Washington Update
October 2004

Mixed Reaction to Refugee Admissions Proposal
By Lynette Engelhardt Stott, LIRS Director for Government Relations

At the beginning of September the Bush administration issued its annual report to Congress, detailing the president’s proposed refugee admissions for fiscal year 2005 (FY05). For the third year in a row, the administration has proposed setting a 70,000 ceiling on admissions, but with only 50,000 allocated. LIRS urged the administration to set a 90,000 ceiling with all allocated.

The report is required by law and is issued each year as part of the consultation between the White House and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, which have jurisdiction over the U.S. Refugee Program. The consultation leads to the release of the annual presidential determination, which sets the ceiling for the number of refugees that will be resettled by the United States in the next fiscal year. The presidential determination must be signed before any refugees can be admitted in the new fiscal year, which begins October 1.

LIRS is pleased with a number of the report’s proposals:

• The United States will extend in-country processing authority to any location in the world in FY05, giving more refugees access to the U.S. Refugee Program.
• In FY05 the United States will focus on developing targeted strategies to improve the protection of unaccompanied minors.
• The United States will consider resettlement for a group of up to 1,000 urban Burmese in India and tens of thousands of Burmese refugees in Thailand. LIRS staff were in India and Thailand in May, looking at the plight of the Burmese, and we have strongly urged the State Department to consider these populations for resettlement in the United States. (See the August/September FYI issue for an article on LIRS’s involvement with the Burmese refugee situation.)

We are also disappointed with parts of the report:

• The admissions ceiling continues to be low. With an estimated 12 million refugees in the world, the United States must restore its historic leadership in third-country resettlement. President Bush said in his 2002 report to Congress that his administration planned to increase the presidential determination to 90,000 by the end of his first term. This is his fourth report to Congress and the ceiling has not been increased. We are also disappointed that the administration once again has failed to allocate all 70,000 slots. Each slot unfilled represents a lost opportunity to provide protection and opportunity and to restore hope to a human life.
• The report fails to address how the Department of State will meet the legal requirement that it “utilize private voluntary organizations with expertise in the protection needs of refugees in the processing of refugees overseas for admission and resettlement to the United States.”

While the report does not address funding issues, President Bush’s budget proposal released early this year provides insufficient funding to resettle even 50,000 refugees. Without such funding, the State Department would most likely have to cut or eliminate refugee assistance to nongovernmental organizations in Africa, East Asia and the Balkans.

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