Third country resettlement in the context of "UNHCR"

Statistics Canada conducts a country-wide census that collects demographic data every five years on the first and sixth year of each decade. The 2021 Canadian census enumerated a total population of 36,991,981, an increase of around 5.2 percent over the 2016 figure. It is estimated that Canada's population surpassed 40 million in 2023 and 41 million in 2024. Between 1990 and 2008, the population increased by 5.6 million, equivalent to 20.4 percent overall growth. The main driver of population growth is immigration, with 6.2% of the country's population being made up of temporary residents as of 2023, or about 2.5 million people. Between 2011 and May 2016, Canada's population grew by 1.7 million people, with immigrants accounting for two-thirds of the increase.

Canada has one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the world, driven mainly by economic policy and, to a lesser extent, family reunification. In 2021, a total of 405,330 immigrants were admitted to Canada. New immigrants to Canada settle mostly in major urban areas such as Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Canada also accepts large numbers of refugees, accounting for over 10 percent of annual global refugee resettlements.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and has 20,305 staff working in 136 countries as of December 2023.

A specified number of legally defined refugees who are granted refugee status outside the United States are annually admitted under 8 U.S.C. § 1157 for firm resettlement. Other people enter the United States with or without inspection, and apply for asylum under section 1158.

Asylum in the United States has two specific requirements. First, asylum applicants must be physically present in the United States, or at a designated port of arrival. Second, they must show that they suffered persecution in the past, or have a well-founded fear of future persecution in their country of nationality and permanent residency on account of at least one of the five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

A divided family is a close family unit or people of the wider family who are separated from each other by borders of one or more countries and are therefore temporarily or permanently not able to live together. The reasons for the separation is usually political conflict or family members are given citizenships of different countries. For example, the division of the Korean peninsula and the division of Germany through the inner German border divided families through political conflicts. Both cases were caused by a rearrangement of national boundaries.

However, families can also be divided if national boundaries remain unchanged, but instead groups of people or individuals are moved, forced to leave or flee. Forced displacement such as flight from persecution, violence or a severe lack of public order can be causes of divided families. For example, over 100,000 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in other countries in 2015. Other examples are population transfer, third country resettlement and deportation. Many countries offer programmes for family reunification that allows divided families to live together again.