Vermont’s Republican governor is asking the State Department to at least triple the number of refugees expected to arrive in the current fiscal year, the Associated Press reported.

Gov. Phil Scott said in a letter to the State Department that Vermont is scheduled to receive 100 refugees this year and he would like to see at least three times that number next year, the story noted.

“Refugees are an integral part of our efforts to grow Vermont’s economy, which include a workforce development strategy to attract new workers and meet the demographic challenges faced by a declining population,” Scott wrote.

More than 715 refugees from around the world “who expected to start new lives in the United States have had their flights canceled in recent weeks because President Biden has postponed an overhaul of his predecessor’s sharp limits on new refugee admissions,” reports Miriam Jordan in the New York Times.

Jordan notes that in his first foreign policy speech last month, the president said he would lift the refugee ceiling to 125,000 in the 2021 fiscal year. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken notified Congress on Feb. 12 that the administration planned to allow up to 62,500 refugees to enter the country in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

“President Biden has talked the talk on refugees, but he refuses to walk the walk. Or, more specifically, sign some basic paperwork,” writes Catherine Rampell in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.

“If the refugee-ceiling paperwork delay is about avoiding more headlines alleging Biden’s softness on persecuted peoples, well, he already got those headlines — a month ago, when he announced the new policy. The public believes Biden has already lifted the refugee ceiling; only those desperate refugees who were recently unticketed know otherwise,” Rampell points out.

In a Fox 2 News story, the work of St. Louis-based Oasis International on behalf of refugees is profiled.

The story notes that every year 500 to 1000 refugees come to St. Louis from 35 different nations with the promise of starting a new life.

“St. Louis is a city of immigrants and refugees,” said Joanie Akers, who founded Oasis International with her husband.

In the wake of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election, local communities are preparing for an influx of refugees, with Biden’s promise to significantly raise the cap for refugees admitted in the country.

Over the past four years, the yearly cap for refugees allowed into the U.S. has been drastically cut under Trump. Biden has pledged to set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000, and seek to raise it over time.

“The thing with getting restarted is so many systems are dismantled,” Leslie Aizenman, director of refugee and immigrant services at Jewish Family and Community Services, one of two agencies in Pittsburgh that currently resettle refugees, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “A lot of us are not equipped to go big fast.”

While the Biden team hasn’t detailed its plans, “Ms. Aizenman has heard speculation from her agency’s national affiliate that there might be some increases later in 2021, with a higher ceiling in 2022,” reports Peter Smith.

Megan Meagher, refugee resettlement director for Catholic Social Services of Southern Nebraska, told Nebraska’s Lincoln Star-Journal that “The landscape of refugee resettlement, we assume it’s going to change pretty drastically” with a new presidential administration. 

In an announcement for the 40^th anniversary celebration of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), President-Elect Joe Biden “stated his intent to multiply the number of refugees accepted by the U.S. in 2021” (National Catholic Register, Nov. 13).

“The Biden-Harris administration will restore America’s historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere, in raising our annual refugee admission target to 125,000,” Biden said last week, the National Catholic Register reported.

Biden “chose the setting of one of the Catholic Church’s leading refugee support organizations’ events to state for the first time as president-elect that he will dramatically increase the target for refugee admissions to the United States, offering a stark contrast to the historic lows under President Donald Trump that were long protested by Catholic leaders,” reported the National Catholic Reporter.

“The United States has long stood as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the oppressed, a leader of resettling refugees in our humanitarian response,” Biden said in a prerecorded video that aired during the virtual event celebrating the 40^th anniversary of JRS, Religion News Service reported.

The video is available here.

In yet another stark policy difference between President Trump and Joe Biden, the Trump Administration has “slashed the number of refugees it will allow to resettle in the United States in the coming year, capping the number at 15,000, a record low in the history of the country’s modern refugee program” (Reuters, Oct. 28, 2020).

The level of 15,000 will be limited to refugees from specific categories of admissions, potentially leaving out more than 1.4 million of the world’s most vulnerable refugees still in need of resettlement, the International Refugee Committee said in an Oct. 28 news release. “This late announcement came a full month into the fiscal year, causing undue delays to thousands of vulnerable people left in harm’s way,” the IRC noted.

The administration also included a restriction on individuals from Somalia, Syria, or Yemen, requiring that individuals from these three countries “shall not be admitted as refugees” unless they meet specific humanitarian carve-outs, the IRC said.

Biden says he will restore the program to around 125,000 refugees a year should he be elected President of the United States.

President Trump’s “rollicking abuse of refugees and the answering jeers of his fans are a frank confession of moral rottenness,” writes George Packer in a new column for the Atlantic magazine. “His contempt for people who have given up everything to become Americans fully displays his fundamental unworthiness as a president and a human being,” Packer says of Trump.

Under Trump, notes Packer, the U.S. refugee program has almost collapsed. “Last year, the administration set a ceiling of just 18,000 refugees. It actually admitted 10,000. Several weeks ago, the administration announced that the ceiling for fiscal year 2021 will go down to 15,000.”

Becca Heller, the executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told Packer, “I think if Trump is reelected, it’s the end of the U.S. refugee program.”

In stark contrast to Trump’s hostility to refugees, Joe Biden has pledged to raise the ceiling of refugees admitted to the U.S. to 125,000 in his first year as president.

The Trump administration earlier this week said it intends to allow only 15,000 refugees to resettle in the United States in the 2021 fiscal year, “setting another record low in the history of the modern refugee program,” Reuters reported on Oct. 1.

The refugee cap was reduced to 18,000 last year, “but only roughly half that many refugees were let in as increased vetting and the coronavirus have slowed arrivals,” the news service noted.

The Trump administration “said it would cut its already rock-bottom refugee admissions still deeper into record territory for the upcoming year, as President Trump returned to his anti-immigrant themes in the closing month of his re-election campaign,” the New York Times reported.

Trump cut the cap to 50,000 in 2017 and then to 45,000 in 2018, 30,000 in 2019 and 18,000 last year, notes Claire Hansen in U.S. News and World Report.

Refugee groups decry proposal

A number of groups that place refugees were quick to criticize the proposal.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) “reacts with deep concern to the Trump administration’s report to Congress recommending a refugee admissions goal of 15,000 for fiscal year 2021, a further reduction from the all-time low of 18,000 set in the previous year, in the face of growing global need,” the IRC said in a statement.

“It is a sad moment when our country shows such weakness when it should be leading,” said HIAS President and CEO Mark Hetfield said. “The administration’s decision to set a record low number of refugees at a time of record high needs — and without even consulting with Congress, as required by law — shows how far we have fallen. Not only will refugees who have fled violence and persecution suffer, but so will our country, as refugees who become new Americans have contributed so much to this country.”

Biden proposes increase in refugee admissions

Joe Biden, the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, has committed to restoring the annual cap on refugees in the U.S. to 125,000 people.

Keren Blankfeld, who covers immigration and refugee issues for the New York Times, reports on a largely untold story about World War 2 — towards the end of the war, the U.S. invited 982 refugees to a converted military base in upstate New York.

They were the only refugees taken in by the United States during World War II, Blankfeld noted.

The military base was located in Oswego, N.Y.

“As the refugees settled in, some Oswegans regarded the camp with suspicion. Rumors circulated that the group was living in luxury,” writes Blankfeld.

“Interacting with the refugees, seeing their gaunt and frightened figures upon arrival and hearing their stories through the fence, many Oswegans had their eyes opened,” the story noted.

In late 1945, President Harry Truman “issued a directive requiring that existing immigration quotas be designated for war refugees. He specifically directed that Fort Ontario’s ‘guests’ be given visas.”

Early the next year, “groups of the Oswego refugees climbed onto school buses, drove to Niagara Falls and formally registered at the Canadian border. They then returned as official American immigrants, eventually dispersing to 20 states.”

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that immigrants act more as “job creators” than “job takers” and that non-U.S. born founders play outsized roles in U.S. high-growth entrepreneurship.

“People want to think of immigrants as coming into the economy and maybe not having very many skills and not having a positive impact on the economy,” Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University involved in the study, told Newsweek, which reported on the study.

He also said that immigrants “start lots of companies at a much higher rate [than U.S.-born counterparts], but those companies actually tend to grow quite a lot.”