More people are on the run than ever before in recorded history, the United Nations said in a report released Monday.
They include people fleeing marauders in South Sudan, drug gangs in Central America, and the Islamic State in the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Fallujah. While most are displaced within their own countries, an unprecedented number are seeking political asylum in the world’s rich countries. Nearly 100,000 are children who have attempted the journey alone.
All told, the number of people displaced by conflict is estimated to exceed 65 million, more than the population of Britain.
The new figures, part of the U.N. refugee agency’s Global Trends Report, come as hostility is surging toward migrants and refugees in the Western countries where they are seeking sanctuary and relief.
The European Union has shown signs of fracturing over how to handle the influx of people crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, expressed alarm Sunday about what he described as a “climate of xenophobia that is very worrying in today’s Europe.”
On Saturday, the U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, denounced what he called “border closures, barriers and bigotry” during a visit to Lesbos, the Greek island where thousands of asylum seekers have arrived, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Ban implored European leaders to stop treating refugees as criminals.
“Detention is not the answer,” he said. “It should end immediately. Let us work together to resettle more people, provide legal pathways and better integrate refugees.”
The issue of how to handle the worldwide movement of people, whether they are fleeing war, persecution, poverty or environmental devastation, will be a major theme in September at the annual meeting of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly.
In the United States, which historically has resettled more refugees than any other country, the Obama administration’s promise to absorb 10,000 Syrians by October is off to a slow start. The administration also is facing criticism from rights advocates over a new round of deportations of Central Americans, including women and children.
Several U.S. states have tried to block the resettlement of Syrians. The latest effort, in Texas, was thrown out by a federal judge last week.
The annual report by the U.N. refugee agency found that in 2015, 65.3 million people remained forcibly displaced from their homes by war and persecution. Some had been displaced for decades because of protracted conflicts in countries like Afghanistan and Colombia.
The bulk of these people — nearly 41 million — were still living within their own countries. Never before had the United Nations documented so many “internally displaced persons,” as they are officially defined. The largest numbers were inside Syria and Iraq, but insurgencies in Nigeria and Somalia also scattered millions inside those countries.
That figure excluded people displaced by earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, which in 2015 uprooted at least 19 million, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a leading source of information on internally displaced people worldwide.
Despite all the attention on Europe’s struggle to absorb refugees, the report found that 86 percent of them were living in low- and middle-income countries, like Ethiopia, Jordan and Turkey, that were close to the countries in conflict.
Half of all refugee children are out of school, the report said, often because schools in their host countries are stretched beyond capacity.
In some ways, the latest refugee numbers amount to a report card on the failure of the world’s most powerful leaders to end wars. From Syria to Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflicts last longer, hospitals are bombed in brazen violation of humanitarian law, and aid workers complain bitterly that they are overwhelmed.
The report also highlighted the global dysfunction in accommodating refugees. Barely 200,000 people were able to go home last year or find a permanent home in a foreign country.
Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council who serves as the humanitarian adviser to the diplomatic effort to end the Syrian conflict, said the growing ranks of the displaced demonstrated the “renouncement of responsibility” by countries that have the power to end wars.