Source: www.theatlantic.com - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 “It’s time to recognize that we cannot go on as before,” the head of the UN’s refugee agency declared on Monday, at the UN General Assembly’s first-ever Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York. “This summit could not be more urgent,” Filippo Grandi added. What he didn’t mention is that “time” and “urgency” have starkly different meanings in the stately halls of the United Nations than in the refugee camps of Greece and Turkey and Lebanon and Kenya. Crisis had brought Grandi to the microphone: One in every 113 people in the world today has been driven from home by violence, persecution, or human-rights violations. Last year, on average, 24 people fled these conditions each minute . More than 65 million people (roughly the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s population) have been uprooted within their country or forced to seek refuge outside their country. This corresponds to the highest share of the global population that has been forcibly displaced since the United Nations started tracking such statistics in 1951. Chronic conflicts in countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia have swelled the ranks of the dispossessed, the vast majority of whom now live in limbo—displaced but not yet permanently resettled—in Africa and the Middle East . UN officials have characterized the one-day summit of world leaders as a “ breakthrough ” and a “ game-changer .” But the document that emerged from the meeting—the fancy-sounding New Yor All Related
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