Biden Plans to Significantly Raise Refugee Admissions After Trump

Zaatari Refugee Camp by Amali Tower

As part of the President-elect’s plan to reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees, in his first year in office, Joe Biden plans to raise the annual refugee admissions cap to 125,000, slowly increasing it over time.

Upon taking office in 2017, the Trump White House slashed the refugee admissions number from the previous year’s 110,000 to 45,000, then the lowest in the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), actually resettling only 22,491 refugees - almost 60% fewer refugees than the 53,716 refugees, (not accounting for Syrian refugees), resettled in the Obama administration’s last year.

In the next three years in office, the free fall in admissions caps continued, eventually reaching yet another historic low of 15,000 for fiscal year 2021.

Becca Heller from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) is correct in pointing out the time it will take to restart the heavily dismantled program in order to meet that ambitious target. Having worked many years in the USRAP, we can attest to the highly secure and contiguous series of security checks, medical clearances, inter-agency coordination and logistics it takes to make the entire vetted program work from overseas referral and processing to US arrival, resettlement and integration. The process is so thoroughly secure and vetted that the average refugee case process is well over two years.

Resettlement agencies that receive refugees in the US do so via cooperative agreements with the State Department. Their budgets are set according to the refugee admissions numbers. The lower admissions numbers then, meant lower budgets, causing many agencies to trim staff and operations or close entirely.

There is a huge backlog of cases - by now well over the 120,000 reported in September. This includes Iraqis who worked for the US military, who are at extreme risk, are qualified refugees, but have been denied assistance by this current administration. In 2020, of the 4,000 Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), reserved for Iraqi refugees and included within the USRAP, only 123 Iraqis were resettled in the US.

Refugees are the most vetted group that arrives in the US. This backlog comprises of people who have passed every clearance required: interviews with UN agencies, US processing staff, official US government immigration and security officers, and a series of security checks, medical and more.

And yet, to further stymie processing, the Trump administration added “Extreme Vetting” to the process, doing nothing more than extremely slowing down the process. Worse yet, the new vetting rules were kept secret until legal action forced the government to disclose its details. (NPR)

---

America Needs Refugees - Our Thoughts on a NY Times Op-Ed

Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan by Amali Tower

Jessica Goudeau has a book about refugees releasing soon, a tale of two refugees in America within the larger context of modern refugee resettlement in the United States, which under the Trump administration, has been systematically targeted for destruction, that she details today in a New York Times Op-Ed. 

As a humanitarian and refugee rights activist that began her career in refugee resettlement, I have worked the entire exhaustive and vetted process that is the United States Refugee Admissions Program. That is to say, I have worked every main artery of a system that refers the less than 1 percent of global refugees considered for resettlement, based on protection needs, from the UN Refugee Agency to the US government, and all its intermediaries that work on its behalf in interviewing, vetting, preparing, counseling and so much more. 

Goudeau is right that refugees are the most thoroughly vetted of any group to enter the United States, and this after enduring unspeakable horrors of persecution and violence in their home countries and years of exile in host countries. There simply is no truth to continued claims that refugees, and immigrants, as a whole, present a security threat to the United States. 

The US, which used to resettle the largest number of refugees within its borders, has consistently lowered the annual refugee admissions ceiling since Donald Trump’s election.  

At a time when 1 percent of the global population is displaced  - nearly 80 million people- 1 million of whom are refugees eligible for resettlement, the Trump administration yet again slashed the refugee admissions ceiling in 2020 to only 18,000. 

A program that began in 1980 with the passage of the Refugee Act and a refugee admissions ceiling of 231,700, the ceiling has had highs and lows since that time, but never as low as its current level. 

In 2016, the year before Trump took office, the Obama administration raised the ceiling by 15,000 persons to 85,000 with plans to resettle Syrian refugees desperately in need of durable solutions. 

The very next year, after Trump took office, the ceiling was drastically lowered to 50,000 and it’s been a freefall downward spiral ever since. 

At a time when the US border receives a steady stream of Central American asylum-seekers fleeing violence, persecution, corruption, state repression and also the growing impacts of climate change, this assault on asylum policy and the refugee admissions program is truly detrimental to individual lives. In addition, it comes at a time when the conversation should be widening to include climate justice policies that take into account the realities of migrant farmers and rural asylum-seekers who are telling us a shifting global reality, important to our collective human security, if only we would listen.

---