Refugee Resettlement Must Remain a Program for Refugees, Not a Replacement for Asylum: A Response to Jodi Ziesemer
Last week, Jodi Ziesemer of Catholic Charities in the US wrote an op-ed in the Guardian suggesting that the resettlement places left unused by the Trump administration could go to asylum-seekers at the US border with Mexico. She presents resettlement of asylum-seekers as an alternative to detention. It sounds like a good idea. I am here to tell you that it is not.
Ziesemer is right that local non-profits like Catholic Charities have lost most of their resettlement candidates over the past year due to the policies of the Trump administration. Many non-profits like Catholic Charities are being forced to shut down their resettlement programs because so few refugees are coming, despite having the funds to help more people. Meanwhile, private companies are now being paid to wearhouse asylum-seekers and migrants all over the US at enormous cost.
But her article totally ignores the purpose of the resettlement program. You see, the refugees at our southern border are only a tiny fraction of the global refugee crisis, a crisis the resettlement program was designed to help alleviate. Most refugees are housed in poor countries, far from the US and Europe. Ziesemer does not mention Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya in her article, but she should have.
While the suffering of migrant families in the United States has been well-documented in the US press, the suffering of refugees in giant refugee camps in far away countries, often housed for decades with no hope of a solution, is rarely mentioned. Resettlement offers one of the only ways out of camps like Dadaab for millions of families who live day in and day out in tents, surviving of World Food Program rations, working under the table and subject to the whims of local police, without hope of ever living a normal life.
But perhaps you think we have more of a duty towards asylum-seekers on our borders than refugees in far away countries. What do these giant, open-air prisons for refugees have to do with the United States? Why, they are paid for by our tax dollars! While the detention of asylum-seekers at our southern border is more visible, the biggest detention of refugees in the history of the world is paid for by our tax dollars but takes place well out of our sight, in far away camps.
We pay less than 1% of less than 1% of our annual GDP warehousing millions of people in giant prisons around the world. Meanwhile, countries like Kenya struggle to keep their refugee populations contained within these camps, paid for by our spare change, and out of the migration pipelines that carry people across oceans and up through Mexico to our border. The business of smuggling migrants to the US earns billions of dollars for criminal gangs and mafia organizations each year. There is a direct link between far away refugee camps and the crisis on our southern border. Both are part of the same dismal system.
Resettlement places to the US were already pathetically limited to a lucky few even before Trump came along. Each year, UNHCR would hopefully refer cases of refugees with extreme needs to the big, rich donor countries, like a market woman trying to sell a passing tourist a fish. Meanwhile, State Department bureaucrats meet with UNHCR each year to pluck certain groups of refugees from the “right” kind of demographic and religious backgrounds. Unlike what many people claim, their is no line, no cue, for resettlement. The system is mostly ad hoc and entirely top-down. Policy, such as it is, is made at a bunch of meetings between functionaries, where refugees are traded in bunches of numbers forming columns on spreadsheets. No refugees are present at these meetings, of course. This year, the United States would like 10,000 Christians from Burma, please.
So while I am sympathetic to Ms. Ziesemer’s idea, I still hope that the resettlement program can be saved. I don’t want it to turn into a domestic asylum program just yet. People in camps need hope, and the idea that one day a donor mission from the US might decide to close a particular refugee camp and whisk all the families away to America is all the hope a lot of people living in camps have left.
