Gallup: Only 30% of Syrians Still Want to Live in Syria
(CNSNews.com) - Only 30 percent of Syrians said they would like to continue living in Syria, according to a Gallup survey that was conducted in Syria in January and published this week [1].
Another 46 percent of Syrians said they would like to permanently move to another country and 24 percent said they “don’t know” whether they would like to permanently move or stay.
Thirty-nine percent of Syrians who said they want to leave Syria named a country in Europe as the place they would like to go. That made Europe the most popular destination for Syrians who would like to permanently leave their country.
The Middle East and North Africa was the second most popular destination for Syrians who would like to permanently leave their country. Thirty-five percent of those who said they wanted to leave Syria named a country in one of those regions as they place they would like to go.
Only 6 percent of the Syrians who said they would like to permanently move out of Syria named the United States or Canada as the place they would like to go.
In January 2015, Gallup interviewed 1,002 Syrians who were 15 years old and older. Gallup asked them face-to-face this question: “Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country?”
Gallup also asked this question among those who responded that they would like to permanently leave Syria: “If you would like to move to a new country, which country would you move to?”
As recently as 2009, 75 percent of Syrians surveyed told Gallup they would like to continue living in Syria. That year, only 22 percent said they would like to permanently move to another country.
“Although Gallup surveys since 2007 have shown that the U.S. is the top desired destination for potential migrants worldwide and that Northern America (which includes the U.S. and Canada) is the most desired region [2], only 6% of potential migrants in Syria desired to migrate to either of these areas,” Gallup said in its analysis of the survey.
“While nearly half of Syrians would like to leave their country, if given the opportunity, this does not mean all of them will,” says Gallup in its analysis [1]. “Gallup's findings reflect people's desires rather than their intentions--but the implications are still serious. Contrary to other research Gallup has done on migration, demographic characteristics such as employment, income level and age do not seem to factor in to whether Syrians wish to leave the country.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 4,288,910 Syrians have left their country and registered with the UNHCR as refugees.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that as of October there were 6.5 million “people internally displaced by violence” in Syria.
The UNHCR says that between April 2011 and October 2015, 689,365 Syrians applied for asylum in European nations.
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has estimated [3] that the population of Syria was 21,533,000 in 2010. As of July, according to an estimate published in the CIA World Factbook [4], it was 17,064,854.
The civil war in Syria began in March 2011.
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http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/gallup-only-30-syrians-still-want-live-syria 
