Forced to Flee: Over 80 Million People Displaced Worldwide | List of Nations From Where Refugees Are Arriving

According to the UN Data, an estimated 42% of refugees are children, among whom are about 1 million born as refugees from 2018 and 2020. A record 82.4 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes.

With almost 200,000 illegal crossings recorded at EU borders, 2021 saw a rebound to pre-pandemic levels of irregular migration to Europe. This was a 57% rise compared to 2020 and 38% rise compared to 2019. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), around the world, 82.4 million people have been forcibly displaced. About 26.4 million people worldwide have fled to other countries as refugees. Another 4.1 million people are asylum-seekers who have applied for refugee status, but not received it yet.

According to the UN Data, an estimated 42% of refugees are children, among whom are about 1 million born as refugees from 2018 and 2020. A record 82.4 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes.

People who have been forced to leave everything behind are among the most vulnerable in the world, and their situation only getting worse, with the added emergency of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. Many refugees have suffered tremendously due to the crisis.

For the authorities, it a difficult task to track irregular migration as it occurs outside the regulatory norms of countries. Changes in the migration status of an individual, into or out of irregularity, are also hard to track. As a result, current knowledge of irregular migration levels and dynamics is limited, particularly on a global scale.

According to the reports, in Asia,  there were some 4 million undocumented migrants in Pakistan in 2013, and about 500,000 undocumented workers in Malaysia in 2012 (Gallagher and McAuliffe, 2016). Other Asian countries host significant irregular migrant populations, although the lack of reliable data and estimates make it very difficult to assess the actual extent of irregular migration and migrant smuggling trends in these regions (McAuliffe and Laczko, 2016).

In 2013, it was estimated that approximately 2.7 million irregular migrants from Afghanistan lived in Pakistan (UNODC, 2015). Whereas in Europe, the size of the irregular migrant stock of the EU-27 in 2008 was measured to be between 1.9 and 3.8 million, a decline from between 2.4 and 5.4 million in the EU-25 in 2005 (Kovacheva and Vogel, 2009).

United States had an estimated 11.3 million undocumented migrants were living in the United States (US) in 2016 (Krogstad, Passel and Cohen, 2017). The number of Mexicans crossing the US border irregularly has fallen dramatically in recent years (Gonzalez-Barbera and Krogstad, 2017).

In 2000, the US border patrol stopped 1.6 million irregular Mexican migrants; in 2016, that number was 193,000.  In recent years, the number of non-Mexicans apprehended is higher than that of Mexicans (Ibid.).

Here are the top seven countries of origin that account for the most refugees in the world today:

• Syria — 6.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers:  Most Syrians who are refugees because of the Syrian civil war remain in the Middle East. Turkey hosts nearly 3.7 million, the largest number of refugees hosted by any country in the world. (According to worldvision.org)

• Venezuela — 5.4 million refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants: Years of economic and political instability in Venezuela caused millions of Venezuelans to leave the country since 2014. They migrate to seek food, work, and a better life, most of them to nearby countries. (According to worldvision.org)

• Afghanistan — 2.8 million refugees and asylum seekers: About 2.6 million people from Afghanistan are refugees, representing one of the largest long-term refugee situations in the world — and that number increases to 2.8 million when you add asylum-seekers applying for refugee status.  (According to worldvision.org)

• South Sudan — 2.2 million refugees and asylum-seekers: The protracted conflict in South Sudan has caused one of the largest refugee crises in Africa. About 1.6 million people are displaced within the country, and an additional 2.2 million are refugees who fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda. (According to worldvision.org)

• Myanmar – 1.1 million refugees and asylum-seekers: About 1.1 million people who identify as members of the Rohingya ethnic group have fled their homes in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Today, about 880,000 stateless Rohingya refugees live in the world’s largest and most densely populated refugee camp, Kutukpalong. (According to worldvision.org)

• Democratic Republic of the Congo — 1 million refugees and asylum-seekers: About 5.2 million are internally displaced, and about 1 million people live in neighboring countries as refugees and asylum-seekers. Violence also hampered the containment of an Ebola outbreak that started in May 2018. (According to worldvision.org)

• Somalia — 800,000 refugees and asylum-seekers: Most Somali refugees have settled in Kenya, Ethiopia, or Yemen. Some have lived in massive refugee camps for years. Tens of thousands have returned to the country since 2015, largely due to the Kenyan government’s intent to eventually close Dadaab, which at one time was the world’s largest refugee camp. (According to worldvision.org)

(Data Source: migrationdataportal.org)