Refugees International: Issues: Resettlement

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Resettlement

Thailand 2004 -2- Hmong Refugees at Wat Tham Krabok

Concerns

Resettlement is one of three durable solutions for refugees (the others are repatriation to the country of origin and local integration in the country of first asylum) and involves allowing refugees to resettle in a third country, usually an industrialized one with the resources to provide the requisite support to ease the transition to a new country.

The United States, which took as many as 200,000 refugees in the early 80s, now accepts about 50,000 refugees for resettlement each year, up from 28,000 in the two years immediately after September 11, but still less than the Bush Administration’s avowed goal of 70,000 annual admissions. The new UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has recently announced that UNHCR plans to devote greater resources to facilitating resettlement of refugees.

Resettlement can never be an option for more than a tiny minority of the world’s refugee population of 11.5 million. Nonetheless, resettlement has proven to be a boon for hundreds of thousands of refugees who have made new lives in countries such as the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway. The concern is that post 9/11 anxieties over terrorism and illegal migration are eroding the commitment to resettlement as an option for refugees, many of whom have been languishing in camps for a decade or more and who themselves are victims of terror and violence.

Refugees International advocates for continued U.S. commitment to resettlement at levels that do justice to the historic U.S. support for bringing refugees to this country. RI would like to see annual admissions return to 90,000, the level established by both the Bush and Clinton Administrations in the 1990s. Since personnel of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (BPRM) often argue that fewer promising resettlement populations are available in the post 9/11 world, RI also focuses on bringing particular groups of refugees to the attention of BPRM.

Accomplishments

Along with other non-governmental organizations, RI has successfully pressed the Administration to make an all-out push to increase resettlement numbers, resulting in an increase in admissions from 28,000 in 2003 to more than 50,000 in 2004. RI has also taken the lead in identifying specific refugee populations that have been accepted for resettlement in the U.S., notably Hmong from Wat Tham Prabok in Thailand, Montagnard highland people from Vietnam in Cambodia, and Burmese refugees in Thailand.

What You Can Do

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