War, persecution and bitter poverty are driving more and more people to flee: the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that there are 120 million displaced people as of April, as it will announce at the presentation of the annual World Refugee Report on Thursday. The numbers have been rising for the twelfth year in a row – according to the UNHCR, one in 69 people worldwide is now experiencing displacement. A decade ago, this affected around one in 125 people.
And what is sometimes overlooked in Germany or other European countries with high levels of asylum immigration is that the vast majority of displaced people seek protection within their countries of origin or flee to a neighboring country for a few years. Only a minority move from their refugee regions to Europe to settle there permanently. According to the UN World Refugee Report, around 68 million of the approximately 117 million displaced people at the end of 2023 were internally displaced.
Almost 32 million were refugees according to the UNHCR definition, i.e. people threatened with persecution. Six million more were Palestinian refugees under UNRWA mandate: the majority of them were people who had been displaced from Israel to neighboring countries decades ago or their descendants who live there with refugee status, but also around 1.6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In addition, UNHCR lists 5.8 million other people in need of protection living outside their countries of origin. Finally, the displaced persons figures include 6.9 million asylum seekers. According to the refugee organization, at least 27 million were displaced in 2023, three quarters of them within their own country.
“Behind these rising numbers lie countless human tragedies. This suffering must galvanise the international community to reduce the causes of displacement,” says UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
The civil war that broke out in Sudan in April a year ago caused a particularly high level of individual suffering. Six million people fled within their country in 2023 alone, and a further 1.2 million to neighboring countries, primarily Chad (900,000) and the breakaway state of South Sudan (350,000). Including those who had already fled in the conflicts of previous years, the UN report recorded 10.8 million displaced Sudanese at the end of the year, including 9.1 million internally displaced persons. UNHCR has never before identified more “internally displaced persons” in one country.
As a result of the armed conflicts, hunger is also spreading. 20 million people, almost half the population, are suffering from food shortages. The roughly one million refugees who were taken in by Sudan before the escalation of the war last year are particularly affected – mainly South Sudanese, Eritreans and Ethiopians. Many have been forced to return to their countries of origin, but several hundred thousand are still living in Sudan.
According to the UN report, the main host countries for refugees and other people entitled to protection are Iran (3.8 million), Turkey (3.3 million), Colombia (2.9), Germany (2.6) and Pakistan (2). In Iran and Pakistan, almost all refugees come from neighboring Afghanistan, and in Turkey from neighboring Syria.
The UN Refugee Report states: “In 2023, Germany was the only major host country that does not border the main countries of origin of the refugees it receives.” UNHCR counts 1.1 million Ukrainians, 706,000 Syrians, 255,000 Afghans and 147,000 Iraqis as the main groups of refugees and other beneficiaries of protection in Germany.
When making these global comparisons of admissions, it should be remembered that Germany, in contrast to the other receiving countries mentioned, is relatively generous in naturalizing people, and immigrants who have been recognized as refugees can switch to other residence permits, for example for work purposes. According to Destatis, for example, there are currently more than a million Syrians and more than 400,000 Afghans living in Germany, almost all of whom entered the country as asylum seekers or as family members. However, many of them no longer fall into the UN refugee categories due to naturalization, for example.
According to the UNHCR, the number of refugees being admitted has been increasing for a decade in all of the main receiving countries mentioned. Only in Turkey has there been a decline of 14 percent since 2021. Many Syrians are being sent back from the Bosporus state to their homeland, which has been devastated by the civil war; some are also travelling on to the EU.
In Syria – the country with the most internally displaced people after Sudan – the report puts the figure at 7.2 million. And in Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia, 3.7 million have fled within the country, including more than 700,000 last year.
For the many refugees around the world who cannot return to their home countries for a very long time and who cannot or should not be permanently integrated into the societies of neighboring countries, the UN Refugee Agency runs what is known as resettlement: programs for the permanent relocation of refugees in particular need of help to as many countries as possible that are willing to accept them. However, only very few countries are participating on a large scale in this form of targeted and planned admission from the overburdened refugee camps all over the world.
According to the UN report, around 159,000 refugees were able to find a safe new home in countries willing to accept them in 2023, 39 percent more than in the previous year. However, this is only a small part of the approximately two million people for whom UNHCR is particularly urgently looking for a country willing to accept them.
As in previous years, the USA was the main receiving country (75,000); it took in mainly people from refugee camps in Congo and Syria. This was followed by Canada (51,000), where mainly Afghans, Eritreans and Syrians found a new home. In third place in absolute numbers is Germany (4,500), which took in mainly Syrians via resettlement.
However, the Federal Republic takes in several thousand more people in need of protection every year, apart from resettlement, through other reception programs: for example, since 2016, around 30,000 Syrians from Turkey under the EU-Turkey migration agreement. Or around 30,000 Afghans since the Taliban took power; those admitted include local employees of German ministries and their families or anti-Islamist activists.
But all of these legal ways of accepting migrants together do not even come close to the level of the main form of acceptance that the Federal Republic has been practicing for decades: irregular immigration via the asylum system. More than 100,000 people seeking protection have already moved to Germany this year. Most of them enter illegally from safe neighboring countries.
Accepting resettlement refugees offers the great advantage that reasons for protection and identities are already checked in the refugee camps in the crisis regions. And it particularly benefits people in need of protection who, for financial or health reasons, would otherwise not be able to flee to the rich regions of the world, sometimes at great risk and financial expense.