Türkiye clings to its title as the country with the highest number of refugees, largely due to the influx of people fleeing civil war in its southeastern neighbor Syria. A report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released on Wednesday shows that the countries hosting the most refugees are Türkiye (3.6 million), Iran (3.4 million), Colombia (2.5 million), Germany (2.1 million) and Pakistan (1.7 million).
The UNHCR says that some 110 million people have had to flee their homes because of conflict, persecution, or human rights violations. The war in Sudan, which has displaced nearly 2 million people since April, is but the latest in a long list of crises that have led to the record-breaking figure.
"It’s quite an indictment on the state of our world,” Filippo Grandi, who leads the UNHCR, told reporters in Geneva ahead of the publication of UNHCR's Global Trends Report for 2022. Last year alone, an additional 19 million people were forcibly displaced including over 11 million who fled Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in what became the fastest and largest displacement of people since World War II. "We are constantly confronted with emergencies,” Grandi said. Last year the agency recorded 35 emergencies, three to four times more than in previous years. "Very few make your headlines,” Grandi added, arguing that the war in Sudan fell off most front pages after Western citizens were evacuated. Conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia and Myanmar were also responsible for displacing over 1 million people within each country in 2022.
The 2021 edition of the report has shown that another "record," 89.3 million people, were displaced by the end of 2021. Türkiye again was the country hosting the most refugees.
The issue is sensitive as Türkiye, a neighbor of war-torn Syria, has embraced millions since the unrest broke out in 2011 in that country. Ankara was lauded for its exemplary treatment of the refugees but growing far-right anti-refugee sentiment aggravates the risk of violence toward them. Prior to the recent general elections which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won, opposition parties fiercely advocated a return of Syrian refugees to their homeland. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Erdoğan's rival in the presidential election, repeatedly pledged to "send refugees home" if elected and was endorsed by the Victory Party (ZP), which campaigned for the forcible return of refugees, not only from Syria but also from other countries who found a haven in Türkiye.
Erdoğan and the AK Party said refugees can only return to their country in "a safe, voluntary, dignified way" while the government works to improve the safety and crumbled state of areas in northern Syria to encourage more people to return to the country. Ankara, through charity campaigns and cooperation with other countries, builds new homes in areas liberated from the terrorist groups in Syria's north, for settlements of returnees. So far, over 554,000 Syrians returned to their country.
Most of the displaced globally have sought refuge within their nation’s borders. One-third of them – 35 million – have fled to other countries, making them refugees, according to the UNHCR report. Most refugees are hosted by low to middle-income countries in Asia and Africa, not rich countries in Europe or North America, Grandi said.
The report found that the figure includes 62.5 million internally displaced people, 35.3 million refugees, 5.4 million asylum seekers and 5.2 million people in need of international protection. The heaviest burden is on the shoulders of low and middle-income countries, as they host 76% of the world’s refugees and other people in need of international protection. The least developed countries provided asylum to 20% of the total, the report said, while 70% of the total were hosted in countries neighboring their countries of origin.
Relative to their national populations, Lebanon and Aruba hosted the largest number of refugees and other people needing international protection as one in seven and one in six are displaced, respectively. Meanwhile, children, which account for 30% of the world’s population, represented 40% of all forcibly displaced people, according to the report.
Regarding asylum claims, the U.S. was the country to receive the most new applications in 2022 with 730,400 claims. It's also the nation with the largest backlog in its asylum system, Grandi said. "One of the things that needs to be done is reforming that asylum system so that it becomes more rapid, more efficient,” he said. The United States, Spain and Canada recently announced plans to create asylum processing centers in Latin America with the goal of reducing the number of people who trek their way north to the Mexico-U.S. border.
As the number of asylum-seekers grows, the challenges encountered by them spiral as well. "We see pushbacks. We see tougher and tougher immigration or refugee admission rules. We see in many countries the criminalization of immigrants and refugees, blaming them for everything that has happened,” Grandi said. Last week European leaders renewed financial promises to North African nations hoping to stem migration across the Mediterranean while the British government insists on a so-far failed plan to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda, something the UNHCR is opposed to.
But there were also some wins, Grandi said, pointing to what he described as a positive sign in the European Union's negotiations for a new migration and asylum pact, despite criticism from human rights groups. Grandi also celebrated the fact that the number of refugees resettled in 2022 doubled to 114,000 from the previous year. But he admitted this was "still a drop in the ocean."
