Record 70.8 Million People Forcibly Displaced Globally Last Year

(Bloomberg) -- Persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations.

These were the reasons why 70.8 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide last year.

This equates to 37,000 displacements daily. The number of refugees has almost doubled over the 2008-2018 period, and 3.5 million people were awaiting a decision on their application for asylum -- a 300% change from 2008.

In 2018, displaced Venezuelan refugees and asylum seekers increased 2.6 million to reach 3.4 million -- or 5% of the world’s total displaced. Venezuelan accounts for 0.4% of world total population.

About 350,000 Venezuelans sought asylum last year, including 227,300 in Peru and 81,000 in Brazil. Globally, about one in five asylum seekers come from Venezuela.

United States

In the U.S., the United Nations classified more than one million as “persons of concern” for the first time. The U.S. figures were broken down to 719 thousand asylum-seekers and 313 thousand refugees. The U.S. is among a dozen countries which hosted 200,000 or more refugees last year.

Based on resettled refugees, the U.S. ranked second with 22,900, following Canada’s 28,100. The U.S. is the largest recipient of new asylum applications, with 254,300 pending in 2018 -- about 27,500 or 11% of these were from Venezuelan. Salvadorans and Hondurans accounted for 33,400 and 24,400, respectively.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Tanzi in Washington at atanzi@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Tanzi at atanzi@bloomberg.net, Wei Lu

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