and more extreme. Uh, one side says Medine is cooked. The other side says foreigners are parasites and deserve to be unalived at or leave.

[00:09:47]I've seen this unfortunately.

[00:09:50]The reality is much more uncomfortable because there's truth mixed into both.

[00:09:54]Not the unaliving part.

[00:09:57]But some foreigners actually do disrespect the city and that is egregiously terrible. Horrific.

[00:10:04]Horrific. Some locals absolutely stereotype people unfairly.

[00:10:10]This is you see somebody that doesn't look like you and oh there's the problem. There's the problem. There it is. There it is. Look, look. There's the problem.

[00:10:17]Some tourists arrive here trying to exploit the economy and all of these things can exist simultaneously and they are right now. If you look, if you actually look that complexity, that social complexity is exactly where people struggle with this topic.

[00:10:35]People want a clean villain. And let's be honest, reality rarely gives that to you. And honestly, the future of this city may depend on whether people can handle uncomfortable nuance again. It was here when I first came, but it seems to be that people are splitting far and far further and further apart. So, if this conversation is going to continue getting reduced to foreigners bad and then nothing actually improves, the prices will keep rising. People will stop wanting to come here and developers will still build luxury products thinking that, oh, the the green goes are coming. We're going to get them.

[00:11:12]We're gonna get them. We're gonna hook their money. Get them.

[00:11:16]Landlords are going to continue chasing higher profits and foreign demand may or may not exist. Regular people are going to continue getting squeezed while fighting each other online. And that's where I think this issue needs some honesty instead of some tribalism. That all the tribalism going on. Foreigners should absolutely respect the city more deeply. 100%. I say it all the damn time. Learn Spanish, understand the culture, and for the love of God, stop treating the city like it's your adult playground. And you are you are owed a good time here. But locals also deserve transparency about who is absolutely driving these massive profits from the housing market. Because the average Colombian is struggling with rent right now. They're not the ones buying these apartments. And the average foreigner renting a furnished apartment somewhere is not personally engineering the collapse of the entire housing market here. The systems behind this are bigger than one group. That's an inconvenient truth that nobody wants to talk about anymore and gets simplified into a Tik Tok slogan. So going back to it, is there xenophobia in Medí?

[00:12:33]Sometimes yes. But I think what we're really seeing is a city that's under immense pressure, economic pressure, social pressure, psychological pressure, and globalization pressure. And under pressure, people become super tribal.

[00:12:49]People look for villains and they stop looking at each other as human beings.

[00:12:52]And that is where the real danger in this situation is because Medine's future cannot belong to just investors.

[00:13:01]It cannot just belong to the tourists.

[00:13:04]And I'm going to be honest, it can't survive if locals and foreigners increasingly see each other as enemies instead of trying to navigate the same rapidly changing reality that is global.

[00:13:15]It's changing everywhere in the world, and it's not just here. So, this city deserves a smarter conversation than the one that's happening online right now.

[00:13:24]And honestly, I think people are here, the people that live here just exhausted from all the propaganda enough that they're finally ready for a real conversation about it. I certainly hope that that's the case. So, I want to hear what you have to say about it. I want to hear down in the comments. Uh, tell me what you think. What do you think the issue is? Try and be respectful and don't go into tribal foreigners bad, locals bad. Just think about it. Think about what is going on here and let's talk about it. Let's have a discussion, a real discussion, not a fingerpointing, blaming. Uh, God forbid if anybody I I will delete any comments that start to get threatening. So, and I've seen those and I've deleted them. So, keep that in mind. All right. Thank you guys for listening. I hope that my my uh rant here hit the target. So, please let's talk about it. Let's stop blaming and let's start talking to each other, not at each other. Do a little listening, a little talking. So, like, share, subscribe, share this with people, comment on the video. I want to hear what you have to say. Until next time, ciao.