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.