Disgraceful: 44 Refugees Admitted since October

Syrian Refugees Admitted to US Drop to Just 44 in 6 Months

April 17, 2018

The number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States after fleeing their war-torn homeland has plummeted to just 44 since the first of October — down from around 6,000 in the same period a year ago, according to the Refugee Processing Center, run by the U.S. State Department.

The Trump Administration set the refugee cap to 45,000 persons for the fiscal year. They planned to set aside the finances and resources to welcome and provide for 45,000 people fleeing circumstances wildly out of their control.

Since October the Trump Administration has admitted 44 refugees. Period. That is 0.0978% of the overall cap. Since November, 11 Syrian Refugees have been admitted. Since 2011 5.4 million Syrians have fled, not counting the 6.1 million internally displaced people, and we have the audacity to admit eleven. 

To put that into perspective: 11/5.4 Million = 0.0002037%. That does not even begin to scratch the surface of the crisis.

As Per the United Nations Human Rights Council

This is a disgrace to the 65.6 Million displaced persons. This is a disgrace to the 22.5 Million refugees. This is a disgrace to the 28,300 people fleeing their home every day due to persecution and conflict. This is a disgrace to the 9,540 UNHRC staff working in the field to support refugees fleeing for their lives. And this is a disgrace to the moral fiber of this nation.

Whether or not you believe that we should be accepting more or less refugees, the government has set aside the funding and resources for 45,000 desperate people to find refuge in this country. At minimum, we have made that promise to the global community. And we are a failure.

Forty-four admitted refugees is not relief. It is spiteful. It spits the the faces of the International Rescue Committee, HIAS, and countless of other refugee and immigration advocacy organizations. Countless people who spend hundreds of hours advocating for refugee rights in Congress. For the countless people who risk their lives every day to transport refugees fleeing the only homes they have ever known. It spits in the face of anyone who has ever donated their time to welcome refugees into the US, or donated clothing, bedsheets, and kitchen supplies so that these families can begin to imagine to rebuild their lives in this strange new country that has accepted them.

Accepting forty-four people ridicules the entire global crisis.

And we are better than that.

Improving Refugee Resettlement is an American Necessity

What’s going on?

The current process for refugee admission and resettlement in the United States is an arduous ordeal. Refugees coming into the country not only face intense vetting and long waits between stages of admission, but they also face anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric that makes them feel like the U.S. is not trying to help them. The Trump administration’s policies against refugees only serve to further alienate them from what will soon be their new home. This type of anti-refugee policymaking has also stopped any advancement in the process of refugee admission and assignment. However, as new technologies become available, so do new solutions.

Protester at JFK International Airport to demonstrate against President Donald Trump’s refugee and immigration policy in New York

The Trump administration is constantly attacking refugees and making statements about how much ‘better off’ the U.S. would be if we took in fewer refugees, but they refuse to do anything to improve the process and experience for refugees. Trump has lived a life of excess; when he is confronted with something bent or broken, he opts to throw it out instead of work to fix it. Recently, the White House cited a study from the Center for Immigration Studies saying that “for what it costs to resettle one Middle Eastern refugee in the United States for five years, about 12 refugees can be helped in the Middle East for five years, or 61 refugees can be helped for one year.” Not only does this organization openly favor low immigration levels, but they are taking two very different statistics and attempting to draw a direct comparison. According to Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute (a nonpartisan nongovernmental entity) the cost of resettling a refugee in America and the cost of helping refugees in refugee camps abroad are “not remotely comparable.” Another anti-refugee argument comes from the flip side of the cost-effectiveness coin; some say refugees do not contribute to the economy. An internal study done in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources, however, refutes that claim and because of this, it was rejected by the Trump administration. In this study, HHS found a $63 billion positive fiscal impact from refugees over a period of 10 years in the United States. Refugees are an important part of the U.S fiscal ecosystem, and the Trump administration is actively trying to ignore their contributions.

Looking Forward

In 2016, a U.N. Summit on the global refugee crisis led to a series of proposals for the U.S. to consider. One of the main suggestions was for the U.S. and other nations around the world to build a coalition for the resettlement of refugees. In order to start this coalition, we must start by increasing our own intake of refugees. As we noted in previous posts on this blog, Trump has done the exact opposite of that, decreasing our annual refugee cap to record low levels. One piece of that forward-thinking coalition would be aimed at introducing new digital tools to speed up and ameliorate the refugee assignment process. According to an article by Brookings, “the U.S. Digital Service, a team within the federal government that uses technology to improve access to government services, can work across agencies to support the creation of a secure and efficient digital screening process for Syrian refugees.”

So what new technology can aid in this humanitarian crisis? Oddly enough, the answer is big data. An algorithm designed by the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) is greatly improving efforts to resettle and integrate refugees on American soil. The IPL understands that one of the most pressing problems in the resettlement of refugees is the failure of participating agencies and organizations to communicate adequately. Without proper communication at each stage of the resettlement process, so many details that could otherwise help improve the lives of refugees just fall through the cracks. They also took into account the difficulties that the refugees themselves face. The IPL knows that “after experiencing the traumas of war and expulsion, refugees can find the challenges of acquiring a new language and finding basic employment to be insurmountable.” The algorithm harnesses big data in order to analyze and assess where a refugee should be placed in the U.S. in order to more fully integrate that refugee into American life. The placement of a refugee often isn’t considered one of the most important parts of resettlement. The testing of the algorithm included a study of historical refugee registry data from the U.S. and Switzerland, two nations with very different assignment regimes and refugee populations. The use of their algorithm to discern refugee placement led to “gains of roughly 40 to 70%, on average, in refugees’ employment outcomes relative to current assignment practices.” This algorithm provides a practical and cost-efficient tool to aid governments in assigning refugees their placements.

Refugees’ predicted employment rates rose across the board, including for those who were most and least likely to find work.

Trump and his administration should stop trying to focus on how much refugees can cost Americans, but how much they can contribute to the United States as a whole. With the IPL-designed algorithm, the government can make the best matches possible for not just a lucky few, but for every refugee in the country. By embracing the amazing technological advances the world has seen in recent years, the U.S. can greatly improve our current refugee resettlement process and thereby improve America as a whole.

Crime Statistics and Crime Statistic Reporting

The Institute for Delinquency and Crime Prevention in Germany recently released a study that found that violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, attributing more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees. The study continued by noting that refugees stemming from war-torn countries like Syria were much less likely to commit violent crimes, and that rather those asylum seekers from who were unlikely to be given asylum were the cause of the increase.

Bloomberg’s article Germany Must Come to Terms with Refugee Crime did seek to provide a reasonable insights. “The explanations are intuitive. Asylum seekers often share cramped quarters, which frequently leads to conflicts. For months after their arrival, they are forbidden to work, and their language skills and status often prevent employment long after that restriction is lifted — so robbers are motivated by jealousy of the locals and a lack of legitimate ways to make money. ”

While various article similar to Bloomberg’s, gave reasonable explanations following their clickbait-esque headlines, an entirely different issue came to light. As per Die Welt’s article, a study on newspapers’ reporting found that the media focus predominantly on migrant criminality, despite increasing violence against refugees in Germany.  “The study found that broadcasters had 50 percent fewer reports about non-German victims of violence as compared to 2014. This is despite security authorities still recording attacks on refuge shelters. Sixty-four percent of reports about foreigners in Germany’s mass-circulation Bild newspaper focused on those who were suspected of a crime.” This misrepresentation gives the general public a distorted impression and fuel prejudices.

How do crime statistics in Germany affect us here in the United States?

Because we are subject to the same prejudices as Europeans are.

Research by the New American Economy Research Fund analyzed refugee resettlement data from the U.S. Department of State’s Worldwide Refugee Processing System to calculate the 10 cities in the US that received the most refugees relative to the size of their population between 2006 and 2015. This information was then cross referenced with overall crime rates over the same time period using detailed data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

The results?

Nine out of Ten of the communities actually became considerably more safe, both in terms of their levels of violent and property crime.

Refugees make communities safer because, after everything they’ve been through to be resettled, they would not jeopardize their chance at a better future by committing violent crime.

#TBT Migrants and Refugees

Courtesy of Last Week Tonight, HBO

MAGA, Middle America, and Refugees

In Alex Grass’ article for The Federalist he laments  his frustration with white liberal upper and upper middle class American’s support of refugee resettlement in the United States. He argues that these affluent people are unjustified in their support of refugees because their communities will be virtually untouched by the resettled refugees, rather less affluent neighborhoods will bear the brunt of the transition. He complains about the “European crime wave” that will soon be plaguing America. This is such a popular anti-Refugee argument even though study after study after study continue to disprove this claim.

Since the 2016 presidential election much attention has been redirected towards Middle America in an attempt to understand this dramatic shift occurred in a country that elected Barack Obama for two terms. Under the Obama administration the United States saw a shift towards policies of universal healthcare, prisoner rehabilitation programs, and increasingly open immigration policies like DACA. It all felt like America was on track to join the rest of the forward thinking developing world. So how did this silent majority hijack the political machine?

In Samuel Huntington’s 2004 manifesto Who Are We? he analyzes the tumultuous future of the American identity. He predicted that the growth of non-white minority groups would provoke backlash from white Americans sooner or later.

The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

The Trump election is the manifestation of this fear. The Atlantic’s article Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America addresses how the grievances of white middle class men and their nostalgia for the the 1950’s is not entirely unwarranted.

The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages … and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.

For white American middle-class men, especially those without a college degree, it was the best of times. But here are three significant turns: the 1968 election; the 1979 peak in manufacturing employment, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Together, these episodes made economic anxiety and promoted racial resentment.

For these middle class Americans, who feel forgotten by the system and robbed of their rights, even the bare minimum of refugees accepted into the United States is a personal insult and a threat to their livelihood. While it’s so easy to dismiss these middle class Americans as bigoted racists, we have to make an effort to understand their fears so that we can appropriately address them.

Are We, or Aren’t We: Living Up to Ourselves

America has achieved a prominent position on the world stage by time and time again claiming the moral high ground, seeking to be the world’s policeman.

This statement is not meant as a criticism or a compliment; merely a statement of how things stand. And if the United States want to maintain a rhetorically significant position in global conversation, it must live up to the moral courage/standards it espouses. This isn’t only in a general PR sense, but also so that America’s citizens can be proud of the nation they live in.

So now that we’re all on the same page regarding patriotic pride, what does this have to do with refugees? If you look at the banner of this website (scroll up) you’ll see that we quoted Emma Lazarus’ The New Colossus, as is engraved upon the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

We are currently in the largest refugee crisis in recorded history. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, 65.6 million people are currently living as refugees or as displaced persons inside their own countries. More than half of these people are under the age of 18, which is particularly shocking given that children make up only 31 percent of the world’s population. Furthermore, in 2016 alone, according to UNHCR, 75,000 children applied for asylum as “unaccompanied minors.”

Even though there is no evidence of refugees posing any national security threat to the United States, or any Western nation, the Trump administration continues to maintain a particularly hostile stance towards refugee populations, which, again, are mostly comprised of children. By not accepting these refugees the Trump administration is creating a national security threat that they explicitly are seeking to avoid. 

Refugees who are unable to find asylum are being forced to stay in unstable regions, or flee to neighboring countries, where they face deteriorating conditions and few prospects. Their presence is also placing pressure on poor and middle-income countries, risking state collapse, furthering regional instabilities.

That’s not to forget that the refugees themselves have undergone a great deal of trauma and psychological stress, which makes them targets for militant mobilization and radicalization — thus expanding the conflict in the Middle East.

By not allowing refugees into the United States, we are not only creating the problems that the Trump Administration is actively seeking to avoid; we aren’t living up to our promise. If these people are not the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breather free, who is?

Don’t Bother Me with Facts, My Mind is Made Up: The Financial Effects of Refugees

In September of 2017 the Trump Administration dropped the annual refugee cap to 45,000 persons admitted annually. Not only is this the lowest limit of the refugee cap since the implementation of the Refugee Act of 1980, the cap dips lower than the 50,000 minimum cap set by the Refugee Act.

The suggested cap is based on estimates and suggestions from the Department of Homeland Security, which advocated for as low as 40,000, while completely ignoring the findings and suggestions of other relevant departments. The State Department and the Department of Defense both called for no fewer than the minimum 50,000-refugee cap,

(It’s also important to note that the annual Refugee Cap is only rarely met, and that more often than not the United States accepts significantly less refugees than it has the resources to.)

Unsurprisingly, the dip in the cap caused great outrage. As the global community finds itself in the largest refugee crisis in recorded history, it is remarkably counter intuitive to decrease the cap, when we have the capacity to accept 100,000s more.

The White House justified the 45,000 cap citing concerns of national security and limited resources. The budget released by the Trump Administration back in May stated “under the refugee program, the federal government brings tens of thousands of entrants into the United States, on top of existing legal immigration flows, who are instantly eligible for time-limited cash benefits and numerous noncash federal benefits, including food assistance through SNAP, medical care and education, as well as a host of state and local benefits.”

Most significantly though internal study conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, completed in late July, found that refugees “contributed an estimated $269.1 billion in revenues to all levels of government” between 2005 and 2014 through the payment of federal, state and local taxes stating, “overall, this report estimated that the net fiscal impact of refugees was positive over the 10-year period, at $63 billion.”

Outside of the Government there are various other sources reaffirming how the economy is benefitted by immigrants and refugees. An analysis from the Washington Post reviewed research conducted by the American Community Survey, an annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau. Their analysis suggests that within a handful of years after arriving, quite a few refugees are doing as well as or perhaps better than the average American resident, according to basic economic indicators. “Within seven years, refugees reach a higher median income and lower use of food stamps than their neighbors. They develop language competency fairly quickly, and remain active in the workforce, buoying the local economy.”

Across the board economic indicators are suggesting that refugees and immigrants are very supportive and beneficial to the American economy – by blocking these refugees out we not only keep them from their potential, we block our own communities from thriving.

We Cannot Allow Ourselves to Repeat History

We are all familiar with the American romanticization of the victory over the Germans in World War Two. It’s arguable that the American self perception of being the policeman of the world began due to this victory, and while its so comforting to fall into the narrative it’s sooooo important that we remain honest about America’s position in the war.

In reality the United States stayed out of the war until they were directly assaulted by a foreign entity. The pacifist and non-confrontational tactics were not in the interests of maintaining a global peace, but only because it was easier to stay out of a second global conflict.

Further more, even though the United States had a great deal of knowledge about the dangerous situation that European Jewry found themselves in, and nonetheless efforts by Congress to increase immigration caps or refugee limits were blocked again and again. Most dramatically was the Wagner Roger Act.

The bill was introduced on February 9, 1939, by Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts, and would have permitted the entry of 20,000 refugee children, ages 14 and under, from tGermany, and it’s occupied territories, into the United States over the course of two years (1939 and 1940). The children would have been granted entry without reference to the existing quota system.

Who could argue against such a cause?

Congress members on either side of the isle argued that the bill would increase unemployment, even if the refugees were young children. Groups like the American Legion and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, which included members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, supported a decrease in immigration to the United States overall and that any charitable efforts should be directed to impoverished American children.

And most upsettingly: Laura Delano Houghteling,the wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, summarized the sentiment of the opposition when she complained that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.”

No.

Most of them didn’t grow up at all.

The Bill died in Committee in early March.

Over the course of the war several hundred refugee children from Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal were admitted to the United States during the war, far fewer than the 20,000 children proposed by the Wagner-Rogers Bill.

We cannot afford to repeat this history.

Refugees Welcome Here

Hello World!

A banner was placed across the observation deck on the statue’s pedestal on Liberty Island, New York in February 2017.

Welcome to Refugee Rhetoric! In light of recent controversies regarding the annual refugee cap in the United States, we decided to create this blog to address what we consider to be three major aspects of the issue.

Firstly, we believe the United States should return the annual refugee cap to the standards set by the Obama administration.

Second, we feel the need to reaffirm that refugees coming to America are granted the same legal and civil rights as other legal residents of the United States.

Finally, we believe the United States should be putting more resources towards refugee resettlement programs to provide these individuals with the opportunity not only to readjust, but to thrive.