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.

“What’s more, worldwide displacement doesn’t show signs of getting better,” he said. “The numbers of displaced people worldwide really are tremendously concerning, not only because they represent a large share of the world’s population, but also because we have so few effective policy responses.”

Indeed, when Masterson worked at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, he and his colleagues in 2018 discovered that governments and U.N. agencies were beginning to talk about when the roughly 5.6 million Syrian refugees — displaced by the country’s 7-year-old civil war — were going to return. 

But when Masterson and others in the lab looked for social science data that would give them guidance on who would return and when, they found little of relevance. 

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