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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

> Canada took in 28,100 of 92,400 refugees who were resettled in 25 countries last year

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-resettled-most-refug...

Do you have a source for many countries taking in millions?

I think this article is cherry picking here trying to make Canada look good compared to say the USA and other countries. ( im canadain btw ) I think it's easy to take in 28K refuges when the illegal load is very small in Canada, of something like 20K per year [1] Compare that to the USA that needs to deal with an illegal load of 20X that. [2] And for 2019 the USA load seems to be twice that of 2018. [3]

1. https://irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/statistics/Pages/Irregular-border-...

( and this is just the sw border, not accounting for flights ) 2. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration/fy-20...

3. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration

I am not the OP. When I read that sentence, I thought it meant total refugees settled, not just new 2018 refugee numbers. I would be very surprised if Canada is near the top in total resident refugees. A small country like Lebanon (population of less than 6 million, total area smaller than New York metropolitan area) has 1.5–2 million refugees residing in the country. By some estimates, more than a quarter of the population of Lebanon are refugees. No matter what indicator you choose (total, per capita, per square km, per $ GDP, ...), Lebanon would be far ahead in the number of refugees accepted.

Agreed; I'm sure there are many countries with far more total refugees. The annual trends do seem newsworthy to me though. If anything it illustrates how much the US annual number has dropped that it's now below Canada. Likewise European countries that were taking much larger numbers of refugees per year are no longer taking as many. Canada has increased its intake slightly under the Liberal government, as the article mentions, but the real change is the reduction by other countries.

"Taking" != "Resettling". European countries are still "taking" asylum seekers, but they don't "resettle" them: the asylum seekers show up in the country and request asylum. It's not a good idea to only look at resettlement and extrapolate from that to "total number of refugees admitted".

No sources, just anoctal evidence (I travel around middle east). Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi... 28k seems like very small number on global scale, tiny Lebanon has 1M.

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