President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that he will sign an executive order to rebuild the United States’ refugee resettlement program, raising the annual admissions limit to 125,000 from October.
In a State Department speech, he acknowledged that the U.S. refugee program suffered from former President Donald Trump, who reduced the refugee admissions limit to just 15,000 this fiscal year – the lowest number since the refugee program. it was created in 1980 and below 110,000 just four years earlier. Increasing the ability of the United States to accept more refugees will be a gradual process, said Biden.
“The moral leadership of the United States on refugee issues has been a point of bipartisan consensus for so many decades,” he said. “It will take time to rebuild what has been so damaged.”
Its executive order would allow the State Department, in consultation with Congress, to start increasing refugee admissions in the months before October, but it is not clear how quickly this could occur. Under Trump, refugee agencies have seen their federal funding dwindle, forcing them to substantially reduce their infrastructure and personnel to keep their resettlement programs running. More than 100 resettlement offices have been closed and many government officials charged with prosecuting refugees abroad have been dismissed or transferred.
The task of rebuilding is urgent. The coronavirus The pandemic has only deepened the situation of the world’s most vulnerable populations. There are more refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people today than at any time since the second world war, and these numbers are only growing due to the ongoing crises in Hong Kong, Syria, Venezuela, and other countries.
“With this announcement, President Biden signaled to the world that the United States is proudly resuming its responsibility as a world humanitarian leader,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, in a statement. “Their commitment to significantly increase the ceiling on refugee admissions is a bold recognition of the scope and scale of the worst global displacement crisis in history.”
Biden is fighting anti-refugee attitudes fueled by Trump
The refugee program has historically flourished under Republican presidents. Even in previous Republican administrations that sought to curb immigration, no one has ever set a limit as low for the admission of refugees as Trump. President George W. Bush briefly reduced the number of refugees admitted after the 9/11 attacks, but even so, the limit was set at 70,000.
But the bipartisan consensus on maintaining a robust refugee resettlement program began to crumble after the Paris terrorist attacks in late 2015, when suicide bombers – allegedly sanctioned by the Islamic State – killed 130 civilians in explosions and shootings across the city.
There was speculation that one of the attackers was a refugee, one of the 5.6 million Syrians who have been displaced since 2011 by the ongoing civil war. It was later confirmed that all the perpetrators were European Union citizens. But the rumors were enough to spark panic over Syrian refugees and start a movement at the state level to curtail the US’s admission of Syrian refugees and resettlement efforts more broadly.
Governors of 31 states, all Republicans, except for New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, said in 2015 that they no longer wanted their state to receive Syrian refugees. In 2016, Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana, also tried to prevent refugee resettlement agencies in his state from being reimbursed for the cost of providing social services to Syrian refugees.
But states had no legal authority to simply refuse refugees; this is a prerogative of the federal government. Finally, Pence had to back down after a federal court ruled against his decision to withhold refunds.
Trump, then campaigning for president, aroused more fear, suggesting that Syrian refugees were raising an army launch an attack on the US and promise that they would all be “coming back” if he won the election. He said he would tell Syrian children in their face that they could not come to the USA, speculating that they could be a “Trojan horse”.
When Trump finally took office, he fulfilled his pledge to reduce Syrian refugee admissions by completely suspending refugee admissions from January to October 2017. From October 2017 to October 2018, the U.S. admitted only 62.
State leaders lined up behind him: The Tennessee legislature, for example, filed a lawsuit in March 2017, claiming that the federal government was infringing the rights of states by forcing them to welcome refugees (a lawsuit that also failed).
In September 2019, Trump also issued an executive order that allowed local governments that lack the resources to support refugees to become “self-sufficient and free from long-term dependence on public assistance” to reject them. Texas Governor Greg Abbott later announced that the state would no longer resettle refugees under executive order. Courts prevented the executive order from coming into effect, but it revealed strong party divisions over who deserves US humanitarian aid.
Biden sought to reaffirm the US role as a humanitarian leader on Thursday, recognizing that American values are “under pressure”.
“We shed the light of freedom on the oppressed,” he said. “Our example has led other nations to open their doors as well.”