ABSTRACT
Like tourists, sojourners, and immigrants, refugees have significantly contributed to the global expansion of international migration. The number of world-wide refugees has steadily increased over the last three decades with estimates climbing from the 1970 figures of 2.5 million, to 8.2 million in 1980 and an estimated 19 million in the early 1990s (Leopold and Harrell-Bond, 1994). The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has acknowledged that reliable statistical data on refugees are very difficult to produce but has reported that the 1996 estimate for people under the UNHCR’s mandate was 26 million or 1 in every 220 people on the planet! More recently, Beiser (1999) has put this number at 27 million. This reflects massive global relocation and an enormous range and variety of intercultural interactions.
