Safe Haven in America? Thirty Years after the Refugee Act of 1980
BY DAVID W. HAINES
As Senator Edward Kennedy began hearings on the bill that would become the Refugee Act of 1980, he commented for the record that “I believe our national policy of welcome to the homeless has served our country and our traditions well. But we are here this morning to explore how we can do this job better.” The result of those hearings, the Refugee Act of 1980, formalized a system of refugee admissions and post-arrival assistance separate from the other immigration programs that are now largely in the Department of Homeland Security, The program is based on an allocation of roles among several federal agencies (especially the Departments of State and Health and Human Services), state and local governments, and a wide range of voluntary agencies. There is a system of annual consultations with the Congress on refugee admissions, and those admissions provide broad global representation in the origins of refugees and general adherence to international standards in the definition of who refugees are. This U.S. refugee program remains absolutely central to the international efforts at refugee resettlement, accounting for the great majority of formal refugee resettlement cases designated by the UNHCR (60,000 of 89,000 in 2008).
Despite its merits, however, this refugee program accounts for only a very small fraction of the number of immigrants legally admitted to the United States, roughly five percent over the last decade. There are many reasons for that small size, but one reason is that refugees are, by and large, different from Americans and often far more different from Americans than are other immigrants. Refugees are, following the theme of this issue of the Global Studies Review, a relatively unknown set of newcomers. The unknown represents potential uncertainty, and thus possible danger. There is no security in uncertainty. That is why, for example, the refugee program was shut down for four months after September 11, 2001 and why admissions for the next two years were more than cut in half (from 68,000 before 9/11 to 27,000 in 2002 and 28,000 in 2003). Only in 2009 did the number of annual admissions match that at the beginning of the decade.
The reasons why refugees are different are multiple. One reason is that refugees are often already different in their home countries: whether because of religion, race or ethnicity, social background, or political opinions. Refugees are rarely typical representatives of the countries from which they come. That is why they have to leave. Consider some recent examples. The most recent set of refugees from Somalia are hardly Somali in an ethnic sense; rather they are Bantu people trafficked north into Somalia as labor. The refugees coming from Myanmar (Burma) are not ethnic Burmese; rather they are hill tribes who have fled from a government dominated by ethnic Burmese who differ from them in culture, language, politics, and often religion. The Bhutanese refugees coming from Nepal are actually Nepalese in origin but, having migrated to Bhutan during colonial times, were not readily accepted when they fled back to Nepal after the outbreak of ethnic turmoil in Bhutan in 1990. These examples illustrate the complexity of refugee situations, but also suggest why Americans might feel uncertain about these new arrivals. After all, the Burmese refugees aren’t ethnically Burman, the Somalian refugees aren’t ethnically Somali, and the Bhutanese refugees aren’t Bhutanese.
Many other differences come from the disrupted nature of refugee lives, much less the frequent horrors of which they have been victims and witnesses. One consequence is that, unlike other immigrants, most refugees have limited opportunity for planning their migration. They must seize opportunities to flee on quick notice, must navigate complex geographical and political mazes, and must usually make such a sharp break with their home country that they cannot return. They thus tend to lack the social resources of kin and community on which most immigrants can rely, either by having those resources with them in the United States or at least being able to utilize them at a distance through visits and easy communication.
There are also economic consequences. Refugees, for example, often lack the three factors that a vast body of research indicates are crucial for finding work in America: English competence (and refugees sometimes lack literacy in any language); education (often limited and almost certainly interrupted for most refugees); and occupational skills (particularly a problem for refugees coming from agricultural backgrounds). So refugees are different not simply in a general cultural sense but also by often being rather poorly prepared to be new immigrants to America.
Refugees in America were not always so different. America was, after all, founded at least in part by refugees. So it would seem the idea of refuge—perhaps especially for freedom of religion—lies at the core of American consciousness. In that sense, the willingness of the contemporary U.S. refugee program to accept refugees of many different religions is quite encouragingly traditional—whether Buddhists from Southeast Asia, Muslims from Bosnia, Baha’is from Iran, or Hindus coming from camps in Nepal after fleeing from Bhutan. However, much of the early American attitude toward refugees was not so expansive. When the Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s, for example, they found little refuge in the American colonies. They were, after all, both French and Catholic. In more recent times, there was little support for displaced persons after the Second World War until it was established how many of them were Christian rather than Jewish.
It was always easier when refugees were not so very different, whether the issues were linguistic and religious, or simple socioeconomic characteristics. When the U.S. accepted some 37,000 Hungarian refugees in 1956 and 1957, for example, a classified CIA memo would note the “happy” fact that these refugees were young, well-educated, and with non-agricultural occupations. They were, of course, “freedom fighters” so they were acceptable on political grounds. But they also looked like very good regular immigrants as well. They were not so different after all.
The more broadly inclusive U.S. refugee program that emerged from those hearings chaired by Kennedy three decades ago was, in retrospect, a rather significant change in the relationship between America and refugees, above all in the willingness to accept people who would not necessarily be such “happy” cases of young, educated people well positioned to survive and prosper in the United States. Many refugees, of course, continue do very well in the United States but that is, in the context of the 1980 revisions, not the purpose of their admission. Indeed if the U.S. refugee program produced wonderful statistics about only cases of successful adaptation and refugee prosperity, it might well raise some suspicions about whether the program was truly responding to those in most need.
Overall, then, there are two key points to be made about the U.S. refugee program: first, it has some very meritorious features and, second, it is very small considering the overall size of U.S. immigration. With immigration reform once again coming into view, it is an opportune time to reconsider the relative importance and scale of refugee admissions in that larger immigration framework.
Since 2000, the number of refugee admissions has averaged about 50,000 per year. During that same period, overall legal immigration has averaged slightly over 1,000,000 per year. So refugee admissions have indeed been a very small part of overall immigration during this past decade. Three other numbers help put that general figure into clearer perspective. The first of those other numbers involves immigrants who are admitted because they have family connections in the United States. Since 2000, the number of family-related immigrants has averaged about 650,000 per year. That figure is high enough to permit the generalization that new Americans are largely people who are already connected to other Americans. That implies a certainty security. What else, after all, could provide such a certainty of new immigrants’ commitment to America? What else could provide such a certainty of knowing they will be able to survive and prosper in the United States? Unlike refugees from new places and uncertain backgrounds, these immigrants are already family.
The second crucial number involves the undocumented. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that since 2000 the annual net entry of undocumented immigrants has been about 390,000 per year—although the effects of the recession on the undocumented population are still in dispute. These non-legal migrants must be savvy enough to cross the U.S. border undetected and to navigate through America without legal status, learning to work, live, and often raise children. They too are often already family: of other undocumented people, of legally resident foreigners, or of U.S. citizens. The generalization here is that America seems to want to fill its immediate labor needs without extending legal status. That makes for a simpler business deal that can be revoked as needed—for example, when there is a recession.
The third crucial number involves asylees. During that same period since 2000, the number of new asylees has averaged nearly 30,000 per year (compared to the roughly 50,000 refugee admissions per year). These asylees are, in legal terms, people who had already arrived in the United States and were then ruled to have met the same fear of persecution standard that applies to refugees. The difference might seem a simple one: whether someone is approved as a refugee and then comes to America, or whether someone comes to America first and is then recognized as meeting the refugee standard. However, that simple difference implies a rather different journey to America. Asylum applicants have to travel clandestinely and often along transit routes that pose danger, require money, and often take very long periods of time. That puts a preference on people who have the personal and financial resources to make such a journey and, because of the dangers, tends to select for the young, the single, and the disproportionately male.
Those requirements for asylum seekers are, of course, almost exactly the same as for other parts of the undocumented population with which they intermingle. Asylum seekers must have the skills and resources to reach U.S. borders, to cross them without documentation, and then live in the shadows at least long enough to find people who can help them develop a viable legal claim for asylum. They thus provide some measure of familiarity: they are already here and they know how America works. In many ways, that is a good thing. However, the increasing number of asylees compared to refugees raises the question of whether, in the humanitarian aspects of immigration policy, America is choosing to passively let people enter the country who can already pass this kind of competency test, rather than proactively reaching out beyond its borders for those most in need, whether or not they have the economic, social, and cultural resources to reach America on their own.
Back to the Refugee Act of 1980. After Senator Kennedy opened the initial hearings with an evocation of refugees as “one of the oldest and most important themes in our Nation’s history,” Senator Strom Thurmond proposed a different standard that also “has served us well.” We should, he cautioned “weigh the cultural and demographic impact of the refugee problem” and “be guided by enlightened interest tempered with compassion.” Thirty years later, we seem to have something of each of these two positions: following Kennedy: a refugee program that reaches out to all; following Thurmond, a refugee program small enough that it is but a “tempering” of the self-interest that guides most American immigration policy, whether it is the economic self-interest of having cheap labor, the social and cultural self-interest of emphasizing family ties, or the cognitive self-interest of avoiding the uncertainties of refugees with their unknown (and often unknowable) experiences, and their unpredictable futures.
At the beginning of 2010, the forecast is not entirely bleak. The last years of the decade saw increased admissions and the most recent presidential determination on refugees indicates those higher numbers may well continue. The Obama Administration has also finally increased—after many years of complaints—the per capita grant given to voluntary agencies to help settle refugees. Yet still, just as the overall issue of refugees runs the danger of being lost in the broader concerns about immigration reform, the structure of resettlement at the local level also remains fragile. In early 2010, for example, the State of Iowa, having just celebrated its thirty-fifth year of acting in a dual capacity as a state government overseeing resettlement and as a de factor private sector agency providing resettlement services, decided to close down its refugee program. One of the major religious organizations resettling refugees in Iowa did likewise. The program was no longer financially tenable. Safe haven for refugees, it seems, remains in jeopardy both at the national level, where admission must be approved, and at the local level, where the process of resettlement actually takes place.
David W. Haines is Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University, an affiliate of the Center for Global Studies, and author of the forthcoming Safe Haven? A History of Refugees in America.
