We're once again drastically cutting the number of refugees who can resettle in the U.S. while we concentrate on asylum cases, says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. We're concentrating on them, all right-turning some of those fleeing persecution away at the border and jailing others, for the perfectly legal act of claiming asylum.
"This year's refugee ceiling reflects the substantial increase in the number of individuals seeking asylum in our country, leading to a massive backlog of outstanding asylum cases and greater public expense," Pompeo said. "The daunting operational reality of addressing the over 800,000 individuals in pending asylum cases demands renewed focus and prioritization."
The policies you're so willing to defend may be good politics, but they put lives at risk.
As those involved in resettlement efforts have suggested, dismantling the whole infrastructure of that work may in the future limit our ability to welcome persecuted Christian refugees along with the Muslims we're encouraged to be so afraid of. And it vastly underestimates the generosity of the American people you not so long ago represented in Congress.
Only a week into his presidency, Donald Trump signed an executive order that cut the maximum number of global refugees the United States would resettle in that fiscal year from 110,000 to 50,000.
A year ago, the administration cut the cap further, to 45,000, but only brought in about 22,000 people, even amid the worst refugee crisis since World War II. Currently, a record 68 million people have been displaced by war and persecution. Two-thirds of the world's 25 million refugees come from South Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and Somalia.
Uganda, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon and Pakistan take in the most.
"This year's refugee ceiling," Pompeo said, "also reflects our commitment to protect the most vulnerable around the world while prioritizing the safety and well-being of the American people, as President Trump has directed. "
It's true that one Iraqi refugee, a suspected former ISIS fighter in his home country who had been under FBI investigation since 2016, was arrested in California this year. But the greater threat to our country than those Pompeo rightly calls the world's most vulnerable is our manufactured but mounting sense that we're so vulnerable we have to keep refugees out.