Asylum Seeker Population by Destination Country 1951-2023

This bar chart race shows the number of asylum seekers by destination country/territory and world from 1951 to 2023.

Some countries have static and rounded numbers over several years, because of policy, legislative quotas and bureaucratic limits. People who sought refuge but were not officially counted due to these limits ended up in legal limbo, as undocumented migrants, or under temporary humanitarian statuses that were not included in the official statistics.

Asylum seekers in the Soviet Union were rare, and reliable data on this issue is limited, due to the lack of transparency and restrictions on information. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, which defined the status of refugees and asylum seekers. As a result, asylum seekers were not recognized in the same way they were in Western countries and other parts of the world.

Data source: UNHCR

Data visualization created with flourish.studio https://flourish.studio