A new low: In Biden's first year, the US is on track to resettle even fewer refugees than under Trump

An Ethiopian refugee stands as she is registered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the Um Rakuba refugee camp which houses Ethiopian refugees fleeing the fighting in the Tigray region, on the Sudan-Ethiopia border, Sudan, November 28, 2020.

REUTERS/Baz Ratner

• President Joe Biden has pledged to rebuild the US refugee resettlement program.
• He set a goal of resettling as many as 125,000 refugees in his first full year in office.
• In fiscal year 2020, just over 11,800 people were admitted to the US through the program.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

The United States is on track to resettle fewer than 10,000 refugees this fiscal year, the smallest number since at least 1975, according to new data from the State Department.

As of July 31, the US has now resettled some 6,200 refugees this fiscal year, which ends in September. That means, if the latest pace is maintained, the country is on track to resettle no more than 9,500 refugees, breaking the previous low of 11,814, set in 2020.

The modern refugee resettlement program was created in the wake of the Vietnam War, when the collapse of a US-backed government in Saigon sparked a mass exodus from the country. At its peak, in the 1980 fiscal year, more than 207,000 people fleeing war and political persecution were provided new homes in America.

The last administration worked to dismantle the program, cutting the number of refugees admitted each year it was in power. Yet, barring a surge in resettlements, the record low will be set under President Joe Biden.

Sunhil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project, told Insider that the new figures are "disheartening."

"It is easy to think that this was inevitable because of COVID-19 or the previous administration's anti-refugee policies," he said. But, he argued, the US could have done far more, much faster, to identify candidates for resettlement - moving to remote interviews, for instance - while expediting the resettlement of the most vulnerable, such as Syrians, Afghans, and Uyghurs.

"More could and should have been done," Varghese said. "We cannot afford another year of 'signals' without action from the administration."

President Joe Biden.

JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

The Biden administration insists it is trying. A spokesperson for the State Department told Insider "it will take some time to build back," a process that "is happening and will enable us to support much increased admissions numbers in future years." The department has now moved to conducting some refugee candidate interviews remotely.

There is no question that the last administration made it far more difficult for the current White House to meet its resettlement goals.

The 2021 fiscal year, which began last October, started with the resettlement of just a single refugee. It did not increase much from there. After losing the election, former President Donald Trump and his administration accepted roughly 1,400 refugees, total.

Biden has pledged to rebuild the program. Officials at refugee resettlement agencies have told Insider they see evidence that pledge is real, with the federal government providing money up-front to facilitate the future resettlement of many more people.

The bottleneck, to date, has been actually finding and approving refugees to resettle, a job that until recently required US immigration agents to conduct a series of intensive, in-person interviews overseas. Even virtually, the process, which includes in-depth security checks, can take months.

The first sign that process was ramping up came in June, when the US resettled more than 1,500 refugees, the most since Biden took office. In July, the country accepted another 1,463 refugees.

But Biden himself noted back in May that he was unlikely to reach this year's admissions cap of 62,500. The administration has set a goal of resettling as many as 125,000 refugees in its first full fiscal year.i

"There is no question that the Biden administration inherited a hollowed-out refugee program, and COVID-19 restrictions haven't helped," Ali Noorani, president of the National Immigration Forum, told Insider. "The real question is whether, a year or two from now, the US has restored its leadership at a time when the need is so great."

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