As the first hint of dawn stretches over a Colombian neighborhood known as "Little Mene Grande" after the warm, Venezuelan city where so many recent arrivals are from, six men and women rise from worn, flattened mattresses.

The women do their makeup in front of a mirror hanging from the security bars inside a window. One wraps her 4-month-old daughter in a fuzzy yellow blanket. The men don jackets and baseball caps.

Bogota is cold compared to their Venezuelan hometown and their day will be long. The task: Sell 54 mangos at less than a dollar each in hopes of sending a sliver of what they earn to relatives struggling even more back home.

"I never imagined living like this," says Genesis Montilla, 26, a nurse and single mother who left her three children with their grandmother.

While Venezuela plunges further into political and economic ruin, the flight of its citizens is accelerating, reaching levels unseen in its history. Experts believe nearly one-tenth of its population of around 31 million now lives outside the country. For better-off professionals the preferred destination is Spain or the U.S., where Venezuelans are overstaying their visas in droves and now lead asylum requests for the first time — 18,155 last year alone.

But for many poor people fleeing Venezuela's triple-digit inflation, hours-long food lines and medical shortages, Colombia is the journey's end. The neighboring Andean nation has received more Venezuelans than any other nation. Estimates indicate more than 1 million have arrived in the last two decades, reversing the previous trend of Colombians fleeing war heading to Venezuela.

The most desperate cross illegally through one of hundreds of "trochas," unpaved dirt roads along Venezuela's porous 1,370-mile (2,200-kilometer) border with Colombia.

"When you talk to Venezuelans, they all say, 'I want to come,'" said Saraid Valbuena, 20, who made the journey with her husband and their then 1-month-old daughter earlier this year. "Even though you come here to sleep on the ground, people want to come because they know with a day or two of work at least they'll eat."