Today, more than 19 million people have been forced to flee their home countries because of war, persecution, and oppression, and every day an estimated 42,500 more join them. Many, though far from all, of them head for Europe, which is why the crisis there can appear most acute.
There are two layers to this crisis and why it has grown so dire. The first is the sometimes-overlapping web of wars and crises that has forced millions of people from their homes in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere — and that has opened, ever so slightly, a previously closed route to Europe.
The second, and less-discussed, is the increasingly anti-refugee politics in Western and other wealthy countries that are best suited to take them. People in those countries, insecure and fearful over the effects of immigration, preoccupied with vague but long-held ideas about national identity, are driving nativist, populist politics, and thus policies that contribute to the crisis.
The result is that at a time when more people than ever need help, wealthy countries are more reluctant to help them — putting thousands or millions of innocent refugee families in peril.
What routes are people using?
The most direct routes are fraught with danger. More than 2,600 people have drowned in the Mediterranean this year trying to reach Greece or Italy in flimsy dinghies or unsafe fishing boats. Most of those heading for Greece take the relatively short voyage from Turkey to the islands of Kos, Chios, Lesvos and Samos - often in flimsy rubber dinghies or small wooden boats. There is virtually no infrastructure on these small Greek islands to cope with the thousands of people arriving, leaving local volunteers providing vital assistance.
Many people travel by boat from Libya to Italy, a longer and more hazardous journey. Survivors often report violence and abuse by people traffickers, who charge thousands of dollars per person for their services. The chaos in Libya has given traffickers freedom to exploit migrants and refugees desperate to reach Europe.
Many attempting to reach Germany and other northern EU countries go via the perilous Western Balkans route, running the gauntlet of brutal people traffickers and robbers.
Faced with a huge influx of people, Hungary has built a controversial 175km (110-mile) razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia. It has also urged EU partners not to send back migrants who have travelled on from Hungary.
Some of the worse tragedies in 2015 include:
- Two boats carrying about 500 migrants sank after leaving Zuwara in Libya on 27 August;
- The bodies of 71 people, believed to be Syrian migrants, were discovered in an abandoned lorry in Austria on 27 August;
- A shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa island killed about 800 people on 19 April;
- At least 300 migrants are feared to have drowned after attempting to cross the Mediterranean in rough seas in early February
Where are they going next?
Under an EU rule known as the Dublin regulation, refugees are required to claim asylum in the member state in which they first arrive. But some EU countries, such as Greece, Italy, and Croatia, have been allowing migrants and refugees to pass through to countries where they have families and better prospects.
Germany receives by far the most asylum applications in the EU and says it is expecting 800,000 refugees to arrive this year.
In order to match Germany's 2015 projection per population, France would need to accept more than 650,000 people and the UK nearly the same amount. But France has pledged to accept just 24,000 and the UK 20,000 over five years.
Between 2,000 and 5,000 migrants are camped around Calais, which is just 1% - 2.5% of the more than 200,000 who have landed in Italy and Greece.
Hundreds of thousands of people are somewhere along the route to Germany, in Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Serbia, and elsewhere.
The war and repression driving this unprecedented crisis
The biggest driver of the crisis by far is Syria. Four million people, nearly a fifth of Syria's population, have fled the country since the war began in 2011.
It's not hard to understand why Syrians are fleeing. Bashar al-Assad's regime has targeted civilians ruthlessly, including with chemical weapons and barrel bombs; ISIS has subjected Syrians to murder, torture, crucifixion, sexual slavery, and other appalling atrocities; and other groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra have tortured and killed Syrians as well.
Most of these Syrian refugees have ended up in underfunded and crowded camps in neighboring countries. But seeing little future for their families in the camps, and knowing they may never be able to return home, many have decided to set out on the dangerous and uncertain journey for a better life in Europe.
But it’s not just Syria. Older, longer-running conflicts have displaced, for instance, 1.1 million refugees from Somalia and 2.59 million from Afghanistan.
Political and sectarian repression in other countries has contributed as well. Many families in Eritrea, for example, are fleeing the dictatorship there that is sometimes called Africa's own North Korea. In Myanmar, a Muslim minority group known as the Rohingya has endured brutal violence and ethnic cleansing, sometimes with the tacit support of the Myanmar government or even at the hands of government forces themselves. Fleeing Rohingya made headlines in recent months after thousands became stranded at sea, marooned in dangerous boats because neighboring countries refused to take them in.
Meanwhile, in Central America, gang violence and lawlessness made thousands of families so desperate for their children's safety that they sent those children on a perilous journey north toward what they hoped would be safety in the United States. Many of their futures remain uncertain.
To be sure, there are also many economic migrants who travel to wealthy countries in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families. But their presence doesn't erase the desperate need of refugees who make the difficult decision to flee with their families, risking drowning in the Mediterranean or dying on the roads because the terrifying dangers of the journey are still preferable to what they face if they stay behind.
As you can see, these crises sending refugees fleeing for safety are not all necessarily related, and indeed many are totally distinct. But the global refugee crisis is more than just a collection of these individual humanitarian disasters. There are a few common elements tying much of them together. One of them is the Arab Spring, the wave of anti-government protests that hit the Middle East in 2011.
How the Arab Spring jump-started the refugee crisis
For years, the EU kept refugees out of sight and out of mind by paying Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's government to intercept and turn back migrants that were heading for Europe.
Gadhafi was something like Europe's bouncer, helping to keep the potentially significant number of African migrants and refugees from ever reaching the continent. His methods were terrible: Libya imprisoned migrants in camps where rape and torture were widespread. But Europe was happy to have someone else worrying about the problem.
But then came the Arab Spring. In 2011, Libyans rose up against Gadhafi, Europe and the US eventually intervened, and with Gadhafi's regime gone, Libya collapsed into chaos. Though the journey through Libya remained dangerous, it was also suddenly open, making it easier for both refugees and economic migrants from across Africa to use the country's shores as a launching pad for the cross-Mediterranean journey to Europe.
At the same time, the Arab Spring also helped lead to Syria's war, and to conflict in Yemen, and eventually to the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Of course, none of this caused the exodus of refugees from, say, Afghanistan or Myanmar, but the Arab Spring was perhaps the largest single spark of the ongoing, global refugee crisis.
Why so many refugees began heading for Europe and other rich countries
As the crisis has grown, and particularly as more refugees have left camps in places such as Jordan or Myanmar and set out for wealthier countries, the crisis has also become far more difficult to ignore.
It is not merely a matter of swelling numbers of people in far-off refugee camps — although that is happening too, and the camps are in crisis — but of desperate families reaching the shores and borders of Europe.
There are a few reasons that refugees have become more willing to brave the journey to Europe (or to Australia, in the case of some Southeast Asian refugees; or to the US, in the case of Central American refugees). The first is that the crises in their home countries have simply become too dangerous to tolerate. Another is that while many initially fled into camps, those camps have become dangerous as well, and offer little future for families who may spend years there.
This summer, the European Union, United States, and Kuwait respectively pledged $1.2 billion, $507 million, and $500 million for aid to refugees. That's good, but it's still far short of the $5.5 billion in aid that the UN says is needed for these refugees, as well as another $2.9 billion for displaced Syrians within Syria. As a result, the camps are often crowded and undersupplied, which leaves the people who live in them cold, hungry, and subject to the ravages of disease.
In the meantime, other crises have opened previously closed routes, for example through Libya. And as the numbers of these refugees have grown, so have the often exploitative smuggling networks that lead the journeys, often for exorbitantly high fees, in dangerous conditions, and with little regard for the safety of their charges.
And so hundreds of thousands of refugees have made their way to Europe, with most crossing the Mediterranean in rickety boats and rubber dinghies. Those boats are barely seaworthy, so tragedies are frequent: UNHCR estimates that 2,500 people have died just this summer while attempting to make the crossing.
That influx to wealthy countries makes the crisis seem, for those countries, far more immediate and extreme. When children die in Syria, that rarely grabs the developed world's attention — sadly, and unjustly, it has come to seem routine. But when they die in the back of trucks in Austria, or in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Greece, that feels much harder to ignore.
Rich countries try to discourage refugees — making their journey more dangerous
Rich countries, in their efforts to deter refugees from reaching their shores, have actively avoided policies that would make the journeys less dangerous, and thus contributed to the danger. Last fall, for instance, the UK cut funding for the Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue operations that saved an estimated 150,000 people in one year, saying the rescues encouraged more people to make the crossing. The Italian government ended the operation in November. Since then, it has been replaced by the EU's far more limited Frontex program, which only patrols within 30 miles of the border, and does not have a search-and-rescue mission.
The result, predictably, has been deadly: An estimated 2,500 people have already died so far this summer. This is not an accident. It is the result of European policy meant to keep out refugees.
Within Europe, countries are also trying to restrict refugees from getting to or staying within their borders. Hungary has erected a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia in an effort to prevent refugees from crossing into Europe over land. It also announcednew laws that will make it a crime to damage the fence or cross it, and will make illegal border crossing punishable by up to three years in prison. The Hungarian government also shut down train service to Germany in an apparent effort to discourage refugees from using Hungary as a transit country on their way to seek asylum there.
And Austria has now introduced checks along its internal border with the rest of Europe to search for refugees and other immigrants being smuggled into the country. Although the government claims that the checks are a humanitarian measure intended to prevent tragedies like the recent deaths of 71 people who suffocated in the back of a smuggler's truck, critics have charged that they constitute a violation of the EU's open-border policy.
Australia, meanwhile, has gone to great lengths to prevent so-called "boat people" from reaching its shores, including imprisoning them in abusive detention centers on remote pacific islands, and shipping them off to Cambodia.
In North America, the US has stepped up enforcement efforts after last year’s child migrant crisis, including sending aid to Central American countries in exchange for efforts to keep children from making the journey to the United States. As with Europe and with other right countries, the whole idea is to keep refugees from showing up in the first place — even though these efforts never solve, or often even address, the underlying crises that cause the refugees in the first place.
Europe (with one big exception) refuses to take responsibility
For years, the world's wealthiest countries have, for the most part, steadfastly refused to accept more than the barest possible minimum of the world's refugees. As a result, now that the crisis is growing out of control, there is no plan in place to handle it, and no agreement on how the burdens should be shared.
The European Union is particularly ill-suited to this. In theory, the EU is supposed to handle refugees collectively, to act sort of like a unified country in the way that, say, the US collectively takes responsibility for refugees who show up in Arizona, rather than making Arizona carry the entire burden. But in practice, most EU member states don't want to take their fair share, and EU rules mean they don't technically have to. As a result, the majority of incoming refugees are stuck in the same two or three countries, which quickly became overwhelmed. That is bad for those countries and bad for the refugees.
Part of how this happens is a European Union rule called the Dublin Regulation, which requires refugees to stay in the first European country they arrive in until their asylum claims are processed. In theory, this rule is a way to prevent applicants from "orbiting" the EU by filing application after application in different countries until one of them finally gets approved. But in practice, it’s a rule that has trapped thousands of refugees in Greece and Italy, simply because those countries are the easiest ones to reach by boat across the Mediterranean. And it's a rule that many EU countries exploit in order to push much of the burden of handling refugees onto these two countries.
The results have been disastrous. Doctors Without Borders' Stathis Kyroussis described the current refugee crisis in Greece as the worst he has ever seen: "I have worked in many refugee camps before, in Yemen, Malawi, and Angola. But here on the island of Kos, this is the first time in my life that I have seen people so totally abandoned." According to Human Rights Watch, the Greek reception centers, where arriving refugees are held, lack sufficient food and health care, and are so severely unsanitary and chronically overcrowded that the conditions in them may amount to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law.
European countries could, and in theory should, accept many of these refugees into their own borders. This would be much better for the refugees, and also healthier for the EU, whose ideals of burden-sharing have been strained nearly to the breaking point by the migrant and refugee influx. But most EU nations are instead acting selfishly to keep refugees out.
Germany, to its credit, recently agreed to suspend application of the Dublin Regulation for Syrian refugees, who will now be permitted to apply for asylum directly in Germany. But the rest of Europe has largely failed to follow Germany's moral leadership. And while there are now small signs that might be changing — on Friday the UK announced vague plans to accept "thousands" of Syrian refugees — there is as yet no unified EU response, and thus Europe's status quo remains unfriendly to refugees.
The United States, for its part, has largely ignored the crisis. Thus far it has resettled only 1,434 Syrian refugees, and has pledged to take only a few thousand more. The entire US refugee resettlement program is capped at 70,000 refugees globally — a cap that has remained the same for years, despite the growing crisis.
Anti-immigrant populism is on the rise in Western countries
That problem would be much easier to solve if it were just a question of money. Europe is wealthy, and so are Australia and the United States. There is no doubt that we could bear the costs of resettling and sheltering the refugees who need help, even with their growing numbers. And in the long run, such a program would likely pay for itself: Immigration tends to be a net economic positive for immigrants and their new home countries alike.
But the problem isn't really about money. Rather, the challenge is about overcoming the domestic political forces that drive nativism, right-wing populism, and anti-immigration policies. The political forces are complex, but they often come down to an anxiety about change.
Taking in large numbers of refugees requires accepting that those refugees might bring changes to a nation's identity or culture. That is of course often a very good thing: Refugees have been enriching their host countries for generations, improving everything from their snack foods to their scientific discoveries. But accepting them means accepting changes that can feel scary. As Max Fisher wrote, taking in large numbers of refugees means having to modify, ever so slightly, your vision of what your town and neighborhood look like, and having to widen the definition of your community's culture.
And therein lies the real problem: This crisis has arisen at a time when many people in wealthy countries already feel tremendously threatened by immigration, and by the idea that their towns, communities, and cultures are changing in ways that feel uncomfortable or scary.
That is especially acute within the EU, partly because economic duress has led to the growth of right-wing, populist anti-EU parties that are also anti-immigration, and partly because internal migration within the EU has already heightened populist anxieties about foreigners. And here in the US, Donald Trump has ridden a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to the top of the polls in the GOP presidential primary, which just goes to show how strong those feelings have become.
Are EU countries doing their fair share?
Germany has been critical of France and the UK over the countries' relatively meagre commitments to take people in and called on all EU members to do more.
Earlier this month, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker set out proposals for 120,000 additional asylum seekers to be distributed among EU nations, with binding quotas. Mr Juncker's proposals were criticized by the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Romania.
For years the EU has been struggling to harmonise asylum policy. That is difficult with 28 member states, each with their own police force and judiciary.
Championing the rights of poor migrants is difficult as the economic climate is still gloomy, many Europeans are unemployed and wary of foreign workers, and EU countries are divided over how to share the refugee burden.
More detailed joint rules have been brought in with the Common European Asylum System - but rules are one thing, putting them into practice EU-wide is another challenge.
How do migrants get asylum status in the EU?
They have to satisfy the authorities that they are fleeing persecution and would face harm or even death if sent back to their country of origin. Under EU rules, an asylum seeker has the right to food, first aid and shelter in a reception center. They should get an individual assessment of their needs. They may be granted asylum by the authorities at "first instance". If unsuccessful, they can appeal against the decision in court, and may win. Asylum seekers are supposed to be granted the right to work within nine months of arrival.
Nearly 104,000 got refugee status in the EU last year, nearly 60,000 subsidiary protection status and just over 20,000 authorization to stay for humanitarian reasons. (Austria was not included in the data.)
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