Abstract
Both India and Europe confront challenges posed by migration and influx of refugees. This chapter seeks to address some of the core issues pertaining to both legal and illegal migration and the movement of refugees in India and Europe. It discusses the issues and challenges faced by India and Europe due to influx of migrants. In conclusion, the author seeks to make a comparison between the scenario, mechanisms and success achieved by India and Europe in coping with the influx of migrants.
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Notes
- 1.
India is a leading source of international migrants, with one in twenty migrants worldwide born in India. In 2015, 15.6 million people born in India were living in other countries. India has been among the world’s top origin countries of migrants since the United Nations started tracking migrant origins in 1990. The number of international Indian migrants has more than doubled over the past 25 years, growing about twice as fast as the world’s total migrant population (Connor 2017).
- 2.
Writing from the town of Barasat, a city located in the outskirts of Calcutta, West Bengal, Sydney Schanberg, a journalist with the New York Times, describes the town as a ‘swarm’ with refugees ‘so thick in the streets that cars can only inch through’. The refugees seemed to be everywhere—sitting in the streets, crouching in doorsteps, sleeping on porches, occupying empty buildings and cooking in the fields. They attempted to build lean-tos only to have the monsoon rains rip them apart’. The refugees, Schanberg adds, appeared ‘anxious and troubled … look[ing] for someone to answer their questions … ‘Do they know we are coming?”’ (Schanberg 1971, 17 June).
- 3.
The Rohingya are a stateless Muslim minority in Myanmar. The latest exodus began on 25 August 2017, when violence broke out in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, driving more than 723,000 to seek refuge in Bangladesh. Most arrived in the first three months of the crisis. An estimated 12,000 reached Bangladesh during the first half of 2018. The vast majority reaching Bangladesh are women and children, and more than 40 per cent are under age 12 (UNHCR 2019).
- 4.
Of the 1.2 million first-time applications for asylum in the EU in 2016, over a quarter came from war-torn Syria, with Afghanistan and Iraq in second and third place, respectively. In all these countries, civilians face threats from extremist insurgent groups (European Parliament 2017).
- 5.
In 2018, there were 634,700 applications for international protection in the EU plus Norway and Switzerland. This compares with 728,470 applications in 2017 and almost 1.3 million in 2016. In 2018, EU Member States granted protection to almost 333,400 asylum seekers, down by almost 40 per cent on 2017. Almost one in three (29 per cent) of these were from Syria while Afghanistan (16 per cent) and Iraq (7 per cent) rounded up the top three. Of the 96,100 Syrian citizens granted international protection in the EU, almost 70 per cent received it in Germany (European Parliament 2017).
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Sharma, S. (2020). Indian and European Responses to Migration and Refugee Crises. In: Jain, R. (eds) India and the European Union in a Turbulent World. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3917-6_11
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