– 83.4 million people were living in internal displacement at the end of 2024, more than twice as many as only six years ago (2018).
– 90 per cent had fled conflict and violence. In Sudan, conflict led to 11.6 million internally displaced people (IDPs), the most ever for one country. Nearly the entire population of the Gaza Strip remained displaced at the end of the year.
– Disasters triggered nearly twice as many movements in 2024 as the annual average over the past decade. The 11 million disaster displacements in the United States were the most ever recorded for a single country.
GENEVA, Switzerland – The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) reached 83.4 million at the end of 2024, the highest figure ever recorded, according to the Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025 published today by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). This is equivalent to the population of Germany, and more than double the number from just six years ago.
“Internal displacement is where conflict, poverty and climate collide, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest,” said Alexandra Bilak, IDMC director. “These latest numbers prove that internal displacement is not just a humanitarian crisis; it’s a clear development and political challenge that requires far more attention than it currently receives.”
Asylum-seeking migrants walk toward a makeshift camp to await processing by the U.S. Border Patrol after crossing into the United States past a gap in the border barrier Dec. 1, 2023 in Jacumba Hot Springs, CaliforniaPUBLISHED 5 DAYS AGO
Immigration policy has been a hot-button issue for generations, in the United States and around the world. But waves of people fled their homes by land or by sea in 2023, triggering migrant crisis after migrant crisis in multiple regions. Battles over migration policy stoked domestic political feuds and diplomatic clashes.
International Organization for Migration officials told delegates at the United Nations’ COP28 climate conference that more than half of forced “internal displacements,” which totaled 32.6 million people last year, were driven by climate-related events, according to Forbes. Wars, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, drove more people to seek a better life in a new country, and increased tensions once they got there.
Here are some of the migration routes where the crisis was intense in 2023:
The U.S.-Mexico border
A “growing wave of migration” exploded at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported recently. It hit especially hard in the small border city of Eagle Pass, Texas, where Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. declared a state of emergency as the number of migrants entering from Mexico hit 3,000 per day. “We are on pace for this to be the worst of the border crisis yet, and we’ve seen some doozies,” said Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Texas), whose district includes Eagle Pass. The migrants included people fleeing turmoil in Venezuela, drug cartel violence in Ecuador and other once-safe countries, gang violence in Haiti, and a broad economic downturn across Latin America blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the impact wasn’t just felt at the U.S.-Mexico border. New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency as thousands of migrants — more than 146,000 between spring 2022 and November 2023 — arrived from the southern border. Many were sent north by Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to cities run by Democrats in a campaign to pressure President Joe Biden to crack down at the border. Adams warned the city was facing a humanitarian crisis that would cost $12 billion over three years, The New York Times reported. City officials said in November their homeless shelters had no room for any more asylum-seekers.
The EU and UK
European nations have faced a huge influx of migrants in recent years. The EU is on track to receive more than one million asylum seekers in 2023, the most since a wave of people in 2015 and 2016, most of them fleeing Syria’s civil war. In Germany — already home to three million refugees, the most since waves of ethnic Germans returned from Eastern Europe after World War II — Chancellor Olaf Scholz is under pressure from overwhelmed states to do something about a more than 70 percent rise in asylum applications in 2023. “I don’t want to use big words,” Scholz told reporters in November, according to Politico, “but I think this is a historic moment.”
Italy and the United Kingdom joined forces in October to lead a European effort to fight “illegal migration.” Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power last year after vowing “to clamp down on unauthorized arrivals from North Africa with harsher immigration laws, restrictions on sea rescue charities, and plans to build migrant reception camps in Albania,” Reuters reported. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s conservative government wants to pay Rwanda to process asylum applications for people arriving illegally in the U.K., which Sunak said would help “break the cycle of tragedy” of people-smuggling using small boats, the BBC reported. The UK also is taking steps to curb legal migration, including a higher minimum salary.
South to South
Migrant waves to Western countries get most of the headlines, but most migration occurs between countries in the same region. “That has put a significant burden on states that border conflict zones, like Uganda, which sits alongside both South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” according to the World Politics Review. Fighting between Sudan’s army and paramilitaries has internally displaced three million people, and sent 926,841 people seeking refuge in Egypt, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and other neighboring countries, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
These crises threaten to only get worse as rising global temperatures fuel mass climate migrations, according to Fortune. Global carbon emissions are rising, and climate scientists say the greenhouse gasses already accumulated in our atmosphere all but guarantee that Earth’s average temperature rise will exceed the tipping point of two degrees Celsius, which it did briefly in November 2023. This, according to Fortune, could make countries like Bolivia or Yemen “vacant states,” as their people leave seeking “fertile” ground, with their leaders unable to give them reason to stay. As Fortune put it: “Solar panels for an Eritrean village won’t keep its boys from fleeing the country’s hopeless economy and austere politics.”
Since November, more than 1,500 refugees have arrived in Indonesia’s Aceh province, triggering anger among the locals.
A Rohingya woman rests on a beach following her arrival in Blang Raya, Pidie, Aceh province, Indonesia [Reuters]
Published On 10 Dec 202310 Dec 2023
Over 300 Rohingya refugees have arrived on the coast of Aceh province in Indonesia after weeks of drifting across the sea from Bangladesh.
The emaciated survivors – children, women and men – told of running out of supplies and of fearing death at sea as they landed on the unwelcoming shores of the villages of Pidie and Aceh Besar in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning.
“The boat was sinking. We had no food or water left,” told Shahidul Islam, a 34-year-old survivor, saying he had left from a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
A group of 180 refugees arrived by boat at 3am local time (20:00 GMT on Saturday) on a beach in the Pidie regency of Aceh province.
The second boat carrying 135 refugees landed in neighbouring Aceh Besar regency hours later after being adrift at sea for more than a month, while a third boat is missing.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. refugee chief sharply criticized the Security Council and world leaders Thursday for failing to prevent and resolve conflicts that have displaced nearly 66 million people around the world.
Filippo Grandi told the U.N.’s most powerful body the sharp rise in forced displacement from 42 million people in 2009 “reflects weaknesses in international cooperation, and declining capacity to prevent, contain and resolve conflicts.” Tiếp tục đọc “Refugee chief criticizes UN for failing to solve conflicts”→
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