President Trump’s executive order suspending entry to all
refugees is a grave rejection of America’s commitment to liberty and sanctuary for the oppressed.
How is a refugee
defined? The U.S. State Department offers this explanation: “A refugee is
someone who has fled from his or her home country and cannot return because he
or she has a well-founded fear of persecution based on religion, race,
nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.”
Do refugees have
legal status? Yes. There is a legal mechanism for making this judgment. By
definition, refugees are not “illegals.”
How many refugees did
the U.S. admit last year? In 2015, the last year for complete data, the
total was 69,933. Compare that to the last year of President Bush’s
administration: The total in 2008 was 60,091. Since 1975, the U.S. has admitted
3,252,493 refugees.
Is a refugee a
citizen? No. There is a different legal process to adjust status to “citizen.”
Can a refugee vote?
No.
Where do refugees come from? All over—not just Syria. In the
1990s, the U.S. admitted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the
former-Soviet Union and Southeast Asia. With the implosion of Yugoslavia, the
U.S. also admitted tens of thousands of refugees the Balkans— primarily Serbs,
from Croatia and Bosnia who fled the genocide by the Croatian army. The refugee
population shifted around 2000, when Africans fled various ongoing conflicts.
What does this change in policy mean? It means that our
national identity has fundamentally changed from being a beacon of hope to the
oppressed to an inward-looking, fearful nation.
What we seem to fear, at the
root of all this, is “otherness”—the refugee ban will apply far beyond the
Syrian conflict, far beyond ISIS, and cover everyone (except Christians who are
fleeing persecution— a group that certainly should be granted asylum, with
others).
For statistics, see https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/prm/releases/statistics/251288.htm
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