History

Throughout recorded history, oppression and disaster have caused people to flee their homelands. In biblical times, the enslaved Israelites fled Egypt. In the 15th century, the Moors and Jews were expelled from Spain. In the 17th century the Puritans, seeking religious freedom, settled in what became the United States. Political exiles left central and southern Europe during the upheavals of the mid-19th century. After World War I (1914-1918), people were displaced in large numbers from Asia Minor, the Russian Empire, and the Balkans. During World War II (1939-1945), an estimated 7 million Jews and others threatened by the Nazis fled their homelands.

After World War II, refugees fled Communist countries of Eastern Europe, Tibet, and China. Dutch nationals left Indonesia during the struggles for Indonesian independence. Arabs and Jews were displaced following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. More recently, refugee problems have developed in Vietnam, from the Vietnam War (1959-1975); Afghanistan, from the Soviet occupation (1979-1989); and Rwanda, from the ethnic fighting of the mid-1990s.