The American Refugee Program

FAIR's Spencer Raley, Preston Huennekens, and Madison McQueen discuss the United States Refugee Program.

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.

Spencer:
Today on Understanding Immigration the American refugee program all right welcome back to another episode of FAIR’s Understanding Immigration podcasts this is Spencer Raley FAIR’s director of research and today I’m joined by Madison McQueen from my research team and Preston Huennekens from our lobbying department now on May 3rd President Biden announced a massive increase in the refugee cap this despite the fact that millions of Americans continue to go unemployed and struggle to care for their own families due to the ongoing economic impact of covid 19. also this decision was not based on the advice of his experts or particular driving need or a new war humanitarian issue overseas rather it was simply another situation where the administration caved to excessive external pressure from the open borders lobby over the past decade the refugee cap has ranged from anywhere from fifteen thousand all the way up to eighty five thousand in the past it's grown to as much as two hundred and forty thousand obviously all of these drastic changes can lead to confusion for the American people what goes into the decisions that drive the refugee cap up or down what's the ideal number how does our program compare to other programs around the world these are all questions that we hope to address in this episode so Preston I want to start with you tell us more about the recent change to the refugee cap and why the bite administration suddenly changed their mind and how did they arrive to this particular number?

Preston:
Right so most of Biden’s immigration moves can be characterized essentially as doing the exact opposite of what former President Trump did regardless of the effects or consequences and their decision to change the refugee ceiling is no different it's important to remember that resettlement as it's applied today is not really a life-saving last resort for refugees we know I think this has been shown in year after year of data from the UN that about 80% of them are in normal circumstances they're not people who are truly fleeing for their lives in many respects they look a lot like people coming from south of our border and applying for asylum they're people who the situation at home is not great but it's not the worst thing in the world the government hasn't collapsed as you mentioned there's no there aren't really any global wars occurring right now and so this goes back to the Trump administration where the Trump administration took this information from their experts they had looked at it and they said our current ceiling does not need to be as high as it is for what we are doing and so they set it at 15,000 which I believe was still the highest really of any developed country that was accepting refugees at the time and naturally opponents of President Trump lost their minds they said this was a dereliction of our duty as one of the strongest countries in the world as a country that has traditionally had a very robust refugee program but again even with this 15,000 number we were still taking in generally more refugees than most other developed countries and so now Biden comes into office on January 20th 2021 and he doesn't touch the refugee number for a while and then he had substantial pressure from his allies in congress from the media from universities and from the non-profit advocacy sector that really supported his presidency supported his campaign he had enormous pressure from them to raise the ceiling from the Trump level of 15,000 to something else and so it's also important to remember not only are these outside allies and these outside groups pressuring him to raise the number but members of his own staff are who by and large are significantly more to the left of him on the immigration issue remember these are all people that campaigned for him by and large they come from a different generation of democratic politics than he does despite working for him and so there's a lot of internal pressure as well for him to raise this cap and so incredibly he actually announces on May 3rd that no he actually isn't going to raise the cap he's just going to keep it at the Trump level and he kind of dusted his hands off and moved on and then everyone in democratic politics completely lost their mind when he said this and so next thing you know you have his allies in congress that are blasting him and essentially suggesting that Joe Biden President Joe Biden is continuing and fulfilling Donald Trump's immigration policies which god forbid of course he couldn't do that so he's the democratic president he can't do that so even the Trump policies that have worked have to be overturned in his eyes and so within a few hours Joe Biden’s white house has released a statement clarifying that they're going to raise it to over 62,000 people and it really was a remarkable episode and it really just illustrates how beholden Biden is to these groups and to these to the universities to members of the mainstream media to a lot of these immigration nonprofit organizations that he has drawn from for staff and things of that nature and so it really just kind of illustrated that Joe Biden might not necessarily be in charge when it comes to setting refugee policy even though it is largely up to him as the president of the United States to do that.

Spencer:
I think what's so troubling to me is that like you mentioned this was not based on the advice of experts it was literally based on orange man bad theory he announced that the data suggested Trump's policies were indeed what was best for America at this time that's what his experts told him that's what they reviewed and decided hey this should stay as it is and then reverse course simply because the anti-Trump crowd howled about it just because Trump did something doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best course of action but when the entirety of your public policy approach is let's see what Trump didn't automatically assume it was wrong and do the opposite no matter what the science says no matter what the data says no matter what experts say it's ultimately going to end up a recipe for disaster and like you mentioned so many in this country like to suggest that it's inhumane that we don't accept more refugees and we've heard that all throughout the Trump administration we heard that throughout the Obama administration some have gone so far as to say there should be no cap we should just take as many as we can fly into the country and these individuals often point to other countries as an example of how the United States could do better so Madison maybe detail a little bit how does our refugee program compare to other countries especially other westernized countries?

Madison:
Well historically the U.S. has led the world in terms of formal refugee resettlement we accept more refugees annually than any other country and we have one of the most generous programs in the western world in 2016 the U.S. accepted 96,900 refugees and in fact the U.S. was listed as the top resettlement submission and destination country for 2017, 2018 and 2019 all will underneath these Trump lower caps the U.S. admitted over 29,000 individuals into the country in 2019 and according to the UN refugee agency there was 21,159 refugee submissions to United States comparatively there were only 9,031 refugee departures for Canada and 5,774 departures for the United Kingdom so even with President Trump's lower caps the United States still accepts more refugees than any other country for 2020 the U.S. government assisted refugee resettlement targets were 18,000 which was lower than obviously our 96,000 for 2016 but that still was far higher than for example Canada whose cap was just over 10,000. now of course covid affected these numbers not only for the U.S. but for other countries and so for 2020 our refugee acceptance was about 11,814 for that year beyond accepting refugees for resettlement the U.S. also grants humanitarian protection through various other means we had 46,508 individuals that were granted asylum in 2019 which was a 34% increase from the previous year whereas for the same year the UK granted asylum to just over 11,000 individuals not only do we have the asylum programs but the U.S. also offers temporary protected status known as TPS two countries facing ongoing armed conflict environmental disasters such as earthquake or hurricanes epidemic or any other extraordinary and temporary conditions TPS is a temporary deferral of removal due to these circumstances in a person's or demographic's home country and currently there are 12 countries who have TPS designation Biden just instituted TPS sector Biden just instituted a TPS designation for Venezuela so now there's about 300,000 Venezuelan nationals currently residing in the United States who are going to receive temporary legal status and work permits through this TPS program another program offered by the U.S. as humanitarian aid is our unaccompanied alien children resettlement program which places unaccompanied alien children or UACs into the custody of the office of refugee resettlement once in custody these children are put into contact with their parents or guardians or other relatives in the U.S. and the program begins the process of finding suitable sponsors often these sponsors are a parent or close family relative already in the U.S. and until a sponsor is found the children are provided care and wraparound services in one of the 170 facilities across the United States in addition to these programs the United States also has a visa category designed to help victims of abuse called the U visa and the U visa is a non-immigrant visa program is open to victims of certain criminal activities that happen inside the U.S. such as domestic violence and these incidents that cause substantial physical or mental abuse this visa is valid for four years with extensions in specific circumstances and not only does it help to bring domestic abuse out of the shadows but it also helps build trust with law enforcement agencies congress sets limits for this visa category however sponsored family members are not included in that cap so for 2018 there was a total of 17,915 victims and their sponsored family members who are approved for the U visa so while many people want the U.S. to raise our refugee cap they're ignoring the many other ways that we provide humanitarian protection outside of just the refugee resettlement program and they also ignore the fact that we far exceed the refugee admissions of other countries.

Spencer:
I think that's really an impressive thing if you think about most countries have a refugee program most of them asylum is rolled into that other humanitarian efforts are rolled into that parole for illegal aliens is rolled into that some have an asylum program in addition to their refugee but you're still talking figures that often range between about 5,000 and maybe for the upper echelon 50,000. but if you just kind of do a back of the envelope write up on how many individuals the United States accept into you into the country on an annual basis for humanitarian purposes you're talking hundreds of thousands and you mentioned TPS is supposed to be a temporary protection from deportation until the situation improves in a home country but I mean anyone who's looked into this knows that hasn't been the case it's been another avenue for resettlement these programs are rubber stamped again and again and again and I think that's a good point to bring up as well because refugee status asylee asylum status asylum is often turns into something that's a little more permanent at least until the host country can have a regime change or something that makes it safe for the individual to go home but initially refuge the refugee program was not intended to be permanent resettlement but it's become that that option has been given and it's used for another form of permanent resettlement so again I think it's an extremely unfair accusation to make to suggest that the United States is not pulling our weight on an international scale to help take care of individuals who are victims of unfortunate circumstance instead the ultimate goal of these advocacy groups these open borders proponents is to just import more cheap labor into the United States and to try to change the social fabric of the United States to something that is more favorable to their goals and that again is extremely troubling especially when you're considering the fact that the United States is not only continuing to recover from the economic impacts of covid19 but is also spending a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars on helping mitigate that economic impact the unemployment rate just came out as 6.1 percent and that was a slower than expected recovery but that number as we all know is misleading it's been slow slower than expected improvement but it is estimated that more than 20 percent of individuals who work in the lower tier lower income jobs are still without a job and that's after over 40 percent of them lost their jobs due to covid 19. and FAIR has found in some of our previous analysis that almost all refugees work in low-income jobs in fact the annual wage for a new refugee in the United States averages out to only about 12 dollars an hour so those that do find work are taking that work from this pool of low income opportunity which there are millions of Americans looking for right now and we've also found that the taxpayer cost is significant as well up to eighty thousand dollars per refugee over their first five years in the country or roughly 16,000 per year and again this is all occurring this refugee cap is being increased three-four-fold during a time when we're literally passing trillion dollar relief bills for covid 19 and now we're adding these bills that are 16,000 per person for an additional perhaps 50,000 refugees onto the back of American taxpayers who are struggling to put food on their family's plates due to covid 19. it's an almost immoral issue if you think about it kind of runs against the kind of common sense idea that the United States is first and foremost responsible to making sure that their own citizens are taken care of and able to put food on their family's plates and have a place to sleep at night versus those from other countries and again it might be a good discussion to have if the United States wasn't doing that already but we are to the tune of hundreds of thousands of individuals a year so Preston we've now seen what our program looks like right now how it's looked in the past as well as how it compares to other countries and how it far exceeds what other countries are doing but what should our refugee program look like today who should it include how can we ensure that those who are entering the country are not problematic individuals and should we be taking in so many refugees during a time when American citizens like I mentioned are struggling to get back on their feet?

Preston:
So I think this is one of the more interesting debates to have regarding the refugee program is one what does it look like and two who should it benefit I think we need a radical restructuring of the way that the United States deals with refugees by and large there has not been a refugee crisis in the Americas so that includes north and south America and central America in a very long time I think we all know where some of the more recent refugee crises have come from it's been the Middle East it's been Africa and to an extent Asia and so there is this idea that we are somehow helping by bringing people thousands of miles away to the United States instead of resettling them somewhere closer to home where more people could be helped someone who has talked about this to a great deal and I’m actually about to take his analogy that he's used is Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies and he has used the analogy of there's a group of people who are drowning in the ocean and you come up you come across them what makes more sense do you give all of them a life raft which keeps them afloat they're not going to drown they're not going to die or do you give one of them the keys to the boat that you are on and leave everyone else to kind of fend for themselves in the water because that's essentially how our current refugee resettlement program works is that instead of helping I think the number is about 11 or 12 people in their region by providing food aid by providing money to the countries that do take them in that kind of thing instead of doing that and helping more people overall what we're currently doing is giving a golden ticket to one of those people and bringing them to United States resettling them in the United States and that's all good and noble but in terms of actually helping people helping people that are going through the collapse of a state government who are going who have faced genocide these kinds of things that we associate with refugees it doesn't really do anything you're helping a very small number of people and so I think when I say we need to look at how we evaluate refugees in these countries in our country what I think we need to do is really use resettlement as an absolute last resort the resources that our country spends on refugee resettlement could go so far and help so many more people if it was directed in terms of food aid monetary aid maybe the resources of the U.S. military stationed overseas the way that the national guard works domestically helping in events like that I think that goes a lot longer to help more people than just bringing a handful of people over to the United States whether the number is 15,000 or whether it's 62,000 it still doesn't matter because there's still millions of people who if they had the choice would come to the U.S. in a second so I think that's really the number one thing is we need to look at not I think the number is very arbitrary and that's kind of where a lot of our modern politics says oh Trump lowered it to 15,000 and Biden’s taking it to 62,000. that's not the issue the issue I think is the amount of aid that we can give to local governments overseas to help them either resettle people or deal with a surge of people kind of like the European union did with Turkey following the civil war in Syria it would it would have I think that is really where the conversation should go instead of just arguing about numbers and where they should be resettled in the U.S. and things like that.

Spencer:
Right and I think that's a that's a really good point in fact we did some analysis on that a few years ago and found that in most situations it's 90 percent cheaper and much more effective to care for refugees and what we typically found was the first safe country they could arrive at versus importing them to the United States the other thing we found is that when you do that you can help a more diverse group of people right now those coming United States are those who are wealthy enough to get here now in the United States those might not particularly be wealthy individuals but in their home countries these are the individuals who should be able to go back to their country and help solve some of the issues that they're facing instead of simply leaving and resettling elsewhere so what we found is that if you create agreements or create incentives for some of these neighboring countries to take in refugees individuals that speak the language and could contribute right away to the economies of the neighboring countries it's better for the refugees they're not being transplanted to a place they have no clue about they haven't been to before they can't speak the language etc it's better for American taxpayers because we don't immediately put them on welfare rolls which is typically the case when they come to the United States in fact there's a governmental program that connects new refugees to welfare programs now interestingly there's not one that connects them to jobs but there is one that connects them to welfare programs so it's better for us in terms of our pocketbook and again it's better for the situations in those countries because more people can be taken care of they're closer to home so that they can go back and help improve the situation at home or once the situation improves they have more incentive to return and contribute to their own country to their own culture now just to be frankly honest like you mentioned everything we do is not even a drop in the bucket it's not really making an impact on a global stage at this point the refugee program we have is nothing more than a self-righteous pat on our own back on the international scale because we're doing very little to help improve the situation those countries to help the governments get back on their feet to improve the situation we're offering no incentive to those host countries to end whatever corrupt behaviors they may be partaking in to cause a refugee exodus and instead what we end up doing is we just decide what's a number we should bring into the United States we do that we celebrate say that we did something good and then go on to ignore the root problems and I think that's really unfortunate and something that we of course need to rectify and try to think about this topic on a more global scale how we can actually have a positive long-term impact.

Preston:
And Spencer that even comes to another point that you just reminded me of is addressing the role of the refugee resettlement agencies in the United States I’m not sure our listeners or even the average person is aware of how much our government actually kind of delegates the task of settling these people in the U.S. to outside groups whether they are religious organizations or immigrant advocacy groups there are there's a forget the exact number but there's an exact number registered with the state department who essentially bid on government contracts to resettle people so for them it's actually extremely profitable to keep the numbers high because for each refugee they settle they're essentially getting a check from the government and that is that is very problematic when you have essentially and to be frank I’m surprised that democrats for as much as they hate privatization of government services I’m shocked that they have gone along with this instead of allowing the federal government or some arm of the state department to do this and it's created a lot of issues there's a lot of states that have said we do not want refugees resettled here they get into lawsuits with these groups and then next thing you know the federal government is stepping in on behalf of these organizations and it's just a nightmare because you bring these people here and then if a city votes in a referendum and says we do not want these people here who is the this random NGO to tell them well tough luck because we have a contract from the state department and that's pretty much how it works right now and I think that's another thing that we have to look into is why are we allowing pretty much private organizations to determine where refugees are going against in many cases the will of the people in those localities.

Spencer:
That's a really good point and I think something that we should bring up is that these localities are not necessarily rejecting refugees because oh we hate foreigners as is often accused but we found that there are a number of you're talking small cities 10, 20, 30,000 people who because of refugee resettlement from the federal government from these organizations that you talk about that are supposedly non-profits but make a great profit off of resettling refugees are resettling them in these in these small jurisdictions and it has a massive impact on city planning on school systems on tax programs in fact we found that some of these school systems have as many as 12 different languages now spoken by students in their schools and that's extremely difficult it puts a lot of stress on teachers or in worst case scenarios you're seeing these schools firing English-speaking teachers in order to bring in bilingual teachers or to import teachers from somewhere else that can speak the language of these refugees and what ends up happening is you have fewer English speaking teachers that are addressing the needs of citizens and more individuals that are being forced to they're forcing that budget to these refugee programs and again they had no way of planning for it they get very little notice sometimes it's not even a month that hey there are 300 refugees are going to be resettled in your city tough luck deal with it and it's just not fair I know that a lot of these jurisdictions we've heard from a lot of these cities they've said hey we'd be happy to help out if you let us plan this let us know that hey next year two years three years from now we're hoping to resettle a few refugees in your in your city and they're happy to help or they can say we've already got a large population that speaks a particular language so we can resettle those refugees into our jurisdictions and be able to help them right away but at this point so far the federal government's just like yeah no tough luck we're going to give you whatever we feel like giving you we're going to resettle whoever we want to resettle there and you have to deal with it impressive like you mentioned these organizations it's nothing but a profit machine to them and I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that most of the groups that just hounded the Biden administration and attacked the Biden administration for keeping their refugee resettlement numbers low were the groups that stand to make millions upon millions of dollars thanks to this cap being increased so again it comes down to a situation where it's not that experts said that this should happen that it would make the world a better place if we increase the refugee cap it's more that hey our donors are saying they want to increase the refugee cap and they want more money and so they're going to hound us about it and we're just going to cave into what they want.

Preston:
Yeah I mean when you're getting paid when you're getting a check from the federal government for every refugee that you resettle you obviously have an incentive to resettle as many refugees as you can and I think that speaks to how broken the current system is the current system out it obviously I have and I said earlier I think a perfect system would be that we allocate a lot of instead of paying these groups in the U.S. to do this and helping only a handful of people essentially we should be using that money to help significantly more people closer to where the crisis is or closer to where the issues are actually occurring because right now it's what we're doing right now is just silly and like you said it's more just to pat ourselves on the back and claim that we have some sort of moral high ground even when if you really look into the issue we don't.

Spencer:
Right it's nothing but a self-righteous endeavor that just so happens to transfer money from the federal government to an ally’s pocket and unfortunately while that whole corrupt system is going on there are millions of individuals all around the world who are suffering that we could be helping and that's really a tragic thing.

Madison:
I think you guys hit the nail on the head it definitely is one of those self-righteous pat on the back it's a vested interest for these companies and organizations who are getting paid to resettle refugees and it's honestly virtue signaling they're saying oh hey look at us we resettle all these people look at how righteous we are how much better we are than all of you but it's not about caring for the person it's not about wanting to set these people up for success and it makes a lot of sense of what we're seeing with the crisis currently as well as just come in illegally come in as a refugee we'll help the some people that we can we'll give you a little bit of money put you on welfare so we can get your vote or get more checks it's all about a vested interest of when it comes down to money rather than hey let's make sure that these people are being taken care of that these people are set up for success and like you both were talking about we can help way more people if we were to reframe how we address the refugee resettlement program how we're meant to re if we readdress how we're meant to see the refugee crisis around the world is it really about helping people and if that's the case let's find a better way to do so by having people resettle in countries that are closer providing that aid in money water monetary funds whatever it may be rather than hey come to the U.S. so it makes us look good.

Spencer:
Exactly and I think that's a good point as well we're not setting these individuals that we do bring into the United States up for success as we mentioned earlier a large number of these a very large number of these individuals end up being on welfare long term meaning greater than five years most of them make very little money in fact we found in that five-year period most of them went from earning an average of twelve dollars an hour up to maybe close to thirteen after five years that's not much of a pay increase we've also found that children who enter the United States via the refugee program typically perform below average in school for the duration of their public school experience so it's really a tragic situation where individuals are being brought in the United States but they aren't being given the tools they need to succeed so we're spending billions of dollars on this program every year we're making organizations rich to resettle them but we're really not doing anything to solve this conflict on a global scale we're not doing anything to set up those that come to the United States for success and overall that's just kind of a tragic thing and that may be kind of a tragic note to end on but that's all the time we have for today so we hope that you've enjoyed today's episode and perhaps learned something new as a reminder we'll be releasing a new episode every other Monday now for any of our new listeners out there check out our series on your favorite platform such as Google Apple and Spotify to see what other topics we've been discussing that may interest you in fact we have more than 30 episodes uploaded right now that cover important topics that impact your daily life like remittances DACA gang violence and many other issues that you can easily find from our podcast pages we hope that each and every one of you continue to stay safe and sound and until next time this has been Understanding Immigration presented by FAIR.