Which countries people are fleeing from – and why |
The US government halted all applications for green cards, citizenship and asylum from 19 mostly African and Middle Eastern countries on December 2. This move came a week after President Donald Trump announced he would “permanently pause migration” from all “third-world countries” after two national guard members in Washington were shot by an Afghan national.
A cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 presidential election campaign was his promise to deport record numbers of migrants. And in September, his administration claimed to be on track to deport nearly 600,000 people by the end of Trump’s first year in office. But these latest announcements are a sharp escalation.
Regardless of what this will all mean for migrants in the US moving forward, it has drawn renewed global attention to migration. So what are some of the countries people have been fleeing from in recent years, and why are they taking the decision to do so?
Afghanistan has one of the largest displaced populations in the world. Four decades of conflict and instability have contributed to a situation where, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), up to 1 million Afghan men migrate annually.
These people are mostly aged between 18 and 26 and migrate via informal means to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, as well as westward predominantly to Turkey, the Gulf region, Europe and the US. Women and girls generally constitute only a small proportion of the migration flows.
The number of people fleeing Afghanistan surged in 2021, when the