Photo by Internews Network/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A refugees camp on the Libya-Tunisia border, March 2011
Today is World Refugee Day, and to mark it, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has released a report detailing where people displaced from their native countries by war, famine, political upheaval and other crises have sought shelter.
And while growing resettlement demand is anticipated here from unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, the bulk are being hosted by countries far poorer than the United States.
In fact, a full 80 percent of the world’s refugees have been absorbed by developing countries, according to UNHCR’s 2010 Global Trends report. Some of the world’s poorest countries are hosting enormous refugee populations, “both in absolute terms and in relation to the size of their economies.”
According to the report, Pakistan, Iran and Syria (where many Iraqis fleeing the war took refuge) have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.1 million and 1 million respectively.
To illustrate the dearth of resources in these nations for displaced populations: Pakistan has 710 refugees for each U.S. dollar of its per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product); Germany, by comparison, has 17 refugees for each dollar of per capita GDP. (Germany is the industrialized country with the largest refugee population, not the United States.) More from the report:
The 2010 Global Trends report shows that 43.7 million people are now displaced worldwide – roughly equalling the entire populations of Colombia or South Korea, or of Scandinavia and Sri Lanka combined. Within this total are 15.4 million refugees (10.55 million under UNHCR’s care and 4.82 million registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), 27.5 million people displaced within their own country by conflict, and nearly 850,000 asylum-seekers, nearly one fifth of them in South Africa alone.
Particularly distressing are the 15,500 asylum applications by unaccompanied or separated children, most of them Somali or Afghan. The report does not cover displacement seen during 2011, including from Libya, Côte d’Ivoire and Syria.
Displacement from North Africa as people flee the conflict in Libya has reached a crisis point, with some desperate migrants making a perilous crossing by sea to Italy. Among those being displaced in Libya are refugees from other countries who had sought shelter there, according to the U.S. State Department, and some have been referred for resettlement in the U.S. I covered this and other refugee issues during a recent segment on KPCC’s Madeleine Brand Show.
A recent report from the Migration Policy Institute described how the upheaval of the “Arab Spring” in the Middle East and North Africa is and isn’t affecting migration at this point.
