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Aggressive anti-immigration policies and rhetoric from President Donald Trump and other xenophobic right-wing world leaders has contributed greatly to the skyrocketing number of refugees around the world, the United Nation's refugee agency said Wednesday.
Marking a distressing record, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) revealed in its annual Global Trends report that the number of refugees worldwide is now the highest it's ever been since the UN began keeping records, with more than 70 million people seeking refuge after being forced from their homes.
At least one in 108 people around the world were displaced in 2018, including both those who had been refugees previously and those who were forced to leave their homes last year due to issues including war, violence, food shortages, and the effects of the climate crisis.
Half of the world's refugees are children, the UN found.
The European Union director for Human Rights Watch, Lotte Leicht, called the findings "devastating."
\u201cDevastating: The number of people fleeing war, persecution and conflict exceeded 70 million globally last year - the highest number in the @UN @Refugees agency's 70 years of operations.\n\nAnd, all displaced persons have names, dreams, talents, and rights.\n\nhttps://t.co/d5KQzIyz5T\u201d— Lotte Leicht (@Lotte Leicht) 1560940514
The UN stressed that the 70.8 million people it determined were refugees in 2018 represented a conservative estimate, as the number of people displaced by Venezuela's humanitarian and economic crisis is not known.
The agency also noted that the number of refugees grew significantly in 2018 from the previous year, and claimed the growth likely stemmed from Venezuela's crisis--which the U.S. contributed to through years of economic sanctions.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration's aggressive anti-immigration policies have worsened conditions for people seeking refuge all over the world, the UN's commissioner for refugees, Fillippo Grandi, told The Guardian.
"In America, just like in Europe and in other parts of the world, what we are witnessing is an identification of refugees...with people that take away jobs, that threaten our security, our values," Grandi said. "And I want to say to the U.S. administration, to the president but also to leaders around the world: this is damaging."
The UN's report came two days after Trump announced his administration would begin removing millions of undocumented immigrants--people he and others refer to disparagingly as "illegal aliens"--and weeks after the UNHCR warned of the effects of anti-immigration policies in Europe on refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa.
With Italy's far-right government criminalizing NGO boats which have rescued refugees in the Mediterranean in recent years, the agency said earlier this month, "If we do not intervene soon, there will be a sea of blood."
Overall, human rights group say, wealthy countries are doing less and less to support the world's exploding refugee population. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of resettlement slots offered to asylum seekers was cut in half according to The Guardian.
Instead, the work of resettling refugees has largely fallen on far less wealthy countries than the U.S., U.K., and most of Western Europe.
Turkey hosted the most refugees in 2018, setting the record for the fourth year in a row by resettling 3.7 million people. Pakistan, Uganda, Sudan, and Germany rounded out the top five countries offering asylum to refugees.
"Developing countries host the largest share of the world's refugees," the UNHCR said in a video posted to social media.
\u201cWhich country hosts the most refugees?\u201d— UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency) 1560927720
"We must...redouble our solidarity with the many thousands of innocent people who are forced to flee their homes each day," the UNHCR said.
As wars and persecution escalate worldwide, one out of every 122 people on the planet is a refugee, seeking asylum, or internally displaced, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported Thursday.
Taken together, this population of humans wrenched from their homes by violence would constitute the 24th largest country in the world.
The agency's new report, Global Trends: World at War, chronicles what UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres calls "an age of unprecedented mass displacement." Based on data gathered in 2014, the study documents the harrowing human toll of new wars, resurgent conflicts, and long-term violent displacement.
At least 59.5 million people were violently displaced during 2014, roughly half of them children. This is a dramatic jump from the 51.2 million people displaced in 2013. These numbers do not include the many people who are displaced by poverty and global economic inequality, meaning that the actual number of people uprooted is far higher.
Displacement has increased four-fold over the past four years, with the conflict in Syria acting as the largest driver of this rise and surging conflicts from the Central African Republic to Yemen to Ukraine also fueling these grim numbers. The uprooted also include the long-term displaced, including people from Afghanistan and Palestine.
Despite the role of rich nations in driving this crisis through increasing militarism, the UN report notes that "the global distribution of refugees remains heavily skewed away from wealthier nations and towards the less wealthy," with countries including Ethiopia, Kenya, and Lebanon taking in far more refugees than European nations and the United States.
"Far too many of the world's richest and most peaceful countries are ignoring their global responsibility to provide assistance and protection," said secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council Jan Egeland, in a press statement responding to the UN's findings. "They are hiding behind closed borders."
Western countries are not just closing their borders, however--they are also militarizing them.
As migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean to Europe face the rising danger of death at sea, the European Union is rolling back its humanitarian rescue response and replacing it with a militarized one by targeting and attacking alleged networks of smugglers.
In a letter released last month, over 300 slavery and migration scholars asked, "Where is the moral justification for some of the world's richest nations employing their naval and technological might in a manner that leads to the death of men, women and children from some of the world's poorest and most war-torn regions?"
Speaking to this crisis, Guterres said in a press statement: "We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before."
"For an age of unprecedented mass displacement," Guterres continued, "we need an unprecedented humanitarian response and a renewed global commitment to tolerance and protection for people fleeing conflict and persecution."