Fleeing Calamity, Seeking Asylum

Abstract

Although women are more likely to immigrate legally under programs for family unification or with temporary work visas, refugee status or asylum based on humanitarian considerations are other widely used options. Beginning in the 1980s, women began increasingly to request admittance to Western European countries and to a lesser extent the United States and Canada on the grounds of asylum. This development reflected unstable conditions in many parts of the world as well as the fact that opportunities for traditional immigration were largely closed off in the West. The dimensions of the refugee situation and the ramification for women are amply illustrated by the statistics. As mentioned earlier, women constitute almost half the more than 32 million refugees and persons of concern listed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for whom data on sex were available. In 2001 70 percent of the new applications for asylum were filed in the member countries of the European Union, 11 percent in the United States, and 8 percent in Canada. Although there were annual fluctuations in the number of asylum applications filed in individual states, Britain usually received the largest number, followed by Germany and the United States, where refugees are approximately 10 percent of the total annual immigration. In 2001 53 percent of those requesting asylum were admitted to EU countries under the provisions of the United Nations refugee conventions, while the remaining 47 percent applied for asylum on humanitarian grounds as defined by individual countries.