U.S. refugee resettlement resurgence could be short-lived

During the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the United States resettled just over 100,000 refugees—the highest number in 30 years. Though the Biden administration fell short of filling the 125,000 available slots for refugees, the country welcomed 67 percent more than the 60,014 resettled the year before. President Joe Biden renewed the 125,000 cap for next year.

“It’s a huge milestone,” said Aerlande Wontamo, the senior vice president of U.S. programs at World Relief. The organization is one of the United States’ 10 major resettlement agencies. The nonprofit groups receive government funding to help refugees find housing and integrate into society.

Resettlement leaders say last year’s three-decade high reflects the hard work of rebuilding a resettlement infrastructure that was nearly incapacitated under former President Donald Trump and COVID-19 restrictions. They believe next year’s 125,000 target is a realistic goal. Now they’re bracing for election year changes and what that might mean for the refugee pipeline.

President Jimmy Carter established the current, standardized refugee resettlement system when he signed the Refugee Act of 1980 into law. Each year, the White House consults with Congress about potential foreign policy implications before setting the annual refugee ceiling, called the Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions.

Similar to individuals applying for asylum, potential refugees must be able to prove that they have a well-founded fear of targeted persecution based on their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership in a social group. And refugees, like individuals granted asylum, can apply for permanent residency one year after they arrive.

But the system also differs in key ways. Unlike asylum-seekers, who ask for protection and begin the application process once they reach U.S. soil, refugees complete their vetting and are already approved for asylum before they ever step foot in the United States. The U.S. Department of State works with the United Nations’ refugee agency to identify and screen candidates, who have usually already fled their home and are living in a third country.

Corey Jackson pastors Trinity Park Church in Cary, N.C., which has partnered with World Relief for the past 10 years to help resettle refugees. Jackson noted that many people confuse refugees with asylum-seekers. “Most Americans just hear immigration and they think southern border,” he said. “They don’t understand that refugees and asylum-seekers are going through a completely different process.”

Upon arrival, refugees are immediately eligible to work and apply for Social Security, Medicaid, and food stamps. Asylum-seekers, in contrast, must wait six months after they have submitted their application before they are eligible for employment. Due to mounting backlogs, many asylum-seekers wait up to seven years for a judge to adjudicate their case.

Many of the individuals resettled through the refugee pipeline are Christians fleeing persecution in their home countries, said Matthew Soerens, World Relief’s vice president of advocacy and policy. A report compiled by World Relief and Open Doors U.S. shows the United States admitted 29,493 Christian refugees from the 50 countries that the Open Doors 2024 World Watch List designated as places where Christians are most at risk. That’s the most Christians resettled from these countries since 2016.

Historically, the refugee resettlement system has enjoyed bipartisan support. Between 1980 and 2016, the United States’ refugee ceiling ranged from 67,000 to just over 231,000. “We resettled essentially as many refugees under Republican administrations as Democratic ones,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

But Trump lowered the refugee ceiling from 85,000 to 50,000 after he took office in 2017 amid concerns that the country was unable to properly vet that many refugees and should instead focus on working through backlogs in immigration courts. The former president set the cap at 30,000 in 2019 and further slashed the target ceiling to 18,000 in 2020. That year, agencies only resettled 11,814 refugees.

Though President Joe Biden pledged to rebuild the system, raising the ceiling to 62,500 in 2021, regrowth started out sluggish, and the United States only admitted 11,411 refugees that year. Biden hiked the cap to 125,000 in 2022, but the United States only admitted 20 percent of the ambitious target due to ongoing logistical challenges. The meager numbers of the previous few years forced resettlement agencies to close offices and cut staff.

And overseas processing centers were still reeling from pandemic restrictions and multiple displacement crises, including the Taliban’s Afghanistan takeover and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration bypassed the resettlement system to evacuate 76,000 Afghans and more than 170,000 Ukrainians using special immigrant visas or temporary humanitarian parole programs.

But last year’s totals indicate the system has bounced back, said Vignarajah. Last year, Global Refuge resettled more than 14,000 refugees—3,000 more refugees than the total number of refugees Biden admitted into the country during fiscal year 2021. The organization operates 59 resettlement sites across 32 states, according to spokesperson Timothy Young.

With those numbers in mind, Vignarajah believes Biden’s 125,000 cap for next year isn’t a pipe dream. “The system really has been rebuilt,” she said.

Still, Vignarajah and other resettlement leaders recognize this could change rapidly. Trump said he would suspend refugee resettlement if were reelected in November. And in an August interview with Face the Nation, vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance claimed many of the refugees arriving through the resettlement pipeline are not properly vetted. Vignarajah said she fully expects a second Trump administration “would mean a drastic decrease and decimation of the refugee resettlement program.”

WORLD reached out to the Trump campaign about the former president’s position on suspending refugee resettlement. In an emailed statement, the campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that “the Harris-Biden administration has unconscionably abused our refugee and asylum systems, and turned them into programs to import mass numbers of unvetted migrants from the most dangerous countries on earth.” She added that Trump, if elected, will “restore effective immigration policies and implement brand-new crackdowns.”

While Vice President Kamala Harris has recently taken a tougher tone toward immigration police and pledged to extend Biden’s current asylum restrictions, she has not indicated whether she would drastically change refugee admissions. But regardless of who wins the White House, Wontamo with World Relief said the organization is gearing up for changes.

“I think there is no doubt that offices will have to pivot,” Wontamo said. “Outside of refugees, there are still lots of immigrants in our communities that we can help. So it is about thinking through, ‘how do we ensure that we’re able to still respond to the needs of the community and individuals in our communities?’” World Relief operates 16 offices across 11 states.

Each year, representatives from the nations’ 10 resettlement agencies meet with the State Department to match the particular needs of each incoming refugee with the agency best suited to take their case. The big 10 work with a network of over 350 local organizations in different parts of the country. “The first priority is always, how can we ensure that the individuals arriving are reunified with their family?” Wontamo said.

According to Global Refuge, last year’s top countries of origin included the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, and Myanmar, also known as Burma. Vignarajah noted the administration resettled more than 23,000 refugees from Central and South America, a record number for the Western Hemisphere. The Biden administration established a network of safe mobility offices to screen prospective refugees in an effort to direct potential immigrants to legal pathways like the refugee resettlement process.

Still, compared with the number of Central and South Americans seeking asylum, 23,000 is merely a drop in the bucket. Wide-scale migration throughout the region fueled record-breaking illegal crossings last year that have only recently eased up. Officials have encountered 6.3 million migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally since Biden took office, and at least 2.4 million were allowed into the country and are pursuing asylum claims in immigration court.

In January 2023, the Biden administration announced a new refugee resettlement pathway called the Welcome Corps, a program that permits five or more U.S. citizens or permanent residents to form a private sponsorship group and together support a refugee family during their first 90 days in the United States. The sponsors find affordable housing and help enroll the children in school, and must raise an amount of money equivalent to what the State Department provides to the major resettlement agencies: $2,425 of in-kind or cash support per refugee.

“[The Welcome Corps] really just opens up the ability for your average citizen to be able to play a part in this process,” said Wontamo.

Refugees still go through the same amount of vetting before they arrive in the United States, and the sponsors work closely with resettlement agencies. Out of the 8,894 refugees World Relief resettled last year—the highest number in the last decade—the organization helped facilitate 26 private sponsorship groups who together aided 97 individuals, Wontamo said. A State Department spokesperson told WORLD over email that, in total, approximately 1,800 of the 100,034 refugees admitted were resettled by private sponsors in the United States through the Welcome Corps.

“The reality is it is a new program, and the startup really does take quite a bit of time,” Wontamo noted. “We’re working heavily on recruitment of the sponsorship groups.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from the Trump campaign.