From the President’s Desk
Refugee Resettlement—Still Far From Recovery
By Ralston Deffenbaugh, LIRS President

Each time I speak with a member of our board of directors, with our resettlement affiliates, with the church body staff, or with other LIRS partners, I am asked, "How is the refugee resettlement program?" Here's my response.

The good news is that we are not in the same deep crisis we were in last winter. Resettlement numbers have been rising during the first part of this year, but slowly, slowly. LIRS resettlement numbers for the past six months are as follows:

April 2002 numbers are not yet in as of this writing, but we expect them to show only a slight increase over March. Similarly, the resettlement "pipeline" is still fairly dry—we have yet to see a significant boost in the numbers allocated by the government each week for resettlement. By comparison, before September 11 LIRS was averaging just under 1,000 refugees resettled each month.

For LIRS's resettlement affiliates, the combination of special support given by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Department of State toward maintaining local administrative infrastructure has meant that local offices have been able to stop laying off staff and to continue operations. What this means is that the national resettlement capacity of LIRS and the other voluntary agencies has been preserved, at least for now.

The bad news, of course, is that with arrivals still so low there are many tens of thousands of refugees, many of them in quite desperate circumstances, who are still unable to be rescued by the U.S. resettlement program. Their names and faces are largely unknown to us, but we must keep them in mind nonetheless.

Our government colleagues at the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have been working extremely hard these past months to identify refugees who can be reached for resettlement and to try to overcome the snags in the processing pipeline, most of which are understandably due to post-September 11 security measures. Hats off to them for their long hours and extraordinary efforts! Yet despite all efforts, there is no solution in sight that will dramatically increase numbers, just a methodical assessment of refugees in need and processing possibilities—a few thousand here, a few thousand there. Our processing staff will be sharing more detailed information on this with our affiliates.

Of particular concern is the reunification of refugee families. Family reunification has historically made up the largest part of resettlement. Refugees are never fully resettled and at peace in their new country if they are separated from their loved ones. Post-September 11, all family reunification files (affidavits of relationship) are being double-checked against the anchor relatives' INS files here in the States. This is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Unfortunately and disturbingly, INS preliminary results are showing a significant level of apparent fraud, whereby people are attempting to enter the country on the basis of a relationship that does not appear in the anchor relative's original INS files. We do not yet know how many of these cases involve deliberate deception rather than the desperate survival mechanisms sadly common in chaotic refugee camp settings, but we take the findings very seriously and are fully committed to ensuring the integrity of the refugee processing system. INS, the State Department and the voluntary agencies will work intensively to get to the bottom of this situation and to try to devise a system whereby legitimate family members can be reunited and the government can be sure of the real identity of those who are entering the United States. Until then we cannot expect a resumption of large-scale family reunion, nor a full resumption of the resettlement program.

LIRS and the other voluntary agencies will continue our intensive advocacy to keep the political commitment to refugee resettlement while at the same time working hard with our government partners to overcome the obstacles to a full resumption of the program.

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