Media Section
Migration Hotspots Worldwide

7

Mexico -> United States (1/12)

A migrant tries to cross into the United States from the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez near El Paso, Texas in March 2006. U.S. Congress voted in 2005 to build a similar barrier to stop illegal immigrants across one-third of the 2,000-mile (3,200 km) border with Mexico.

Mexico has the world's highest number of emigrants, with a net loss of 8.8 million people in 2000. The United States, on the other hand, receives more immigrants than any other country in the world. (Photo: Reuters)

Cuba -> United States (2/12)

Cuban migrants trying to reach the U.S. coast in Florida ride on a truck, converted into a marine vessel with air-filled drums and a propeller for propulsion. The U.S. Coast Guard repatriated 12 Cuban migrants riding on the makeshift boat.

In the year following the August 1994 decision by Cuban authorities to stop preventing departures, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted nearly 40,000 people. An estimated two million Cuban exiles have arrived in the U.S. since the communist revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959. (Photo: Reuters)

Africa -> Europe (3/12)

Spanish troops patrol the barrier separating Morocco and Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta. Five Africans died when 600 migrants stormed razor wire fences between Morocco and the Spanish enclave in October 2005.

The Spanish government has set up so-called Short-stay Immigrant Centres (CETI). Since 2004, the EU has also started "reception camps" or "off-shore centers" in northern Africa to repatriate illegal migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean. (Photo: Reuters)

Africa -> Europe (4/12)

An immigrant crawls after his arrival on a makeshift boat on the Gran Tarajal beach in Spain's Canary Islands in May 2006. Every year thousands of Africans try to traverse the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

Experts from the European Union's Institute for Security Studies estimate that during the 1990s, more than 180,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean by boat. (Photo: Reuters)

Darfur Crisis (5/12)

A Sudanese refugee from the war-torn Darfur region who crossed the border with Egypt into Israel, washes in a yard in the southern Israeli village of Kadesh Barnea in August 2007.

According to the advocacy group Refugees International, three years of conflict in Darfur have destroyed hundreds of villages, displaced 2.2 million people, and led to more than 400,000 deaths. (Photo: Reuters)

IDPs in Darfur (6/12)

An internally displaced person (IDP), this Sudanese woman carries empty containers to be filled with water at Abu Shouk Camp, home of some 100,000 refugees in Sudan's troubled western province of Darfur in May 2005. Many refugees never appear in any migrant statistic, because they do not leave their country, but rather flee to safer areas inside national borders.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, Sudan counted some 5.3 million IDPs in 2006 - more than any other country in the world. (Photo: Reuters)

Iraq -> Middle East (7/12)

Iraqi migrant Ahlam al-Jibouri and her children eat a meal during a power outage in their home in a slum of Damascus, Syria, in January 2007.

Violence in Iraq and instability in Lebanon are driving hundreds of thousands of people abroad in an upheaval not matched in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinian refugees when Israel was created in 1948. Syria alone hosts some 1.4 million Iraqi refugees who have fled from their homeland since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. (Photo: Reuters)

Migrant Workers in China (8/12)

Migrant workers from China's Hebei Province rest near a wall beside the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. According to Amnesty International, the number of migrant workers in China has risen from 2 million in the 1980s to some 150-200 million today, with an projected 300 million by 2015. The International Labor Organization calls this "the world’s largest ever peacetime migration." (Photo: Reuters)

Eastern Europe -> Western Europe (9/12)

Andrzej looks at the timetable at an international bus station in Bialystok, eastern Poland in August 2006, before his wife leaves to work in England.

Three years after Poland joined the European Union, some 1.2 to 2 million Poles have, at least temporarily, left their country to work abroad. Since the end of communist rule, most Eastern European countries suffer from a similar exodus. (Photo: Reuters)

South Asia -> United Arab Emirates (10/12)

Foreign workers on a construction site in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) in November 2006. Most of the workers are illiterate, poor men from rural communities in South Asia.

According to Human Rights Watch, migrant foreign workers represent 95 percent of the workforce in UAE. As of 2005, there were more than 2.5 million migrant workers in the country. Many are exposed to unfavorable working conditions. (Photo: Reuters)

Pakistan/Iran -> Afghanistan (11/12)

Afghan refugees in western Pakistan prepare to leave a refugee camp on their way back to their home country in September 2005.

With the assistance of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), over two million Afghan refugees have returned to Afghanistan from Iran and Pakistan since the overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001. But an estimated 1.9 million Afghan refugees remain, mostly in camps in Pakistan and Iran.(Photo: Reuters)

IDPs in Colombia (12/12)

A girl displaced by Colombian violence stands during a sunset in Barranquilla in May 2005. Hundreds of Colombians arrive every week in cities along the Caribbean coast, pushed north by guerrilla warfare in much of the country.

Violence in the Colombian countryside has displaced an estimated 3 million people since the mid-1980s. Most of the refugees are internal, though hundreds of thousands have fled to Venezuela, Panama, and Costa Rica. The United Nations says Colombian displacement is the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis outside of Africa. (Photo: Reuters)

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