Who Is the Most Generous of Them All?
Some Basic Statistics on Asylum, Refugees, and Resettlement
There’s a migration crisis in Europe, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Many of these migrants are identified as “refugees.” That’s actually a legal term, and only applies to some of those migrating out of conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa. Along with the “refugee crisis,” there’s been a contemporaneous outcry for generosity towards refugees. Welcoming refugees has become much more politically palatable than, say, 6 months ago, especially in American political discourse.
But there’s been an attendant rise in competing claims about what countries already do. Depending on who you ask, the United States is horribly ungenerous, taking a piddling amount of refugees; or, on the other hand, we take the lion’s share of refugees while stingy Europe ignores the teeming masses of the needy. So which is it? How many refugees are actually accepted in each country?
To answer that question, I’ll use data from the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. But first, let’s ask what the term “refugee” means.
Crisis Migration Data
So You‘re Leaving Something Bad
In casual conversation, refugee implies that a person is leaving some dangerous or disastrous situation. We think of wars and earthquakes and famines as refugee-creating situations. On fact value, that’s actually a fairly good definition (legal terms like “credible fear” get much debate, but we’ll avoid the legalese for this post). But, as I’ll show below, many people fleeing disaster shouldn’t be called refugees. Instead, let’s call all people fleeing war and disaster “crisis migrants.”
Crisis migrants are people fleeing some dangerous situation. Crucially, very few people believe in the idea of an economic refugee. High unemployment is not a crisis of the time that can make people into bona fide refugees, as far as international law is generally concerned, unless there is famine or violence as a result. The distinction between economic migrants and crisis migrants may be somewhat clear in law, but in practice it’s an insanely hard line to draw. Say you’re a Syrian and you flee because your house is hit by a bomb: that’s clearly crisis migration. But what if your house isn’t destroyed and you’re not under threat personally, but all the clients to your business leave to fight a war and you lose all sources of income? Are you an “economic migrant” now? What about natural disasters and famines? Most famines don’t involve literally zero food, they involve insufficient food, which is often a problem of insufficient money to buy food. As you can see, the line between economic and crisis migration is blurry.
But even if we restrict ourselves to people fleeing active violent threats to their lives, not everybody is technically a “refugee.” Refugee is a legal term assigned by the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. Broadly speaking, a person flees their country and arrives in a neighboring country and claims refugee status. This gives them access to food aid and other emergency support programs provided by the UN and host countries. They generally live in camps near the border with their home country. These are your classic refugee camps.
Most refugees expect to return home. They don’t necessarily want to move to some other country. They want to go home. So they want the conflict to end. Most “refugees” don’t need resettlement support, but need humanitarian aid and an end to the conflict that made them refugees. The best thing for these people isn’t the media-grabbing idea of welcoming people into our homes, but cash support for relief agencies from international governments, and a political resolution to home-country problems.
Among crisis-migrants less likely to return home, there are two groups: resettled refugees and asylees. Resettled refugees are easy to understand: they’re refugees who decide there’s little left for them in their former home, so they resettle in a new country, helped by the UN High Commissioner and partner governments. This is the number people are looking at when they talk about developed countries welcoming in refugees.
The last group is asylees or asylum-seekers. Asylum seekers flee their country to stable countries away from their home’s borders, then claim asylum status under international human rights laws. Here’s the key difference between asylees and refugees: refugees apply for legal recognition in their home country or immediately nearby countries. Asylees show up in foreign countries generally without permission, then ask for humanitarian consideration upon arrival.
Now you know the terms and their differences. Let’s check out who’s the most generous of them all.
To start with, let’s look at the headline number: refugee resettlement.
Crisis Migration Data
Comparing Refugee Resettlement
The chart at right is the chart you would show if you want to sing America’s praises on refugee acceptance. The United States resettles more refugees than the rest of the world combined. When it comes to giving a permanent home to people fleeing clearly identified danger and crisis who work through the appropriate channels, the United States is peerless in its commitment to opening its doors and welcoming in the needy.
Part of that, though, is just our size. The chart at left adjusts refugee resettlement for population. Adjusted for population, U.S. refugee resettlement rates are almost identical to those found in Canada, Australia, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland or New Zealand. But when we adjust for population, what also becomes very clear is that the richer Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, are the least accepting of refugees. For those who follow migration news, this is little surprise: during the height of coverage of crisis migrants fleeing Myanmar, one after another ASEAN country refused to accept the migrants. Likewise, the European Union accepts very few resettled refugees per capita.
So far, the claim that the US is uniquely welcoming of refugees is looking pretty good, while claims of European (and Asian) stinginess also seem to have some basis.
Crisis Migration Data
Asylum Seekers and the Question of Generosity
The graph at right shows how many asylum applications are made to countries. This shows how many asylum-seeking crisis migrants each country group receives. The left graph shows how many asylum claims each country does not reject.
By either measure, the European Union dominates asylee crisis migration. Anglophone countries also receive quite a bit. Claims of asylum in the U.S. have been roughly steady for 15 years, but the number of asylees accepted has risen consistently since 2007. In terms of accepting asylees then, the U.S. is second only to the E.U.
The above chart shows the percentage of annual asylum applications rejected by each country. The rejection rate can exceed 100% due to rollover of applications from year to year.
Somewhere around 40% to 60% is a pretty typical rejection rate. As you can see, the US has had major changes in its asylum rejection rate. During the Bush years, rejection of asylees reached extremely high levels. More recently, policy changes by the Obama administration have made it much easier to obtain asylee status in the United States, leading to remarkably low rejection rates. If we think of the rejection rate as the inverse of “welcomingness,” then by one measure, the United States is far more welcoming of asylum-seekers than the European Union. That is a recent development, however, and Europe may catch up soon.
So when we put it all together, we can find the number of asylees accepted per 100,000 people in each country group. Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland take the most asylees compared to their population by a huge margin. The next biggest asylee-taker is the European Union, especially given a recent spike in acceptance in 2013. The anglophone countries like Australia and Canada are next, though they’ve been declining in recent years. Then comes the U.S., low but rising, and finally the developed Asian countries, where asylees remain exceedingly uncommon.
When we look at asylees then, there’s a strong case to be made that Europe is exceptionally welcoming, while the U.S. is somewhat less so. Certainly the U.S. has high acceptance rates, but that’s easier to sustain when you’re receiving fewer applications.
Thus far then we’ve got the US looking more generous for resettlement, while the EU is arguably more generous for asylees. But what about simple receipt of refugees not for resettlement?
Crisis Migration Data
Refugees, Strictly Speaking
The above charts show, at right, the total number of refugees received by country group, and, at left, the number of refugee arrivals per 100,000 people. Each graph has a stand-out winner. The European Union receives far more refugees than any other group of industrialized countries. But, compared to local population, Norway and Switzerland are the hands-down winners.
So in terms of refugees who go through the process before arriving and who are not explicitly seeking permanent resettlement, the U.S. does not perform all that remarkably at all. We’re lower than the EU or other Anglophone countries.
So when it comes to normal refugee acceptance, it seems like Europe is very welcoming, and the US isn’t.
Crisis Migration Data
Crisis Migrants By Any Name
So let’s add it all up! We’ve got asylees, non-resettled refugees, and resettled refugees. That gives us the inflows. Divide by population and we’ve got the inflows per capita, a reasonable measurement of a country’s commitment to welcoming crisis migrants.
The small non-EU countries of western Europe are the unquestioned titans of refugee-welcomingness. But after them, for many years it was the Anglophone countries like Canada and Australia. Not so anymore. The European Union countries took more crisis-migrants per capita in 2013 than the anglophone countries. The United States has historically accepted fewer crisis migrants than the European Union, but they were about equal after President Obama’s relaxation of asylum rules. But in 2013, the European Union began accepting thousands of asylees and refugees, pushing it well above the U.S.’ number.
On the whole, the European Union is welcoming more crisis migrants than the U.S.
But don’t miss one essential detail: Asian countries aren’t doing squat. This is a big issue. As Asian economies grow, they need to pull their weight as global citizens. Quite frankly, it is a moral calamity that the growth in wealth in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and other higher-income Asian nations has not led to increased housing of crisis migrants.
Because, see, there’s plenty of work to go around. There’s one industrialized country I excluded from the above analysis very intentionally: Turkey. When we include Turkey, here’s what the graph above becomes:
Turkish acceptance of crisis migrants has risen from among the lower industrialized levels to among the highest in just 2 years. Now of course, that’s mostly because the war in Syria is right on their border. And UNHCR provides some resources to support the official refugees. But undocumented crisis migrants are also a large group.
I’m not here to sing Turkey’s praises, but rather just want to note what a small volume of crisis migrant flows actually go to Europe, the US, etc. There is ample room for the European Union and the United States to vastly increase acceptance of crisis migrants.
The United States has traditionally used refugee resettlement as its primary vehicle for crisis migrant policy. We are odd in that regard. Only Australia, Canada, Liechtenstein, and New Zealand share that trait. Far more typical for industrialized countries is a heavy reliance on asylum or direct refugee support. But for the United States and other “settler countries,” refugees are primarily seen as permanent additions to society, a unique category of immigrant.
Changing U.S. asylum policy probably won’t impact very many current crisis migrants associated with the Middle East and Africa. Changing refugee acceptance might, but, again, since 2007, over half of all U.S. crisis migrant inflows have been for resettlement. For the U.S. to impact current crisis migration, it will have to dramatically increase the cap in refugee resettlements and make administrative moves toward rapid resettlement. The data I have are as of 2013. In 2014, anecdotal accounts suggest the crisis worsened. And now in 2015, it seems even worse in major sending areas like Syria.
The right time for increasing the resettlement cap was actually 3 years ago. But better late than never.
See my previous posts about European migration.
Start my series on migration from the beginning.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
