Growth in Refugee Flight
By 2008, the UNHCR raised the estimate of refugees to a total of about 4.7 million, with 2 million displaced internally and 2.7 million displaced externally. In April 2006 the Ministry of Displacement and Migration estimated that "nearly 70,000 displaced Iraqis, especially from the capital, are living in deteriorating conditions,” due to ongoing sectarian violence. Roughly 40% of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled, the U.N. said. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return. Refugees are mired in poverty as they are generally barred from working in their host countries. A May 25, 2007 article notes that in the past seven months only 69 people from Iraq have been granted refugee status in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Civil War In Iraq
Famous quotes containing the words growth in, growth, refugee and/or flight:
“A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her “job” is that the children’s growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother’s indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.”
—John Frederick Nims (b. 1913)
“AIDS was ... an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life.”
—Hervé Guibert (1955–1991)