POINTS OF REFERENCE

rEFUGEE rESETTLEMENT

by APM RESEARCH LAB STAFF | April 14, 2020

Signed by President Trump in September 2019, Executive Order 13888 spurred county-level votes throughout the country on the issue of accepting refugees for local resettlement.

The President claims the order gives state and local government more say in the process of refugee resettlement. Many Americans agree with that stance: Our December 2019 national survey found just under half of Americans feel that either the state or local government should decide where refugees are resettled—not the federal government.

Critics, however, argue that the order will dismantle the national infrastructure—decades in the making—established to assist refugees beginning their lives in the U.S. A federal judge in Maryland has halted the order’s implementation for now—by granting a preliminary injunction in the lawsuit brought by several nongovernmental resettlement agencies.

Regardless of your stance on the order, the Trump administration is pursuing a dramatic departure from historical precedent; he has already lowered the refugee admissions ceiling to historic lows—30,000 in 2019 and 18,000 in 2020 (see graph for the historical trend in refugee admissions). At the Research Lab we aim to place this major policy shift into context.

A refugee is someone forced to flee their country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted—due to their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

This official definition was first established in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and amended in the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which made the definition more inclusive by amending the earlier treaty to be “geographically and politically neutral.”

Are refugees and asylees the same? Not quite.

Like refugees, asylees flee their home country owing to persecution or a fear of persecution. They differ, however, on when and where they receive “refugee” status. Refugees receive that official designation prior to arriving in their host country. Asylees ask for asylum as a refugee after arriving in a host country, at the border, or port of entry. Importantly, the number of asylees allowed into the U.S. differs from the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the country each year.

Refugees, by definition, are forced to flee, but are nations obligated to respond?

The U.N. Refugee Convention and Protocol (“the Protocol”) are foundational to contemporary international law. In addition to defining a refugee, they establish the principle of non-refoulement. That means host countries have an obligation not to forcibly return a refugee to their home country where they would be subject to persecution and violence.

The U.S. signed the Protocol in 1968. A little over a decade later, the Protocol’s “refugee” definition was incorporated into U.S. law through the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act.

Prior to 1980, the U.S. Government assisted refugees on an ad hoc basis, which meant responding to specific crisis situations, such as the wave of Southeast Asian refugees at the end of the Vietnam War. The Refugee Act established a standard procedure for granting refugee status independent of a specific event. The landmark 1980 Act also created the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health & Human Services to oversee this work.

Scroll through the timeline below to see significant treaties, legislation, and Executive Orders pertaining to U.S. efforts towards refugee resettlement.

Would it surprise you to learn that it takes a person, on average, two years to acquire refugee status and arrive in the U.S. from when they first apply to resettle in the U.S. as a refugee?

Our national conversation on refugee admission and resettlement tends to focus largely on the moment of arrival.

This tendency, however, obscures the lengthy process that precedes it. And even a renewed attention to formal resettlement procedures does not account for the (often) multi-year stay in a refugee camp prior to resettlement.

Since 1980, the U.S. has created a robust apparatus to facilitate the resettlement of refugees. The process requires coordination among the United Nations, the federal government (including the Departments of State, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security), state and local governments, and nine voluntary agencies (VOLAGs): Church World Service, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration and Refugee Services, and World Relief. Many fear that it is precisely this robust apparatus that President Trump’s executive order threatens to undermine.

When Gov. Gregg Abbott of Texas declared at the beginning of this year that his state would no longer accept refugees, he said that Texas “has carried more than its share” of the responsibility for refugee resettlement.

During federal fiscal years 2015-2019, two Texas cities were among the top five cities that accepted the most refugees: Houston (which resettled an average of 1,295 refugees each year) and Dallas (1,138 refugees per year, on average). Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin are also the first destinations for more than 407 refugees per year. The top 5 cities for refugee resettlement based on annual averages between 2015 and 2019 are:

1. Atlanta, Georgia (1,359 refugees resettled per year, on average)

2. Houston, Texas (1,295)

3. San Diego, California (1,251)

4. Dallas, Texas (1,138)

5. Buffalo, New York (1,035)

When you examine cities, however, in per capita terms—the number of refugees arriving per 10,000 residents living in that community—a more complex picture emerges. In the case of the major Texas cities noted above, they all fall in the bottom quarter of the top 100 cities for resettlement (ranked from highest to lowest, per capita).

The top 5 cities based on highest number of refugees resettled, per 10,000 city residents, are:

1. Clarkston, Georgia (171 refugees)

2. Lancaster, Pennsylvania (59 refugees)

3. Bowling Green, Kentucky (56 refugees)

4. West Springfield, Massachusetts (56 refugees)

5. Syracuse, New York (50 refugees)

Absorbing more than 2.9 times more refugees than even the second highest city, Clarkston, Georgia stands above all cities for its level commitment to refugee resettlement. Read a profile of Clarkson, nicknamed “Ellis Island of the South” from our partners at America Amplified.

The interactive map below shows the top 100 cities for resettling refugees, per capita (among cities resettling a minimum of 100 or more refugees per year).

Why might smaller cities request and welcome refugee resettlement?

For smaller cities facing a stagnating or declining population, an influx of refugees can provide a jolt of energy to the local economy by filling open positions in established industries and through entrepreneurial enterprises.

The United States typically resettles refugees from more than 60 countries annually. However, these five countries accounted for two-thirds of all refugees admitted to the U.S. in the past five years.

1. Democratic Republic of Congo: Nearly 55,000 refugees in five years, an average of 10,900 each year.

2. Myanmar (Burma): More than 44,000 refugees in five years, an average of 8,900 each year.

3. Iraq: More than 30,000 refugees in five years, an average of 6,000 each year.

4. Somalia: Nearly 25,000 refugees in five years, an average of 4,900 each year.

5. Syria: Nearly 21,500 refugees in five years, an average of 4,300 each year.

Beyond these countries, the U.S. has provided safe haven to an annual average of 1,000 or more refugees in the past half-decade from five additional counties: Bhutan (about 3,500 refugees per year), Ukraine (3,000), Iran (1,900), Eritrea (1,700) and Afghanistan (1,400).

Click the maps below to find out more about the conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria.

A comprehensive July 2017 report prepared by (non-elected) researchers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) found that resettling refugees benefits the U.S. economy on the whole.

The report concluded that refugees generated a net of $63 billion more in government revenues than the cost of serving them, over the 10-year period of 2005-2014.

The researchers estimated that refugees collectively paid $269.1 billion in federal, state, and local taxes—which more than offset the cost of providing public services (such as Medicaid, public education, SNAP food benefits) to them. The Trump Administration rejected the report, according to reporting by the New York Times, which obtained a copy via a Freedom of Information Act request although it was never published by HHS.

A subsequent brief that was released by HHS found that, in an average year over the 10-year period, per-capita refugee costs for major HHS programs were estimated at $3,300. This is higher than the average American cost of $2,500 for HHS programs, as refugees are more likely to benefit from services in their initial years in the United States.

However, this brief did not consider offsetting revenues—the collective taxes paid by refugees—which the initial report found exceeded the costs refugees incurred, by more than $60 billion.

Broadening the scope to refugees’ non-refugee children and spouses, the original report findings also indicated a net economic benefit at the federal level (+ $52.8B), but at the state and local level, costs exceeded benefits (-$35.9B). This may indicate a need to redistribute federal funding to the places where refugee costs are being more directly incurred. The state and local expenditures for U.S.-born children of refugees was largely due to K-12 education costs. Importantly, the longer HHS report did not estimate the lifetime contributions and costs of refugees, nor their U.S.-born children, which generally have more positive labor force outcomes than first-generation immigrants.

This net economic benefit of refugees was corroborated by a 2017 report issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which concluded that “refugees pay $21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits over their first 20 years in the U.S.”

A 2017 report by the New American Economy found that, during their first five years in the U.S., refugees had a median income of about $22,000—but for those who had been resettled 25 or more years, median income was estimated at $67,000—higher than the median income of all U.S. households.

Another paper published in the winter 2020 Journal of Economic Perspectives examined economic integration of refugees in high-income countries, as measured by employment and wages, compared to other immigrants. It found that, in the United States, “refugees appear to have caught up to other immigrants after just two years and to natives by ten years after migration.”

Amidst travel restrictions and other government responses to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of March 17, 2020, temporarily suspended refugee resettlement departures—the actual travel of a refugee from their initial country of asylum to the country where they will be resettled. In addition to travel disruptions, the UNHCR cited concerns that refugees would be placed at a higher risk of contracting and transmitting the virus if they continued to travel as reasons behind their decision.

The U.S. continued to accept refugees for resettlement until the UNHCR suspended resettlement departures—according to data from the Refugee Processing Center, the U.S. admitted 1,584 refugees in February and 1,110 refugees in March. However, the U.S. introduced new travel restrictions on March 20th that allow border patrol agents to block asylum seekers from entering the country on the grounds of slowing the spread of COVID-19, an action prohibited by international law.

Officials from the UNHCR stress that refugees living in refugee camps are particularly vulnerable to outbreaks of COVID-19 due to the high population density and poorer medical infrastructure of those camps. Experiences from past epidemics, such as Ebola, are informing their current preparations for the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also affected the reunification of refugee families, causing those who were slated to join resettled family members to remain in refugee camps for the foreseeable future. Additionally, recently resettled refugees may face more difficulty accessing services and receiving volunteer assistance due to stay-at-home orders, and they may face greater challenges in finding employment during an economic downturn. Finally, many are concerned that the COVID-19 pandemic will prompt an increase in anti-refugee sentiment due to an unfounded fear that they are carriers of the virus, as we have unfortunately seen with the rise in attacks on Asian Americans.

Do you have more questions about refugee resettlement? We’d love to hear from you!

…or email us at info@apmresearchlab.org