Jordan's Quiet Emergency

Jordan’s real crisis is not the threat of encroaching extremism, but the grinding weight of hosting victims from the region’s various humanitarian emergencies. The technical name for this is a “protracted refugee crisis”—a burden that Jordan uniquely bears as host to more than a million refugees and asylum seekers from surrounding conflicts, according to government numbers. Since 2011, Jordan’s 6.3 million people have taken on roughly an additional 600,000 Syrians, who join about 29,000 Iraqis and some 4,000 refugees from Sudan, Somalia, and other countries, along with thousands more who remain unregistered with UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. If this were the United States, it would be as if Canada’s entire population moved in virtually at once.