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, refugee and/or flight:
“A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“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)
“Its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of the Argonautic expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over Parnassus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)