Daniel Masterson
The scale of the global refugee problem is a nightmare told in numbers: 26 million people are classified by the U.N. as refugees, with 79.5 million forcibly displaced worldwide if we count those forced to flee in their own countries. To put that second number into perspective, if all those displaced people formed a nation, it would rank as one of the 25 largest countries in the world.
Daniel Masterson, a UC Santa Barbara assistant professor of political science and a co-author of a new paper on refugees, said that as bad as the numbers are, the public’s tendency to use the term “refugee crisis” implies mass displacement is a recent phenomenon or something novel. But, he noted, it isn’t new at all.