In the wake of President Biden’s recent move to revise the United States’ annual refugee admissions cap to 62,500 for this fiscal year, towns, cities and states are preparing to help refugees who will soon arrive in the country.
“With the country opening to more refugees, the five-year-old Hyde Park Refugee Project is entering a new phase of its existence: a time of great expansion and a rapidly spreading web of partnerships,” reported Andrea Holliday, a contributing writer for New York’s Hyde Park Herald.
“Their new goal, in tune with the Biden administration, is to multiply the number of families who come directly to Hyde Park after escaping desperate situations overseas,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, two programs dedicated to resettling refugees in Idaho “are preparing for more people to call Idaho home,” reports KTVB’s Katija Stjepovic.
But raising the annual refugee resettlement cap “is just the first step in rebuilding a complex program that involves coordination among several U.S. government agencies, the United Nations refugee agency U.N.H.C.R. and nongovernmental organizations in the United States and abroad,” note Melanie Nezer and Leon Rodriguez in a recent New York Times opinion piece.
“This will take serious effort and resources. After all, the prior administration did all it could to dismantle the infrastructure that supported every step in the refugee resettlement process,” they wrote.
Nezer is the senior vice president for public affairs at HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides services to refugees and asylum seekers around the world. Rodriguez was the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2014 to 2017 and is a board member of HIAS.
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 