Refugees: Millions Flee Their Home Countries

According to new UN data, major movements of refugees have happened over the last decade and a half as millions left Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan and Ukraine, among others. While the rate of displacement recently slowed, it almost doubled over the past decade. Due to the steep rise and "detrimental" funding cuts, the UN sees the humanitarian system at a breaking point.

At the end of last year, the organization put the number of Syrian refugees who have been displaced across the country's borders and have not been resettled at 6.1 million, down from a high of 7 million in 2021. While the number of such refugees from Afghanistan also dipped to 6.1 million recently, the number of Venezuelans in the situation decribed above continues to grow and stood at 7.6 million in 2024. Most recently, 4.5 million Ukrainians were made refugees as a result of the Russian invasion. In the case of Afghanistan and Venezuela, the UN is also counting many persons in refugee-like situations among the affected, meaning these individuals have not been officially registered with the United Nations.

All in all, the UN counted 45.3 million asylum-seekers, refugees and persons of similar concern, 5.9 million Palestinian refugees and 73.5 million internally displaced people in 2024, a total of more than 120 million forcibly displaced individuals. These are mostly hosted in neighboring, mostly low-income, countries.

Other than the crises described above, the number of Palestinian refugees has remained more steady over the past decade or so due to the different nature of the Palestinian conflict. While other refugees normally either aim to return to their home country or gain residence or citizenship elsewhere, Palestinian refugees were displaced starting in 1948 to Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring countries without a real path of resolving their situation or that of their descendants.

There are also four refugee crises in Africa that have been receiving less media attention despite counting more than 1 million non-resettled, externally displaced refugees in 2024. These are in Sudan (2.8 million), South Sudan (2.3 million), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1.2 million) and Somalia (1.1 million). In Myanmar, 1.4 million people - mostly of the Muslim Rohingya minority - were counted as refugees by the UN in 2024.