“For the first time on record, the global number of people forced to flee their homes has crossed the staggering milestone of 100 million, according to recent data from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
That 100 million includes refugees, asylum seekers, and those displaced inside their borders by conflict. If they were a single country, it would be the 14th most-populous nation in the world.
“It’s a record that should never have been set,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a press statement. “This must serve as a wake-up call.”
It should especially serve as a wake-up call for rich countries like the United States that have fallen short of their moral and political responsibilities to the displaced.
“We very much have a national mythos around being a safe haven and being a nation of immigrants,” said Elizabeth Foydel, the private sponsorship program director at the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project. “And for a long time, the US was the top country in terms of resettlement. But I think it’s definitely fair to say that we’ve been falling short over the past several years. You see a pretty significant decline overall.””
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“Part of the work of rebuilding the US resettlement program is undoing the damage that was done under previous administrations. That means staffing up the government agencies that do resettlement and streamlining the security vetting process.
The Biden administration is also working on getting a private sponsorship program up and running by the end of this year, one that would allow Americans to sponsor not only Afghan refugees, as I’ve previously written about, but refugees from any country.”
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“For anyone interested in becoming a sponsor through this program, it’s a good idea to start preparing now, since it will likely require a fair amount of money. Canada’s highly successful private sponsorship program, for example, requires a sponsor to raise nearly $23,000 USD to bring over a family of four refugees. The US equivalent of that program could easily require money on a similar scale.
But it would be well worth it, since it would provide an immigration pathway so more vulnerable people can enter the US. Importantly, the State Department has signaled that any refugees who come to the US via private sponsorship will be in addition to the number of traditional, government-assisted resettlement cases.”