(NewsNation) — More refugees arrived in the United States in the first eight months of fiscal year 2023 than in any year since 2017, according to data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI).
It’s a sign the nation’s Refugee Resettlement Program has rebounded following COVID-19 and historic restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump.
Still, admissions are nowhere near the capacity President Joe Biden set when he took office and as the nation prepares for another presidential election, the continued growth of refugees in the U.S. isn’t guaranteed, MPI Senior Policy Analyst Julia Gelatt said.
“Presidents have a lot of control in setting the refugee ceiling — that is, the goal of how many refugees we intend to resettle in the U.S. every year…” Gelatt said. “We may continue to see big swings in the level of Refugee Resettlement with different presidential administrations.”
In fiscal year 2021, the Trump administration reduced the annual resettlement cap to a historic low of 15,000. Biden raised that cap to 62,500 for the remainder of that year and again expanded it to 125,000 for the following two years.
The first year after raising the cap, the number of admissions increased from 11,400 in fiscal year 2021 to 25,500 in 2022 and 31,800 so far in 2023.
The rate of admissions is still far below record numbers set in the 1990s. The U.S. allowed 142,000 people in response to the Balkan wars in 1993, according to MPI.
The recent growth doesn’t come as a surprise to Erin Corcoran, a professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The climbing number of refugees underscores differences between the Trump and Biden administrations, she said.
“I think there’s been a philosophical change in this presidential administration,” Corcoran said. “Who are the kind of people we’re going to try to protect?”
The majority of admitted refugees during this fiscal year, 43%, have been from Africa. Another 28% came from the Middle East and South Asia. Smaller shares of refugees came from East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia, according to MPI.
The process of refugee resettlement is different from asylum-seeking.
People seeking asylum enter the U.S. from another country and ask for refugee protection. Their asylee status isn’t guaranteed and could take years to establish.
Refugee Resettlement, on the other hand, is a humanitarian program that entails vetting people abroad to see if they meet the refugee criteria and granting them legal refugee status before they enter the U.S.
Once they arrive, a federally funded network of support will help them attain housing, food, work and medical attention, among other services, Gelatt said.
After one year in the U.S., refugees must apply for a green card to adjust their status to that of a lawful permanent resident.
The amount of preparation that must happen before a refugee’s entry into the U.S. is one of the reasons the nation hasn’t reached its cap yet, Gelatt said.
“Our refugee resettlement process takes a long time,” she said. “It takes years of vetting and screening of potential refugees, so it takes time to build back up the numbers.”
At the same time, the local resettlement network hasn’t been ready to receive such high numbers of refugees, especially with Ukrainians and Afghanis also coming outside of the formal refugee process and accessing those resources.
For those reasons, it’s been “a slow rebuilding” of capacity and of the pipeline of refugees coming to the U.S., Gelatt said.
“We’re not yet at that monthly level that would get there, but I think that the monthly numbers will continue to increase,” Gelatt said. “Right now, we’re in the realm of where things were in 2016.”
How many refugees the U.S. accepts each year changes under each administration and tends to be the result of weighing humanitarian duties against domestic challenges.
“There are a lot of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet and to find housing,” Gelatt said.
“And there are always important questions about how we should use our national resources and whether that should be to help people here or to help people who are struggling around the world.”
Proponents for higher refugee ceilings, however, say the United States has joined conventions that make them part of a global effort to offer safety to refugees.
“Our refugee resettlement program, while it’s great, does not help the lion’s share of the people who are fleeing political violence, sexual violence, climate displacement,” Corcoran said. “It’s a tiny, minuscule program… It only helps a very tiny, few individuals who have been forcibly displaced worldwide.”
About 108.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced at the end of 2022 as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events “seriously disturbing public order,” according to the UN Refugee Agency.