Refugees

A refugee is a person who is forced to leave their country due to the existing violence, war, famine, religious and political opinions.

Internally displaced people

A person/family who is forced to leave their home but lives within that particular country boundary are called internally displaced people.

Asylum Seekers

A person who has left their country due to safety concerns of their life due to any reason and applies asylum in a different country are called asylum seekers. The country that provides asylum status is responsible for safeguarding the person.

Stateless Persons

A person who doesn’t count as citizen under any country is called a stateless person. According to UNHCR there are around ten million stateless persons in the world.

Resettled people

Refugee that is granted a permanent residence in a state/country comes under the category of Resettled people.

Naturalization

A person who is offered a permanent residence in a country is called naturalization. A naturalized person can enjoy all the benefits of a country just like a citizen.

TOP 5 REASONS FOR REFUGEE CRISIS

1. Religious/ National oppression

2. Gender/ Sexual Orientation

3. War

4. Climate Change

5. Hunger

The largest refugee crisis origin countries is represented with red color and the largest refugee hosting countries are represented by green color. The size of the circle displays the magnitude of the population.

The largest refugee crisis are originated from Syria, Venezuela and Afghanistan. The reasons for the crisis are war, economic crisis, and famine. Nearly 68% of refugees originated from just 5 countries and 73% of refugees are being hosted in their neighboring countries. Almost 85% of refugees are hosted in the developing countries and some of the top refugee hosting countries are Turkey, Jordan, and Pakistan.

Over the years refugees, internally displaced persons are increasing. With the continuous effects of refugee organizations like UNHCR, Refugee council, and IRC millions of stateless persons and asylum seekers are getting decreased. All these trends can be clearly seen in the above visualization.

In the past decade only 2% of the Syrian refugees resettled and the majority of the resettlement was in Canada, UK, USA. Due to the present conditions it will be more difficult for the rest of the refugees to be resettled considering the pandemic.

Syrian civil war formally started on March, 15 2011. It started in the southern town of Daraa where a group of youngsters have been arrested for drawing anti-government graffiti. Within no time the violence increased and the war began between government and anti-rebel groups. It was the largest crisis that has been continuing till date.

As soon as the violence took place people started moving out of their country to save their lives and the first refugee camp was formed in Turkey, a neighboring country of Syria. Almost 3.7 million Syrian refugees have been hosted by Turkey till date.

There are different rules and regulations to offer a citizenship to a refugee. Each country follow a different process for providing citizenship to a refugee. Some of the widely followed rules are

1. The refugee should not be involved or work with any anti-government and rebels groups.

2. He/ She must be in that country for atleast be a resident of that country for 5 years.

The above plot gives an information of refugee applications and citizenship offered by year. The red color indicates the number of applications filled by the refugees and the blue color shows the number of approved citizenship to the filed applications. In the last 5 years Germany provided citizenship to almost ~400k refugees.

Almost ~6.6 million people have fled from the country and most of the routes taken by refugees are dangerous. It may even cost their life to cross the borders of the country. One among the most taken routes is the Mediterranean sea route to Europe. Many lost their lives by drowning due to heavy storms and all these conditions makes impossible for a female/elderly refugee to cross the borders. So let's see the distribution of gender in the refugees.

Th above plot gives a detailed information of gender distribution since the civil war. Almost all the years have a equal rate of female and male refugees. From this we can understand that even the difficult migration routes are not stopping the female/elderly to cross the borders. This also explains the chaotic situation in Syria.

Due to vested interests of various groups there were a lot of war casualties at Syria. These involves civilian deaths, army deaths and also many others. The below plots gives us a detailed statistics of documented deaths due to the civil war.

The above plot gives us a detailed view of civilian deaths by districts in Syria. The largest number of civilian deaths occurred in the regions of Aleppo and Rif Dimashq.

Due to the continuous violence between the government and the anti-government forces the casualties rates on both the sides are really high . The intervention of the foreign powers also increased the tension between both the parties and resulted a death of around 100k government forces and 84k anti-government forces.

Many refugee organizations are working restlessly to address the crisis. Some of the methods followed are by naturalizing the refugees and resettling the refugees. The below plot shows the various paths of resettling by year.

From the above plot we can clearly see that the cases of naturalization of refugees have been increasing from 2011 to 2019. Many Countries are offering resettlement to the refugees.

Most of these refugee crisis can be attributed to political war, religious opinions, drought/famine, sexual/gender orientation etc. As long as these issues are handled and people come to common consensus, the situation continues to be dire!