The Refugee Crisis in Numbers..

Australia's existing humanitarian intake (the number of visas issued to refugees per year) stands at 13,750. In addition to this, the Commonwealth Government recently announced that an additional 12,000 humanitarian visas will be issued in response to the growing refugee crisis in Syria and Iraq.

New South Wales settled the most refugees over the past 12 months, with half of the additional 12,000 refugees being settled in NSW (largely South Western Sydney). This is in addition to the 4300 refugees NSW takes in per year of the regular humanitarian intake.

Unfortunately, these figures barely make a dent in the overarching problem. The United Nations Human Rights Council's 2016 'Global Trends' report identified that 2.5 million people were resettled last year. Just over 34,000 were "assisted" by Australia. While this is above the pledged intake, it represents a mere 1.43% of refugee resettlement. Bear in mind that without the additional intake this figure stands to drop under 1% for 2017 reporting.

These figures may be distorted as the definition of Australia providing "assistance" remains unclear. Competing figures produced by the Refugee Council indicate that in 2015, Australia recognised 6567 asylum seekers and by the end of 2016 Australia had 29,590 asylum seeker applications 'processing'.

These figures show the sheer size of the refugee crisis, particularly in areas of conflict forcing mass evacuations such as the Rohingya in Myanmar and Syrians crossing borders to Jordan to escape persecution.

Our movement asks the Federal Government to consider increasing the Australian intake and provide resources to expedite the process. Find out in our next blog post how you as an active citizen can help at a community level through the enhancement of employment outcomes in the most Aussie way possible - by being a Good Neighbour.

If your interested in looking into the stats further, here are some websites that we've sourced our data from:

https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/projects-and-initiatives/refugee-settlement/

https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/getfacts/statistics/intl/unhcr-global-trends-2016-australia-compares-world/