Repairing America’s refugee program was recently the focus of rare bipartisan support in Congress. Senators John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Alex Padilla, D-California, led a hearing on U.S. refugee policy, which was primarily a defense of plans to rebuild the system from the ground up. The hearing was a refreshing reminder of America’s immigrant heritage and the dire need to improve our refugee program to live up to our values.
The United States has long been a sanctuary for those fleeing persecution and seeking a better life. Since 2016, however, the United States has made itself the new home of fewer people every year until 2022, as Padilla pointed out in his opening statement.
Even last year, the total number of people resettled, 25,465, is a shadow of our 2014 level of 70,000. Even worse, the United States had set a goal of relocating 125,000 people in 2022. That means we rescued only one out of five people we planned to last year.
This makes the U.S. refugee system a bipartisan failure. The worldwide refugee population grew during Republican and Democratic presidencies, yet our resettlement efforts did not. As both senators agreed in the hearing, we need to redesign our system to meet the challenges of today’s refugee crisis. We should offer protection to “victims of persecution,” as Cornyn put it.
My recent study, published with colleagues at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, proposes ways to ensure that we live up to our own history and meet our moral obligation to help those most in need worldwide.
To add to those at the hearing, our proposal is to bring some certainty to how many refugees are brought to the United States each year. This requires insulating resettlement efforts from political pressure. We propose taking 10 percent of the refugees most in need of resettlement. The United Nations already publishes this figure, but the United States could create its own version to refine and track.
If we take 10 percent of these refugees, our formula implies that we should bring in closer to 160,000 people in 2023. That’s a bit more than the 125,000 goal for 2023.
This may seem like a lot. In fact, once you adjust for population size, the United States resettles many fewer people than Canada and several other countries.
In one exceptional year, 2015, Germany brought in 1 million Syrian refugees. At first, this created some bumps along the way, with commentators and polling suggesting Germans were becoming concerned about refugee policy. But just three years later, polls had returned to their pre-2015 trends.
All this is to say that, as German leader Angela Merkel said in 2015, “We can do this.”
This is the same message that Cornyn and Padilla put forward in the hearing. Unlike most hearings, you couldn’t call any exchanges acrimonious or malicious. No one was there to score political points or to turn the session into a campaign speech. This leadership is what the United States desperately needs more of in discussions about refugee policy.
Immigration topics, like refugee policy, are in part so divisive because it is about membership — who belongs here? Who is American? Leaders in both parties can calm the storm by asserting the fundamentally American idea that immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
Fundamentally, refugees add to America. It’s not an erosion of what it means to be American to rebuild our reputation as the place for those downtrodden and persecuted. America’s immigrant history gives us a unique advantage in pulling in people and turning them into new Americans.
Padilla and Cornyn’s cooperation is a model for future policy discussions of immigration and refugee policy. It’s also a reminder that America is at its best when we capitalize on what we agree.
It is time to put aside partisan politics and work toward a more humane and effective refugee resettlement process.
