Where most refugees come from – and go to
As of mid-2022, 72 percent of all refugees under UNHCR mandate and persons in need of international protection come from just five countries, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
Most are from Syria, where the Arab uprisings in 2011 led to a civil war with international participation that has continued to this day. With 5.6 million people, the second largest group are Venezuelans – the South American country has been in a deep political, economic and humanitarian crisis for years. A similar number of refugees came from Ukraine by mid-2022. Since then, their number has risen to around eight million, and the Russian war of aggression continues.
So while the majority of refugees come from a handful of countries, the situation in host countries is less clear. The five countries with the largest number of refugees host 36 percent of all refugees under UNHCR mandate and others in need of international protection. These include Turkey, Colombia and Germany as well as Pakistan and Uganda.
The latter two countries illustrate that the impression held by many Europeans that all refugees from Africa and Asia are on their way to them is wrong. According to the UN, about 80 percent migrate on the African continent within their own region. Most refugees and migrants from Asian countries also remain on the continent. Regional migration thus dominates the movement patterns.
In addition to the pure numbers, the question of which countries take in the most refugees and migrants in relation to their own total population is also relevant. Lebanon is at the forefront – there were at the end of 2020 sea dem Statistics portal Statista around 13 percent of the residents are refugees, most of them from Syria. This does not include Palestinian refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom are in the country.
The Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curaçao also have the highest proportion of refugees – surprising for many. According to Statista, Aruba with its 112,000 inhabitants and 16 percent refugees even had the largest share worldwide at the end of 2020. Most of the refugees come from nearby Venezuela. As part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Aruba and Curacao do not belong to the European Union, but are closely associated with the EU as an overseas territory.
Tens of thousands dead and missing since 2014
On the way to a new life, refugees and migrants often have to put up with numerous dangers, they suffer from hunger, become ill and experience violence. Quite a few even pay for the risk with their lives. From 2014 to 2022, according to information from Missing Migrants Project According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), at least 50,000 people have died or are missing.
More than half of these deaths and missing persons can be traced back to the Mediterranean route – more than 26,000 refugees and migrants have drowned since 2014 trying to cross to Europe, for example from Libya, Egypt or Morocco. This makes the Mediterranean route the most dangerous escape and migration route in the world. The second most dangerous region is Africa and above all the Sahara desert.
In America, too, there is a migration movement from south to north. People from Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela or Haiti are trying to escape the poverty, violence and political crises of their home countries and to cross the Mexico-USA border. Between October 2021 and October 2022, the US Border Protection Agency registered more than two million attempts by migrants to enter the United States – often under dangerous circumstances. The agonizing death of 50 people in a truck in which they were left locked in the blistering heat without air conditioning made tragic headlines last June.
Wreath of flowers on a beach in southern Italy after dozens of refugee bodies were discovered in late February
According to the IOM, thousands also died on the Asian continent last year, including many Afghans and Rohingya from Myanmar, but also some East Africans off or on the Arabian Peninsula.
Why do people leave their homeland?
People decide to leave their country or region of origin for a wide variety of reasons – for example to work or because of a partnership. But not everyone leaves their homeland voluntarily. Violence, a lack of prospects or natural disasters often cause people to seek refuge elsewhere. Research shows that people often do not migrate for just one reason, but rather that different interrelated factors act on them at the same time.
Based on a paper The migration researchers Mathias Czaika and Constantin Reinprecht visualized the nine most important dimensions and factors in IOM.
For example, a young person can decide to emigrate because in his home country many are his age (demographic dimension) and the job opportunities are poor (economic dimension), and at the same time the educational opportunities abroad are better (human development).
For the millions of Ukrainians who have fled their region or country since the beginning of 2022, security is the most important factor – they are fleeing the war of aggression that Russia is waging in their country.
The environmental dimension should not be underestimated either. What is fatal: Extreme weather events such as heavy rains, droughts and hurricanes often afflict residents of the Global South who are already exposed to poverty and conflict. In 2022, for example, hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis had to flee from devastating floods. The country was already in a severe economic crisis and was dependent on international aid for the care of the flood victims and for reconstruction.
Europe is sealing itself off
According to a specialist article from March 2022, while there were only a dozen border walls worldwide at the end of the Cold War, their number has increased more than sixfold since then respect would not have proved to be particularly effective.
When it comes to isolation using fences, Europe in particular is at the forefront. According to one Paper of the EU-Parlaments from last year, the European Union and the Schengen area are now surrounded or crossed by 19 border or dividing fences. Together they add up to a length of 2048 km – while in 2014 it was 315 km.
The longest fence in Europe is the one that EU country Lithuania has erected along a good part of its almost 700 km long border with non-EU country Belarus. The government in Vilnius upgraded after thousands of people tried to enter the EU irregularly in late summer and autumn 2021. The European Union accuses the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of having brought migrants from crisis regions to the EU’s external border in an organized manner.
Anyone trying to get from Belarus to Lithuania is faced with a four-meter-high fence with barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Aid organizations such as Doctors Without Borders have repeatedly criticized Lithuania and other European countries for their strict stance on refugees.
Distributed in their own country
Not all people who leave their homeland go abroad. According to the UNHCR, so-called internally displaced persons make up 60 percent of all “forced displaced persons” worldwide.
Syria has the highest proportion of those fleeing within their own country, accounting for almost a third of the population, according to UNHCR. This is followed by Colombia and Yemen with around 13 percent, Afghanistan with 9 percent, the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 6 percent and Ethiopia with three percent.
However, these figures only include people displaced by conflict and violence, and do not include victims of climate change and natural disasters. The refugee agency counts the latter separately. Accordingly, in the course of 2021, 23.7 million people were internally displaced for environmental reasons. The largest displacements took place in China, the Philippines and India. But for people who migrate within their own country, for example due to flooding or drought, they often return home comparatively quickly.