page_title: Refugee crisis
section_title: Migratory routes and methods of fleeing
hierarchical_section_title: Refugee crisis / Migratory routes and methods of fleeing
caption_attribution_description: A distressed vessel discovered by the US Navy (USN) Oliver Hazard Perry Class Guided Missile Frigate USS RENTZ (FFG 46) 300 miles from shore with 90 people on board, including women and children. The RENTZ provided assistance and took the Ecuadorian citizens to Guatemala, from where they would be repatriated.
context_page_description: Refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced, refugees, asylum seekers or any other huge groups of migrants.
  A crisis could occur within the country, while attempting to leave, or while on the move to a safe country, or even after arrival in a country of asylum. A situation can be called a crisis, either from the perspective of the forcibly displaced persons, or from the perspective of the receiving state, or both.
  According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as of January 2019, 70.8 million had been displaced worldwide.
  In 2016, an estimated 362,000 refugees crossed the Mediterranean Sea in attempts to reach Europe due to dangers in their home countries. In the first half of 2017, over 105,000 refugees and migrants entered Europe through the Mediterranean. On 27, September, 2019 a boat carrying at least 19 people destined for Chios Island capsized and seven people were killed, including five children and two women. As of 2019, 63,311 people had crossed the Mediterranean towards Europe and at least 1,028 people had died as a result of drowning.
context_section_description: The term boat people came into common use in the 1970s with the mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees following the Vietnam War. It is a widely used form of migration for people migrating from Cuba, Haiti, Morocco, Vietnam or Albania. They often risk their lives on dangerously crude and overcrowded boats to escape oppression or poverty in their home nations. Events resulting from the Vietnam War led many people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam to become refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 2001, 353 asylum seekers sailing from Indonesia to Australia drowned when their vessel sank.
  f 5 Cuban refugees attempted (unsuccessfully, but un-harmed) to reach Florida in a 1950s pickup truck made buoyant by oil barrels strapped to its sides.
  Boat people are frequently a source of controversy in the nation they seek to immigrate to, such as the United States, New Zealand, Germany, France, Russia, Canada, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Australia. Boat people are often forcibly prevented from landing at their destination, such as under Australia's Pacific Solution (which operated from 2001 until 2008), or they are subjected to mandatory detention after their arrival.
  There are three Mediterranean refugee routes: Eastern, Central and Western route. Since 2015 more than 700.000 refugees and other migrants used these routes (i.e. the Eastern Balkan route and the Western Balkan route) from Greece through the Balkan to enter central European countries. Since March 2016 the Eastern route is almost closed, but the Western route is still busy.
caption: Ecuadorian refugees near Guatemala.
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