If You Think Europe Has a Refugee Crisis, You’re Not Looking Hard Enough (Sweden is #9)
Europe isn’t the front line of the world’s refugee crisis. Media reports rife with images of people trailing through Hungarian fields and crowding onto rickety Mediterranean fishing boats would have us think that it is. Yet the global reality is starkly different. As the following data show, the overwhelming majority of displaced people are living in countries that don’t really have the resources to host them — a trend that’s unlikely to abate and one that has ominous implications for the future.
Consider Jordan. ... despite its small size and limited coffers, Jordan is being swamped by refugees, bearing the brunt of a double whammy from the Syrian civil war and the continuing conflict in Iraq. It was hosting some 685,000 internationally displaced people by mid-2015, a massive burden for a country with a population of 6.6 million. (Translate that fraction to the United States, and we’d be talking about more than 30 million refugees.) In fact, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that Jordan is ranked second in the world for the number of refugees (90) per 1,000 inhabitants. The top country is Lebanon, with a staggering 209.
None of this is to say that what’s happening farther north, in Europe, isn’t an emergency. Brussels, however, has the capacity to address it. In fact, the challenge posed by refugees could actually serve as a positive impetus for Europe to catch up on some long-neglected homework: bolstering controls on its external borders, deepening political integration, and taking serious moves toward common foreign and security policies. If successfully handled — to the satisfaction of voters — those steps could breathe new life into the European idea and even spur growth; refugees and migrants could help compensate for the graying of European societies and for stalling entrepreneurship.
By contrast, there is relatively little that Jordan, Ethiopia, and other countries hosting most of the world’s displaced can do to stem or prevent crisis. At least, they can’t do what’s needed on their own. The world’s richest countries — including those that, like the United States, Canada, and Japan, are somewhat protected by geography from the full force of migration patterns — must come to terms with the fact that the magnitude of current displacement dictates a need for a truly global approach. That means more fairly divvying up the responsibilities of giving refugees homes, putting money in UNHCR’s woefully underfunded accounts, and working to create and support peace and prosperity in countries that crave it.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/02/the-weakest-links-syria-refugees-migrants-crisis-data-visualization/
There a couple of great bar graphs that I could not get to copy here. They show the number of refugees in the most burdened countries compared to national population and national GDP.
Sweden comes in #9 in terms of refugees per capita of national population. Malta is #10. No other European countries are in the top 15. Not surprisingly, neither is any other Western country. Naturally, where GDP is concerned no Western country, European or other, is in the top 15.
"None of this is to say that what’s happening farther north, in Europe, isn’t an emergency." We all agree that Europe has its problems with the influx of refugees but we should not forget the even greater magnitude of problems in poorer countries. And reports are that conditions in these refugee camps are deteriorating which will motivate more people to move.
= new reply since forum marked as read
