When President Joe Biden committed to double the government’s cap on refugee admissions into the United States in May 2021, he said that the decision would “remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin.”
But five months into the fiscal year, fewer than 6,500 people have actually been allowed into the country through refugee resettlement programs, according to official Department of State figures—out of 125,000 potential spots.
Now, a rapidly growing refugee crisis in Eastern Europe sparked by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has brought renewed attention to America’s role in providing safe haven for people fleeing war, disaster and persecution. With millions of Ukrainians joining millions more Syrians, Haitians and others seeking refuge across the world, the extreme challenges facing a refugee resettlement program that was actively sabotaged under the previous administration have come into clearer view. The Biden administration’s mixed response, experts say, hasn’t always met the needs of a crisis in perpetual motion.
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“It is much harder to rebuild something than it is to destroy it, and we are still coming out of four years of consistent attack against the resettlement system,” said Naomi Steinberg, vice president of policy and advocacy at HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit tasked by the State Department with helping resettle refugees. “We are essentially trying to rebuild the plane while we are flying it.”
Former President Donald Trump’s personal hostility to the very concept of refugee admissions—famously dismissing Haitians and Salvadorans seeking safety as coming from “shithole countries”—was successfully translated into federal policy, refugee resettlement experts and administration officials said, leaving the system titanically underfunded and understaffed.
“We were pretty well decimated by the very low arrivals numbers over the last four to five years,” said Matthew Soerens, the director of church mobilization for World Relief, an evangelical Christian resettlement organization. “We laid off about 30 percent of our U.S.-based staff, and closed at least eight of our offices altogether.”
Simply raising the cap on refugee admissions, Soerens said, isn’t enough to make up for the loss of capacity that domestic organizations have to help refugees find a home.
“The resettlement infrastructure is not a switch that you can turn off and on—you can’t just lay off staff and then expect them to sit around their houses waiting for you to call them back in six months.”
That a wave of major refugee crises has swelled in the past year—first Afghanistan and now Ukraine, to say nothing of longtime refugee crises in Syria, Cameroon, Myanmar and Venezuela—has stretched refugee resettlement organizations far beyond that minimized capacity.
Much of the limited resources have been devoted to resettling tens of thousands of Afghans who have fled their homeland since the collapse of the U.S.-backed coalition government last August. While many of them haven’t entered the United States as refugees per se—some were instead recipients of the Special Immigrant Visa for translators, security guards, drivers and fixers who aided U.S. military in the country over the span of two decades—the huge demand for emergency resettlement in the midst of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan ate up most of the already meager resources available to refugees.
“The resettlement agencies in the U.S. ended up handling all the Afghans after they were paroled,” said Dr. Yael Schacher, deputy director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. “Only this month did refugee interviews begin for some Afghans currently in Qatar, a few thousand of whom will come to the U.S. as refugees.”
The coronavirus pandemic also hindered efforts to revamp the refugee resettlement system by limiting in-person interviews abroad for prospective refugees. Typically, refugee officers with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would be traveling abroad on what are called circuit rides to conduct in-person interviews for prospective refugees. Without those interviews, refugee applicants can’t advance through the process to admission.
“Rebuilding the program from the rubble has further been complicated by the pandemic, which has largely prevented the federal government from processing refugee applicants who have been waiting years for their chance at safety,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. “There were already more than 26 million refugees worldwide before 3 million Ukrainians fled their homeland, underscoring the need to aggressively rebuild the U.S. refugee admissions program.”
The Biden administration has won some credit from those who work to resettle refugees in the United States, particularly for easing the monetary burdens on refugees and nonprofits alike amidst the Afghan refugee surve. Five-figure application fees for work permits and green cards were waived, and Biden signed legislation that allocated $6.3 billion for resettlement of Afghans through the end of this year.
But even that increase in funding has not been sufficient to put resettlement partners on firmer footing, in part because of the structure of how those funds are dispersed. Public funding for refugee resettlement is given as a grant on a per-refugee basis—which means that fewer refugee admissions means less money.
“When 90 percent fewer refugees come in, that part of our budget goes down by 90 percent,” said Soerens.
The Biden administration’s slow reform of the immense bureaucracy of the refugee admissions process, too, has frustrated advocates and refugees who see many components of the process—particularly the in-person interview requirement for applicants—as hopelessly outdated in the pandemic era.
“Expanding the use of virtual interviews is a necessary prerequisite to have a functioning U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), particularly when the pandemic is still raging in most parts of the world,” said Steinberg. “DHS, in consultation with the Department of State, should expand the use of virtual interviews at a minimum for cases that aren’t really complex, for follow-up interviews and for populations that are particularly hard to reach.”
Biden, who promised on the campaign trail—and has continued to promise as president—to implement a more “humane” immigration system, has in practice varied widely in his handling of immigration. His swift extension of Temporary Protected Status to Ukrainians living in the United States comes on top of expansions that already extended that protection from deportation to more than 420,000 people. The approval rate for asylum claims under Biden has increased by more than 50 percent, and monthly U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions have fallen by half.
But continued administration renewal of the Title 42 order that effectively bars asylum seekers from entering the United States in the name of public health, as well as the expansion of the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols that Biden once denounced have given refugees and asylum seekers whiplash—and has delighted Stephen Miller, Trump’s closest adviser on immigration issues.
“The Biden administration is capable of ushering the necessary resources required to rebuild the U.S. resettlement program—it’s just a matter of political will,” said Amy Fischer, director of advocacy for the Americas at Amnesty International. “It’s time the Biden administration commit to tangible solutions and rebuild political support for refugee resettlement.”
A State Department official emphasized the abysmal shape that the refugee admissions system was upon Biden’s inauguration, telling The Daily Beast that the United States “will continue to be, a global leader in international humanitarian response, including in refugee resettlement.”
As for virtual interviews and assisting in increasing manpower for refugee resettlement organizations regardless of admissions rates, “we will continue to review, assess, and apply the full range of tools and initiatives available to strengthen the USRAP, including expanded hiring for critical roles,” the official said.
Most Ukrainian refugees are expected to remain in Europe, many of them in the hopes that their homeland’s continued resistance to Russia’s attempted occupation will prevail.
But with millions having fled since the Russian invasion began, the possibility of a cascading need for permanent homes for those refugees in the United States grows every day—particularly in cases of family reunification, where refugees have relatives in one of many Ukrainian-American communities from Manhattan’s East Village to the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio.
“The longer this lasts, the more some might think about firmly planting their lives in a new place,” said Soerens. “And for some of them, the most obvious place would actually be the United States.”
