...Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. That's what Emma Lazarus wrote a century or so ago. While she was writing about the U.S., it applies to all countries for the world has a refugee crisis unlike any preceding one. According to the UN, nearly 60 million people are now classified as refugees, more than at any time since such records have been kept. The number of refugees increases by 45,000 each day. And more than half are under the age of 18.
It's war and the collapse of nations that are the primary causes of the diaspora, although many of these refugees are internally displaced. If refugees formed a country, it would be the 24th most populous in the world, between South Africa and Italy.
We have not done much to alleviate the problem. We have taken in 700 of the
4 million Syrian refugees. But other developed countries have done little, as well. The developing world hosts 9 out of 10 refugees. The top host countries, in terms of the number of refugees per capita, are Lebanon, Jordan, Nauru, Chad, Djibouti, South Sudan, Turkey, and Mauritania. Only when you get to the ninth place on the list does a truly rich country appear: Sweden.
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