The world has 122 million forcibly displaced persons: Venezuela tops the list of refugees

The migration crisis provoked by the regime of Nicolás Maduro does not stop. Venezuelans top the list of refugees in the world, according to a United Nations (UN) report published Thursday.

The study explained that the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide dropped slightly from its historic high, but remains "unsustainably high," with Venezuela topping the world's list of refugees and people in need of international protection.

The number of people displaced by war, violence and persecution worldwide reached a record 123 million by the end of 2024, but was down to 122 million at the end of April this year.

In its annual report, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, highlighted that this slight drop was due to nearly two million Syrians being able to return home following the December ousting of Bashar al-Assad after more than a decade of war.

This factor in Syria, coupled with a drop in the number of Afghan refugees, makes Venezuela the country with the highest aggregate number of refugees and people in need of international protection, with 370,200 and 5.9 million people respectively in these two categories at the end of 2024. The figure is 2% higher than in 2023.

Venezuelans in the United States

UNHCR highlighted that Venezuelans were the second nationality in the world to make the most asylum requests last year, 268,100. Colombians were the fourth most numerous nationality to do so (149,500), within a list headed by Sudanese (441,400).

The United States received a total of 729,100 asylum applications in the first half of 2024 (latest figures available). Most came from Latin American and Caribbean countries, mainly Venezuelans (116,700), Colombians (79,300), Mexicans (54,000) and Haitians (46,600).

Ukrainians

UNHCR also updated the numbers of Ukrainian refugees in Europe, which were more than 5 million at the end of 2024. The largest number is in Germany: 1.2 million, up 10%.

According to UNHCR, by the end of 2025, as many as 1.5 million Syrians from abroad and 2 million internally displaced persons could have returned home.

By the end of 2024, there were 6 million Syrian refugees in the world, and 5.8 million Afghans.

Adding internally displaced persons, Sudan has the biggest crisis in the world at the moment, because of the civil war raging since April 2023.

The African country had a total of 14.3 million forcibly displaced, the vast majority of them within its territory, and just over two million in neighboring countries.