LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For the first time in more than a decade, the number of people uprooted by conflicts around the world has fallen, and the number of refugees returning home is approaching record numbers - 14.7 million. That's according to a new report by the United Nations Refugee Agency. NPR's Michele Kelemen takes a closer look.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees - UNHCR - has been tracking the number of people forced to flee their homes for decades. Spokesman Chris Melzer says this year, the overall number of displaced people dropped from over 123 million to just under 118 million.
CHRIS MELZER: Since Syria and then Ukraine and then Sudan, every year, a new record for the last 14, 15 years. And this is the first time that the number goes down a little. Sounds like good news, but it's unfortunately only half of the story.
KELEMEN: Half the story because the 14.7 million people who have returned to their homes in the past year face a mixed picture.
MELZER: This time, many of them are people from Syria, for example, who are returning into a country that is destroyed, where the infrastructure is destroyed.
KELEMEN: Or to Afghanistan - and not voluntarily, says David Miliband, who runs the International Rescue Committee, which aids refugees.
DAVID MILIBAND: We're living in a world where refugees are being forced home from countries like Pakistan and Iran. They've been deported, effectively - Afghans - back to Afghanistan. And once they get there, there's very little for them. Four in five returnees to Afghanistan have to skip a meal a day.
KELEMEN: The United Nations' envoy on Afghanistan, Georgette Gagnon, told the U.N. Security Council this week that Afghanistan can't handle this sudden population increase, which could include 2.8 million more this year.
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GEORGETTE GAGNON: Afghans are returning to communities and an economy that cannot fully reintegrate them.
KELEMEN: And to a country run by the Taliban, who have stripped women and girls of their rights. The Trump administration has halted almost all refugee arrivals to the U.S., including from Afghanistan. The first Trump administration also restricted refugee admissions but funded aid groups that were helping people displaced by war, says Jeremy Konyndyk, head of the advocacy group called Refugees International.
JEREMY KONYNDYK: Because the logic then was they didn't want people coming here, but that meant they would need to support them in the countries that were hosting them. It's been a real change this time with the closure of USAID and the decimation of the refugee bureau at the State Department. Now it's sort of the worst of both worlds.
KELEMEN: Konyndyk says there used to be an implicit bargain that rich countries would support poor countries who are hosting refugees.
KONYNDYK: That bargain is now breaking. And it's being broken first and foremost by the cuts in U.S. assistance.
KELEMEN: The State Department says it's pleased to see people returning to their home countries and says this should be the norm. In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson writes, the era of mass and illegal migration is over. The era of remigration has begun.
But David Miliband says the numbers tell a different story.
MILIBAND: By any stretch, the numbers of refugees are about twice the level they were a decade ago, and that reflects the disordered world that we're living in.
KELEMEN: With conflict still uprooting people and U.N. agencies underfunded.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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