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Washington Update
October 2000
Campaign for Refugees: The Final Stretch
By Merrill Smith, LIRS Washington
Representative
When you read this you will probably know more than
I do now about how the Campaign for Refugees turned out. As I write, the
end of the appropriations process appears to be just weeks away. As regular
FYI readers will recall, we are trying to head off funding cuts that may
reduce U.S. refugee admissions by as many as 9,000 and cut overseas assistance
to African refugees by nearly $14 million.
Here is what has happened since the last update:
- My September 19-21 trip to Mississippi yielded a
high profile meeting between Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's state
coordinator in Jackson and six leading Mississippi Lutheran and Catholic
church leaders and refugee activists.
- A sign-on letter to President Clinton asking him
to raise his funding request garnered 60 endorsements from a broad array
of human rights, humanitarian and faith-based groups.
- LIRS's August Action Alert yielded more than 4,000
letters to the President and Members of the House and Senate.
- Reps. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., and Cynthia McKinney,
D-Ga., chair and ranking minority member of the House International
Relations human rights subcommittee respectively, sent a closely argued
letter to the foreign operations appropriators (who decide funding for
the refugee program) detailing why refugee funding should be raised.
It is still gathering endorsements.
- Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a member of the immigration
subcommittee, wrote a sterling letter to appropriators calling for 112,000
admissions.
- In a New York Times article about their recent visits
to African refugee camps, a group of U.S. Catholic bishops garnered
attention for the request for $700 million for the refugee program.
- Washington representatives of the Refugee Council
USA met with members of the National Security Council who said that
they would fight for the president's request of $658 million but, unfortunately,
did not feel they could go higher.
- Senate staffers feel that even Sen. Mitch McConnell,
R-Ky., chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for the issue,
who earlier had proposed the lowest figure for the refugee program,
$615 million, may be willing to go beyond $658 million but won't say
by how much.
Although Democrats have historically been supportive
of appropriations for refugees, the Republican Congress may, in the end,
offer more generous figures than the Democratic administration in this
round of funding for refugee support. This would only go to show what
we have known all along-assisting refugees is not a partisan issue, it
is a human issue. And it is the right thing to do.
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