What exactly is a refugee? Who defined the word, and who decides how many are let into the United States? The term “refugee” has been used frequently in numerous contexts (often incorrectly) to the point that that it has lost its original meaning; this alters our perception and creation of refugee policy. The words “refugee” and “migrant” are often used interchangeably; but, in reality, they have very different meanings. Migrants are individuals seeking opportunity that make a decision to move, while refugees are often displaced from their homes with little or no opportunity to prepare for uncertainties that lie ahead.
In 1951, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defined a refugee as “someone who is unable or willing to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Several years prior, Soviet Jews and Holocaust survivors sought refuge throughout the world after World War II and, as a result, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was enacted by the U.S. government. Although met with opposition from Congress, then-President Harry Truman stated that there was an urgency to act and that the state of this population was “a human problem, a world tragedy.” President Truman set a precedent for the allyship of the United States government and refugee populations in need. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Carter followed suit by passing legislation accepting Hungarian, Cuban, Cambodian, and Vietnamese populations from the 1950s to the 1980s. Since the 1980s, U.S. refugee policy has varied vastly as seen in Figure 1 provided by the Pew Research Center.
Figure 1: Number of refugees accepted by the United States over the years by region (Pew Research Center, 2017)
The role of the United States in areas of conflict is two-fold. While United States is one of the most generous donors of humanitarian aid to areas as conflict such as South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, having donated 7.4 billion dollars to the region since the 2012 fiscal year, the foreign policies enacted by the United States are contributing to crises themselves.
In 2014, The United States decision to aid the Saudi coalition as they decided to target the Houthi rebels backed by the Iranian government. While there are genuine global fears of the operations by the Iranian government, the Yemeni people have become victims of the proxy wars between countries. Since the war started, 3 million Yemeni citizens have been displaced, 60% of the population is food insecure, and 2 million Yemeni children are malnourished as cholera makes a comeback, a situation which has been labeled by the UNHCR as the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis” by leaders of UNICEF, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The UNHCR reported that by the end of 2016, 65.6 million displaced individuals were classified as refugees − a 10.3 million-person increase from the previous year. Contrary to popular belief that refugees seek to settle in wealthy countries for government provided resources, the vast majority of refugees reside in countries that border their home nation. Many countries to which refugees flee are developing countries themselves and may not be able to provide adequate support. The burden for providing asylum and services should not fall upon countries solely due to geographical convenience. Rather, the United States and the countries of the world should do their part to strive for the ideal of responsibility sharing. Instead of increasing the support for these populations, as a the United States has decreased the number of refugees accepted into the country from nearly 85,000 in 2016 to less than 20,000 in 2018, a number that is approaching 0 frighteningly fast under the direction of Stephen Miller, political adviser to President Donald Trump.
The decision of the number of refugees a country needs to be shifted from an arbitrary number decided by one leader to a systematic mathematical equation. The United States should look to the European Commission for inspiration on the matter.
Figure 2: Equation to determine how many refugees a country will accept (European Commission, 2015)
The equation may seem convoluted but the European Commission has decided that final number of refugees accepted by each country should be based on a few key characteristics and the rest of the equation weighs the characteristics differently. These characteristics include:
- The size of the total population of receiving country;
- The country’s total GDP;
- Average asylum applications to the country over 4 years; and,
- The country’s unemployment rate.
While some may argue that an equation dehumanizes a situation as dire as some of the conflicts we are witnessing on the global scale, it is still a system. A systematic way to arriving at a number is inherently better than 1) accepting no refugees, a path on which the current administration is heading and 2) varying the number of refugees based on political leaning.
Not only does the United States have a shared responsibility to refugees as a member of the UNHCR; it has an individual responsibility to the displaced individuals. A country that pursues policy “solutions” by supporting militaristic operations in areas of conflict should not have the privilege of accepting refugees based on the political leaning of the federal government that has the potential to change every few years.