Refugee Slowdown

By: Rui Kaneya After four years of worry and grief, Fatima Shahara Pakrawan was finally on the phone with her brother, who’d been separated from her while fleeing from the Taliban—she’d found him alive, at last.

“I was crying on the phone, telling him, ‘Get here, hurry,’” recounted the Afghani refugee, 12, as she described her jubilant call to Pakistan, where her brother temporarily resides.

But, since then, another year has passed. And Pakrawan, in her family’s modest Northwest Side apartment, still waits.

Pakrawan’s brother is among thousands of refugees stranded overseas during a dramatic slowdown in the U.S. refugee program. Last year, in a world with some 14 million refugees, the United States admitted 27,000, the lowest number in more than 20 years. About 14,500 refugees have arrived so far in this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, raising doubts about whether a goal of 50,000 for the year will be met.

The slowdown is visible not only in distant refugee camps and “hot spots” torn by strife around the world, but also in Chicago. Most local resettlement agencies, which receive government funds on a per-refugee basis, have been forced to cut back their programs to cover huge shortfalls.

“It had a ripple effect on programs that serve refugees who are already here,” said Dori Dinsmore, executive director of World Relief-Chicago, one of the area’s largest resettlement agencies. “Because there are fewer new arrivals coming in, we get less money to provide English classes, job training and mental health services, even though people here [still] need those services.”

At its peak, in 1997, Dinsmore’s agency helped resettle nearly 1,300 refugees, but assisted only 105 last year. Similarly, its budget has plunged—from $3.4 million in 2001 to $1.4 million this year—forcing Dinsmore to lay off more than half of her 88-member staff, many of whom are former refugees themselves. “It has been a very, very painful contraction process,” she said.

The drop in refugees is due in part to security measures adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Refugees—and others who want to visit the United States—are subject to a rigorous security review conducted by the FBI, CIA and U.S. State Department. Known as the Security Advisory Opinion, the process is already overwhelmed by applicants for tourist, student and immigrant visas.

But anti-terrorism clearances aren’t the only reason for the slowdown. The U.S. refugee program is in the midst of changing its focus, from large groups in a few locations—such as Vietnam and the Soviet Union—to individuals from dozens of countries. At some sites, such as in Somalia, security threats and civil strife have also disrupted U.S. officials’ plans to interview refugee applicants. And the program suffered a further setback when U.S. officials discovered widespread fraud by refugees falsely claiming to be close relatives of U.S. residents, prompting added review of these cases.

But officials say they remain committed to the refugee program. “These are temporary setbacks to the program that is going to be bigger and better in the future,” said Kelly Ryan, deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. In an effort to clear the processing backlog, a “refugee corps” of officers will soon be devoting all its time to review refugee cases, she said.

Advocates, however, fear that long-term damage has already been done. “When the United States starts taking in more refugees again some years down the road, the network of resettlement agencies might not be there to support them anymore,” said Greg Wangerin, executive director of the Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Ministries in Chicago. “That would be a real shame.”

Others say the scale-back of the resettlement program, temporary or not, might be sending the wrong signal to other nations. “The United States has exercised a singular leadership role in the refugee program since 1975, and the world community looks to us,” said Edwin B. Silverman, chief of the Bureau of Refugee and Immigrant Services at the Illinois Department of Human Services. “But, if we are to back away, why would the rest of the world participate?”