UN report says 7000 people from India sought asylum in the US

A report by UN refugee agency identified that about 7000 people from India filed asylum applications in the US last year. According to the agency, America was the largest recipient of new asylum requests in 2017.

68.5 million people were displaced globally according to the annual Global Trends report released by UN Refugee Agency. The report indicates a large number of people mobility with a displacement of about 44,500 people on a daily basis which culminated in its finding that 16.2 million people got displaced during 2017 alone. A person is getting displaced every two seconds.

The reasons for a worldwide displacement getting higher in 2017 are mentioned to be wars, other violence and persecution. The crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan’s war, and the refugee flight of hundreds and thousands of Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh from Myanmar added to the 2017 spike in worldwide displacement. The Developing Countries are mostly affected by these crises.

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The US witnessed a spike in the asylum seekers from north of Central America. Salvadorans were the largest of the nationality applicants with 49,500, showing an increase from 33,600 in 2016.

Asylum claims from Venezuelans increased by 63 per cent to 29,900, reflecting the challenging conditions in the country. Other nationalities from which there were more than 5,000 claims in 2017 were Mexico (26,100), China (17,400), Haiti (8,600) and India (7,400). Altogether claims were received from nationals from 168 countries, the report said.

According to the report, there were 197,146 refugees at the end of 2017 in India and 10,519 asylum seekers with pending cases. There are about 40,391 asylum seekers from India at the end of last year, the report said.

The report said contrary to the popular belief of Syria as a country of origin of new asylum seekers. The highest number of asylum claims filed by individuals were from nationals of Afghanistan who submitted 124,900 claims in 80 different countries.

Turkey received the most asylum claims with 67,400 registered in 2016. In contrast to 2016, Greece was the third most common recipient of claims from Afghans with 7,500, followed by France (6,600) and India (4,500). Refugees originating from Myanmar represented the fourth-largest population group by country of origin, more than doubling in number from less than half a million to 1.2 million by the end of 2017.

Maximum Myanmar refugees were hosted by Bangladesh(932,200). Then other countries after Bangladesh, who had a sizeable population os Myanmar refugees were Thailand(100,000), Malaysia(98,000) and India(18,100).

In the 68.5 million refugees, 25.4 million fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution. This is 2.9 million more than in 2016, also the biggest increase UNHCR has seen in a single year.

Asylum -seekers still waiting for the fulfilment of the refugee status as of December 31, 2017, rose to 300,000 to 3.1 million. People displaced inside their own country accounted for 40 million of the total, slightly fewer than the 40.3 million in 2016.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi exhorted for a ‘comprehensive’ approach in dealing with the forced displacement globally. He hoped that the new blueprint for dealing with the refugee crisis which was pioneered by 14 countries would be out soon as a new Global Compact on refugees to be further adopted by the UN.