71 Million People-One in 108 Worldwide-Forcibly Displaced Refugees
More than 70 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence or persecution, the United Nations has said, as the global migrant crisis pushed the number of refugees and displaced people to an all-time high.
The world’s displaced population is now almost double that from a decade ago, and includes an estimated 13.6 million people who fled their homes in 2018, according to the UN Refugee Agency’s annual Global Trends Report.
It is a rise of 2.3 million on last year’s figure, and includes 25.9 million refugees — also the highest number ever recorded.
Overall, an average of 37,000 people are forced from their homes every day, the report said, and one in every 108 people on the planet is now displaced.
Every other refugee a child
In total, around half of the refugee population in 2018 were children.
More than two-thirds of refugees came from just five nations: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. A further 41.3 million people worldwide were displaced within their own countries, and 3.5 million were recorded as asylum seekers.
Announcing the figures, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi criticized rich, “inward-looking” countries for failing to share the burden of resettlement that currently falls disproportionately upon poorer nations.
The United States received more asylum claims than any other nation, with 254,300, despite repeated attempts from the Trump administration to curtail the flow of migrants into the country.
For the fifth straight year, Turkey hosted more refugees than any other country; its take of 3.7 million dwarfed that of Pakistan (1.4 million), Uganda (1.2 million), Sudan and Germany (both 1.1 million).
“Very often we tend to think of the one big refugee crisis affecting the rich world. This is the perception that many people have — and it is wrong,” Grandi said at a press conference Wednesday. “The statistics tell us another story. That is it very often unfortunately a crisis of the poor.”
“This attitude translates practically into a very inward-looking, very restrictive attitude towards people coming to seek safety here … rejection, pushing back, building walls does not solve the problem,” he added, in a swipe at populist governments that are attempting to shut their borders to migrants around the world.
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