The Biden administration plans to maintain refugee admissions to the United States at 125,000, according to a draft report obtained by CNN, “and admit a larger share of refugees from the Western Hemisphere amid unprecedented movement in the region,” reports CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez.

Alvarez reported that the State Department has proposed admitting between 35,000 to 50,000 refugees from Latin America/the Caribbean in fiscal year 2024, according to the draft report. “That’s up from 15,000 in fiscal year 2023, though only around 5,500 refugees from that region have been resettled in the US as of August 31, according to federal data,” writes Alvarez in her story, which was posted on CNN’s website.

More than seven million refugee children are out of school globally, according to United Nations data.

“With the displaced population rising every year, there is a significant and increasing proportion of the world’s children who are missing out on their education,” said Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday that by the end of 2022, the total number of school-aged refugees globally jumped nearly 50 per cent from 10 million in 2021 to 14.8 million, driven mostly by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a new Education Policy Brief  — Education on Hold —  UNHCR reported that only around half of Ukrainian refugee children were enrolled in schools in host countries, for the 2022-2023 academic year.

The factors contributing to low enrollment rates include administrative, legal and language barriers and a lack of information on available education options. 

While the media’s focus these days is on the influx of immigrants in New York City, a recent New York Times article points out that there are plenty of business owners who would love to be able to hire these new arrivals to New York State.

The problem? Federal government policy stands in the way.

“Across the state, many large and small employers have expressed an overwhelming willingness to hire recent asylum seekers; migrants are even more eager to work. But bringing the two sides together is far harder than it might seem,” write Jesse McKinley and Luis Ferre-Sadurni in the New York Times article.

They note that migrants are prohibited by federal policy from securing work permits until 180 days after an asylum application is filed, “a process that has resulted in monthslong backlogs and has frustrated both business and elected leaders, especially in upstate New York, where farms and small rural towns mix with a series of often hard-strapped Erie Canal cities.”

In related news, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul Gov. Kathy Hochul recently “called on the federal government to provide New York State relief in the midst of the migrant crisis by speeding work authorizations for asylum-seekers arriving in regions that include Buffalo,” reports Harold McNeil in the Buffalo News.

Five months after Canada reached a deal in 2022 to stanch the flow of asylum seekers entering from the U.S., “the overall number of people filing refugee claims in Canada has risen instead of falling,” Reuters reported.

“Many now come by air, while others sneak across the border and hide until they can apply for asylum without fear of being sent back, people working with migrants told Reuters.”

“The numbers show how hard it is for countries to shut the door on desperate people and the challenge unexpected numbers of asylum seekers can pose: In Toronto, hundreds slept on the streets this summer as they struggled to find beds,” wrote Wa Lone and Anna Paperny in their article.