This blog is intended to go along with Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, by John R. Weeks, published by Cengage Learning. The latest edition is the 13th (it will be out in January 2020), but this blog is meant to complement any edition of the book by showing the way in which demographic issues are regularly in the news.

You can download an iPhone app for the 13th edition from the App Store (search for Weeks Population).

If you are a user of my textbook and would like to suggest a blog post idea, please email me at: john.weeks@sdsu.edu

Monday, June 20, 2016

World Refugee Day Witnesses a Record Number of Refugees

Today is World Refugee Day, as declared by the UN, but this is sadly not a day for celebration. The UNHCR brought us the news that a record number of people in the world are refugees. The BBC noted that:
The number of people displaced by conflict is at the highest level ever recorded, the UN refugee agency says. It estimates that 65.3m people were either refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced at the end of 2015, an increase of 5m in a year. This represents one in every 113 people on the planet, the UN agency says. Meanwhile, the UN refugee chief says a worrying "climate of xenophobia" has taken hold in Europe as it struggles to cope with the migrant crisis.
The never-ending war in Syria, along with the European deal with Turkey to keep refugees there until processed for migration to Europe, has put Turkey in the position of being the country with the largest number of refugees in the world. The US State Department's Humanitarian Information Unit has put together a global map of the situation of stateless people in the world as of the end of 2015, and I have copied it below.


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