These are the countries with the largest refugee populations
November 28th, 2018(SSNN) — The Central American migrants who have arrived in Mexican towns along the southern border in recent weeks are part of a worldwide movement of people—from Africa to Asia to South America—who are crossing borders to escape violence and poverty in search of shelter and asylum.
Amid the developments on the U.S.-Mexico border, we take a look at some of the recent flows of refugees and migrants from around the world.
According to the United Nations, refugees are individuals who have fled their home countries for fear of conflict, persecution, generalized violence, or disruption of public order, while migrants have no legal definition but are as seen those who change their “country of usual residence, irrespective of the reason for migration or legal status.”
SYRIA
Since the breakout of war in Syria in 2011, as many as 6.3 million Syrians have fled the violence to seek refuge in nearby countries, with Turkey accepting 3.3 million, or more than half of them, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Lebanon, Syria’s neighbor to the west, has taken more than 1 million Syrians. Other Arab countries, including Jordan (655,000), Iraq (246,000), and Egypt (126,000), have also hosted Syrians.
Few Syrians – about 8 percent – live in refugee camps, with most living in urban areas in their host countries, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations agency that helps protect and shelter refugees and individuals forced to flee their homes.
AFGHANISTAN
The second-largest refugee population in the world comes from Afghanistan, which has about 2.6 million registered refugees, according to the UNHCR. The U.N. refugee agency says that Afghans account for Asia’s largest population of protracted refugees, a condition it defines as 25,000 or more refugees from the same country being in exile for five or more years in an asylum country.
The UNHCR says that 1.4 million Afghan refugees live in neighboring Pakistan, where 74 percent are second or third generation refugees.
SOUTH SUDAN
About 2.4 million refugees worldwide come from South Sudan, which became the world’s newest country after splitting from the Republic of Sudan to the north and establishing statehood in 2011. Only a couple years after gaining independence, South Sudan fell into civil war, which claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions.
Uganda hosts the largest number of South Sudanese refugees at 785,104, followed by Sudan (764,400), Ethiopia (422,240), Kenya (114,391), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (95,181).
SOMALIA
The UNHCR reports there are 805,978 refugees from Somali, the Horn of Africa country that has suffered from drought and years of fighting. Most Somali refugees are living in Ethiopia, Yemen, and Kenya, each of which hosts more than 250,000.
As of January, Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, considered one of the world’s largest, alone had a population of 235,269 registered refugees and asylum seekers, according to the UNHCR. The camp was opened in 1991 during Somalia’s civil war. In 2011, 130,000 refugees escaping drought and famine in Somalia arrived, according to the UNHCR.
MYANMAR
More than 723,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh since violence broke out against the Muslim minority in 2017, according to the UNHCR. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that whole villages were burned, and women and girls were ganged raped.
Three-fourths of the Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh in September 2017, a month after their communities were targeted, the UNHCR reports. Cox’s Bazar, where many of the Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh, is home to the densest concentration of refugees in the world, according to OCHA.
VENEZUELA
In early November, the UNHCR reported that the number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide reached 3 million. Latin American and Caribbean countries host about 2.4 million Venezuelans, or the bulk of the refugees and migrants, according to the UNHCR. Neighboring Colombia, which shares a 1,400-mile border with Venezuela, alone hosts more than 1 million.
Venezuelans are fleeing their country to escape widespread food and medicine shortages, rampant hyperinflation and violence by the regime of President Nicolas Maduro.
CENTRAL AMERICA
There are about 3 million immigrants from Northern Triangle of Central America – a region spanning El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – living the United States, and about 55 percent of them are unauthorized immigrants, the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends reported in 2017.
In 2015, there were 110,000 asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle around the world, according to the Council on Foreign Relations,which cites violence, poverty, and forced gang recruitment as some of the reasons for why the migrants have fled.
The U.S. government says individuals from the Northern Triangle do not qualify as refugees, Duke University professor Sarah Bermeo writes in Brookings.
In the U.S., asylum and refugee status are similar in that they allow foreigners to enter the country if they have a well-founded fear of being persecuted in their home country due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The only difference is that refugees are interviewed and vetted outside the U.S., while asylum seekers make their request and go through the interview process after arriving in the U.S.
Contributing: Alan Gomez and Megan Janetsky.
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