A new report suggests most of the more than 117 million refugees currently worldwide are considering moving on to another country.
However, they are often unable to put this into practice. The authors of the Global Report on Forced Migration 2026, which was published in Germany on Monday, explained that while some refugees have concrete plans, for others these are rather vague.
In Jordan, 81% of those surveyed expressed “vague ideas about moving on, staying or returning,” the report says. The Arab country has mainly taken in Palestinians, Syrians and people from Iraq. The researchers also conducted surveys in countries including Colombia, Mexico and Turkey.
The researchers take a critical view of the reform of the EU’s Common European Asylum System (CEAS) which comes into force on June 12. It is “poorly crafted” says Franck Düvell from the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrück, and amounts to a rollback of refugees’ rights.
Breaches of law are already taking place at Europe’s borders, says Petra Bendel, a migration researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. This includes the German practice of turning people away at intra-EU borders, without conducting a genuine assessment of the individuals’ need for protection. She describes this behaviour as “recklessly nationalistic.”
There is no empirical evidence that ramped-up German border controls or cuts to social benefits are leading to a decline in people seeking asylum, the report finds, although numbers have dropped across the entire European Union.
~dpa
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