The Hill (Op-Ed)
By Alex Nowrasteh
June 20, 2015
There
are about 60 million refugees worldwide today — more than at any time
since the end of World War II. Every day last year, 42,500 people became
refugees. The civil
war in Syria has added more to that total than any other conflict. June
20 is World Refugee Day and never before have so many fled oppression,
war and violence.
According
to the United Nations, a refugee is somebody who has fled his country
of citizenship and will not return because of a well-founded fear of
persecution for reasons
of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a
social group. Refugees have played an important role in American
history, but for most of that time, there was no legal distinction in
our laws between economic immigrants and refugees.
Prior
to 1921, refugees could show up at ports of entry and be admitted with
few exceptions. In that year, Congress passed its first law subjecting
immigrants to a numerical
quota. Three years later, Congress lowered the quotas and made them
favor immediate family members. Crucially, Congress made no provision
for refugees or asylum seekers, which had terrible results due to the
rise of Nazism, fascism and communism.
When
Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, many German Jews attempted to
leave. Through administrative finagling, about 127,000 of them were able
to come to the United
States by 1940. However, during those years, the quota for German
immigrants was under-filled by 110,000, meaning that at least that many
more Jews could have come here under the restrictive laws in place.
The
spectacle of the St. Louis, a German passenger ship full of Jewish
refugees, being turned away by the American government cemented the
image of America's disregard
for those fleeing Nazism. Many of them had affidavits of support from
Jewish-American aid associations and their American family, but they
were turned away. Most had no choice but to return to Nazi Germany.
American
diplomatic officials in Germany liberally granted tourist visas to
German Jews and the Franklin Roosevelt administration allowed them to
overstay. But those legal
changes were not enough. By June 1939, 309,782 nationals of the Greater
German Reich (including Austria and Czechoslovakia) had applied to come
to the U.S., but the quotas imposed a wait time longer than a decade.
World War II interrupted the immigration of those refugees, sealing their fates.
In
the 1930s, the United States admitted more Jewish-German refugees than
any other country, but it wasn't enough. The United States has a
founding myth based on settlers
fleeing oppression to settle in Massachusetts. The Pilgrims were
followed by the Huguenots, Christian religious dissenters from all over
Europe, the Irish and Germans fleeing the revolutions of 1848.
Prior
to the 20th century, the most intense emigration was of Jews escaping
Eastern Europe, beginning in about 1881. Although many came for economic
reasons, the scale
of their emigration was due to oppression and frequent pogroms. Annual
Jewish emigration from 1900 to 1913 was equal to about 2 percent of the
entire Jewish population in Eastern Europe and Russia. Congress should
have known about the perils faced by Jews
in Europe, but it did nothing to take account of them when closing
America's traditional open door.
After
World War II, American policymakers created a refugee and asylum law.
It was partly an admission that the 1920s immigration restrictions were
inhumane and partly
a nod to Cold War politics. Every refugee from a communist country was
further evidence that the U.S. and her Western allies were superior to
the Soviet system. There's evidence that Congress reformed other
American immigration laws for propaganda reasons.
An
anti-communist uprising in Hungary led to an exodus of highly skilled
and educated refugees in the mid- to late 1950s. There was already a
sizeable Hungarian-American
population to help them integrate. After Fidel Castro took over Cuba in
1959, the so-called "golden exiles" fled to the United States. Those
largely wealthy and educated refugees were then followed by waves of
less skilled Cubans in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
A special law called the "wet feet, dry feet policy" allowed Cubans who
made it to American soil to stay.
Those
later waves of Cubans were met by many of their former countrymen, who
had already settled and integrated into American society. There was some
animosity between
the new arrivals and the settled group, but also a lot of aid for the
new arrivals.
Unlike
many of the Cubans and Hungarian, there were few Vietnamese-Americans
to welcome the hundreds of thousands of boat people who arrived
following the communist conquest
of Saigon. Many settled in California, where they famously took over
the nail salon industry. Vietnamese refugees are still coming today.
The
current crises are affecting even more people today. Syrian refugees
recently streamed through the border in Turkey. Nine hundred refugees
drowned in the Mediterranean
trying to escape the chaos of Africa and the Middle East. About 1
percent of world refugees are resettled in developed nations, but the
rest languish in refugee camps in places like Lebanon, where a quarter
of that country's population are now refugees from
the Syrian civil war and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
About
4 million Syrians were forced out of the country by the conflict. Since
October 2014, the United States has let in just 800 Syrian refugees.
There are security concerns
with Syrian refugees and the government needs to thoroughly review
their individual backgrounds before allowing them to settle here, but
more should be allowed to do so.
Settling
here is just the first step; assimilation and integration are also
important. Fortunately, past success bodes well for current groups.
Refugees
who came between 1975 and 1980 originally started with lower incomes
and fewer skills than economic migrants. But by 1990s, those refugees
were making 20 percent
more income and improved their language skills more than economic
migrants. Refugees cannot return to their homeland like many economic
migrants do, so many make serious long-term commitments to learn English
and other relevant skills.
The
goal of the Office of Refugee Resettlement is economic self-sufficiency
— refugees working and supporting themselves without public assistance.
That is a worthy goal,
but more strict denials of means-tested welfare or blocking it entirely
for refugees can speed up integration.
Fewer
welfare benefits mean that refugees more rapidly enter the labor
market, search for jobs and work with Americans on a daily basis. Work
boosts self-confidence, which
increases refugee satisfaction and contentment with their new homes. A
growing economy combined with smaller welfare benefits in Richmond, Va.
helped to rapidly integrate that city's refugee population in the 1980s
and 1990s.
American
taxpayers shouldn't be forced to foot the bill. Refugees have access to
some means-tested welfare benefits before other immigrants do; that
should end. Churches,
charities and mutual aid associations should fulfill that
responsibility.
There
are over 150,000 Americans of Syrian descent, with a median household
income of over $65,000, compared to about $53,000 for native-born
Americans. They can help
ease Syrian refugees into life in the United States. It's enough for
the U.S. government to allow more peaceful Syrians who have passed
through national security, criminal and health checks to settle here —
the government should not, and does not, need to
support them.
June
20 marks World Refugee Day. But this week saw another anniversary:
One-hundred thirty years ago, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York.
At the statue's base,
the famous words "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free," are followed by "Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed to me." The present refugee crisis and America's
historical commitment to humanitarian immigration should
impel us to allow more of them to settle here.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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