One of Donald Trump’s first actions after assuming office in January was to halt the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, declaring it “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” This misguided sentiment contrasts dramatically with the bipartisan support for U.S. refugee admissions that ushered in the program under the 1980 Refugee Act. Co-sponsored by Democratic and Republican senators, the measure was advanced by a Senate committee with Strom Thurmond (of segregationist fame) as its ranking Republican member. It passed the Senate 85-0 and transformed U.S. refugee policy.
In the five years that preceded the law, 400,000 Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees came to the U.S. through ad hoc programs under both Republican and Democratic presidents, Ford and Carter. The 1980 law systematized refugee resettlement, requiring an annual presidential determination, in consultation with Congress, on how many refugees to admit and from where. It regularized assessment of humanitarian priorities and created the Office of Refugee Resettlement under Health and Human Services to administer the program. Over the following decades, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program opened the door to some of the most persecuted people across the planet.
It has been pointed out many times since the first Trump administration deemed the program a security threat that refugees accepted by the United States may be the most well-vetted immigrants to enter the United States. Those seeking resettlement to the U.S. undergo years, sometimes decades, of interviews and background checks. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees interviews them multiple times to assess their fit with humanitarian priorities and admissibility under U.S. law. Then they are interviewed by a Resettlement Support Center operated under the State Department, and finally by Homeland Security officers. Over years, their narratives and biographies are cross-checked with detailed information about their home countries, and with everything they’ve reported in previous statements. Their names are run through the databases of numerous U.S. government agencies. Many who start the process do not finish it. After all, less than 1% of refugees ultimately resettle through humanitarian programs.
Another claim is that refugees who come to the U.S. are a drain on the economy. Those who make it through the admissions gauntlet take loans from the U.S. government to pay for their flights. Upon arrival, they receive less than a year of financial support before they are expected to be financially independent. They work in warehouses, factories and meatpacking plants. They clean hotel rooms, drive trucks and work as home health aids. A study by the Wilson Center found that between 2005 and 2019 refugees and asylees contributed almost $124 billion more to the U.S. economy than they received.
Prior to the election of Trump in 2016, every administration embraced the policy of responding to crises around the world — many of which the U.S. was implicated in starting or sustaining — through refugee resettlement. During the Cold War, taking refugees from the Soviet Union and other communist countries bolstered U.S. interests — a flex aiming to show that West was best.
While the refugee admissions caps have waxed and waned, over the past 4½ decades highs and lows have not corresponded to the political party of the president in office. Admissions caps remained nearly identical between the George W. Bush and Obama administrations (hovering between 70,000 and 80,000 spots annually). And, under George H.W. Bush, the caps reached some of their highest levels, with a peak of 142,000 allowed in 1992 (and 132,531 actual arrivals that year). Most of those people came from the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Laos or Cuba.
In more recent years, admissions have reflected contemporary geopolitical realities and the legacies of more recent U.S. foreign policy: Refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan have constituted significant numbers, including many imperiled by their work helping the U.S. military. Other major sources of refugees to the U.S. have included the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Myanmar and Ukraine.
Along with suspending refugee admissions, Trump’s executive order revoked a Biden initiative to prepare for growing numbers of climate refugees. Climate-related catastrophes foment political insecurity and will make more places ecologically uninhabitable. Recalibrating refugee resettlement to prepare is essential. Because of climate change, there will be more forced displacement and more people living without citizenship rights.
For a template to handle this coming situation, we should remember 1980. Then, the U.S. Senate unanimously agreed that “it is the historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands.” Now, as then, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is a small but vital step in responding to the fact that people desperate to survive will not stop moving. For the U.S. to open the door to refugees is a small act of assistance in support of interests of the U.S. and beyond. The refugee program is a legacy of bipartisan collaboration and political imagination that we need now more than ever.
Sophia Balakian, an anthropologist and scholar of forced migration at George Mason University, is the author of “Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship.”