Mechanics of migration and displacement

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states that, as of mid-2023, of all the refugees under the UNHCR’s mandate and people in need of international protection, 52% came from just three countries.

The majority are from Syria, where the initial uprising during the 2011 “Arab Spring” evolved into a civil war that still continues today. The second largest national group is 5.7 million people from Ukraine where no end to the Russian invasion of the country is in sight. A similar amount of people came from Afghanistan. After the government collapsed there in August 2021, extremist religious group, the Taliban, took control of the country.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), refugees are persons outside their own country of citizenship or permanent residence and who, because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of social groups, fear persecution, cannot avail themselves of the protection of their own country or cannot return there for fear of persecution.

A large proportion of refugees, then, hails from a small number of countries. But when it comes to host countries, the situation is less clear. The six countries that have, numerically speaking, taken in the most refugees host more than a third of all refugees under the UNHCR’s mandate and others in need of international protection. They are Turkey, Iran, Colombia, Germany, Pakistan, and Uganda.

The last two nations dispute the false impression — one shared by many Europeans — that all refugees from Africa and Asia head for Europe. UN figures show that around 80% of migrants on the African continent migrate within their own region. In Asia, too, most refugees and migrants remain on that continent. Regional migration is the predominant pattern of movement.

This pattern is important. Because although the 46 least-developed countries in the world accounted for less than 1.3% of the world’s gross domestic product in 2022, they also took in more than a fifth of all refugees. In addition to the sheer number of migrants, it is also relevant to ask which countries take in the most migrants and refugees as a proportion of their total population. Lebanon is at the forefront of this group. At the end of 2020, according to the statistics portal Statista, around 13% of people living in Lebanon were refugees, the majority of them from Syria. And this figure does not include Palestinian refugees, of whom hundreds of thousands reside in Lebanon.

Many may be surprised to learn that the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curacao are also at the top of the table for the highest proportion of refugees in relation to population. According to research company Statista, at the end of 2020, Aruba actually had the highest proportion in the world. Of its 112,000 inhabitants, 16% were refugees, with the vast majority from nearby Venezuela. Aruba and Curacao are constituent countries of the Netherlands; as overseas territories, they are not part of the European Union but are closely associated with it.

Refugees and migrants encounter many dangers on their journey toward a new life. They suffer hunger, fall ill, or are subjected to violence. Many of them pay for leaving with their lives. According to information from the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), at least 50,000 people died or were registered as missing between 2014 and 2022.