‘We Will Be Great Americans’

Dear Capitolisters,

For those of us addicted to the news and habitually screening #PoliticalTwitter, it’s been impossible to avoid seeing the gut‐​wrenching chaos in Afghanistan over the last few days. Foreign policy is way (way) out of my lane—my general view is that recent events are a bipartisan debacle years in the making, and I have literally zero patience for partisan point-scoring—but I’m compelled to spend today examining one aspect of the situation: U.S. refugee policy, which is most obviously a major part of the Afghanistan mess but also a broader policy issue that’s been percolating for years. On the former item, the situation on the ground is opaque and ever‐​changing, but it does seem (at this point at least) that the process for getting the Afghans at most serious risk out of the country was mired in ridiculous red tape that left thousands of them stranded; that the administration seriously miscalculated the time it would have to complete this process; and that—as Haley wrote in Uphill months ago—this was all totally and utterly expected. (Haley has been just killing it on Twitter this week, BTW.)

And, perhaps even more troublingly, the usual suspects on the right are already laying the groundwork for resisting any significant U.S. efforts to take in Afghan refugees—pressure that, per this depressing Politico piece (then corroborated by Reuters), seems to have an effect on not only Republicans, but even the Biden administration itself. This anti‐​refugee sentiment—for Afghanistan and beyond—strikes me as wrong for a whole host of reasons, so that’s what we’ll discuss today.

U.S. Law and History on Refugees

Before we get to that, however, it’s important to understand the basics of U.S. policy toward refugees and other immigrants entering the country on humanitarian grounds. A brand new primer on the history of U.S. immigration policy from my Cato colleagues Andrew Baxter and Alex Nowrasteh covers most of the 20th century U.S. refugee policy, but this part gets us mostly caught up:

Today, the U.S. refugee admissions program allows narrow classes of people facing persecution (or with a well‐​founded fear of such persecution) and their family members to immigrate to the United States. As indicated above and explained in depth elsewhere, the 1980 law grants the president essentially total authority to set a “ceiling” on the number of refugees we’ll accept each year (with regional allocations) and to establish the criteria for selecting them. The president also retains emergency “parole” power to admit aliens when their entry is determined to be in the public interest. Presidents have used this power in several instances, including for many Kurds fleeing 1990s Iraq and for about 111,000 refugees leaving Vietnam in 1975. 

For Afghanistan in particular, there is also a “special immigrant visa” (SIV) for tens of thousands of Afghans employed by the U.S. government as translators, fixers, and in other high‐​risk positions. In late July, Congress expanded funding and eligibility for the SIV program, increasing the number of visas by 8,000 and reducing the employment eligibility requirement to one year (from two). The latest data show a small uptick in SIV admissions over the last few weeks, but certainly nothing major. (Separate admissions of Afghan refugees have also been low.)

The United States has historically ranked highly among developed countries in terms of the raw numbers of refugees and asylees we’ve admitted. The OECD, for example, shows that between 1996 and 2015 the United States accepted more permanent residents on humanitarian grounds than other developed countries, until Germany leapt ahead in 2016 (the last data year available): 

That’s just developed country admissions, however. According to a separate analysis of global refugee stocks (total numbers), the United States ranks lower—but still pretty high in 2017—when poorer countries, which often border hard‐​hit places, are considered. (That same paper also found, however, that refugees are increasingly relocating to developed countries, and that refugee stocks have exploded in recent years because of unrest in Syria and elsewhere.)

The United States’ position drops even further when considering our population and size. As calculated by my Cato colleague David Bier from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) data, the United States between 2012 and 2017 accepted a net increase of 654,128 asylees, refugees, and similarly situated people. That might sound like a lot, but it was only 0.2 percent of the U.S. population as of 2017—an acceptance rate surpassed by 49 other countries over the same period and well below the top 50’s average of 1.2 percent.

As Bier explains, considering refugee admissions on a per capita basis is probably a better metric than just using nominal figures, because — similar to why per capita GDP is a better measure of national wealth than just total GDP—“it is important to control for the size of the population of the receiving country both to understand the likely effects of the absolute numbers on the country and to allow a legitimate comparison across countries.” On this basis, we rank well below many wealthy nations (Australia, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France) and a lot of poorer ones too.

After 2017, moreover, U.S. refugee admissions collapsed because of Trump administration policies skeptical of (if not outright hostile to) refugees. As summarized by the Congressional Research Service, Trump in 2017 and 2018 successively lowered the ceiling on refugee admissions from Obama’s 110,000 for FY2017 to 45,000 in FY2018 and then 30,000 in FY2019. He lowered it again for FY2020 to 18,000—slightly above the statutory ceiling (17,400) that Congress repealed back in 1980—and “the lowest in the history of the U.S. refugee admissions program.” Then came COVID-19 to finish the job, and the latest data from the State Department show that admissions have remained extremely low under Biden:

Some of the decline in admissions from the 1990s to mid‐​2000s was likely due to declining global conflict and refugee stocks (see chart above), but refugee numbers exploded thereafter, with only a small increase in U.S. intake and then, unfortunately, the Trump‐​era collapse. As Bier noted last year, there’s definitely more going on here than just fewer global refugees:

Biden has done a little to reverse these trends, raising the refugee ceiling to 62,500 for FY2021 and claiming he’ll raise it even more (to 125,000) next year. But—Afghanistan crisis aside—the data above and others show there’s surely a lot more to be done.

Numerous Reasons to Support a Liberal Refugee Policy

And there are plenty of reasons why the United States should do more for refugees, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Most obviously, the nation has long recognized its moral obligation to help people displaced or endangered as a result of U.S. government actions—especially (but not limited) to those who voluntarily risked their lives to assist America’s military and diplomatic efforts abroad. I won’t depress you with the many tales of Afghan translators and others seemingly abandoned by the U.S. government in recent weeks, but feel free to click through these links—the latter of which provides the headline of this newsletter—if you haven’t already. 

There’s also a broader American commitment to help those in need, as expressed well during the Vietnam era by President Gerald Ford in 1975 (“our tradition is to welcome the oppressed”) and in a subsequent resolution that the Senate passed (by a vote of 91–1!) and read:

As MSNBC’s Hayes Brown notes, this came at a time when much of the public opposed bringing large numbers of Vietnamese refugees to the United States and a few weeks before Congress passed the Vietnam Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which provided around $2.3 billion in today’s dollars to support the assimilation of 130,000 Vietnamese refugees. Those efforts (and subsequent ones by the Carter and other administrations) were, as Brown states, “the right thing to do”—and they’re still bearing fruit (even if you’re not into things like Olympic gold medals or doughnuts).

And if you find these touchy‐​feely ideals to be insufficient, there are plenty of selfish reasons to support a liberal refugee policy in the United States, including:

Economics. For starters, numerous studies indicate that refugees are not a big drag on the U.S. economy or government resources and are instead useful contributors to American society. Perhaps most notably, the refugee‐​skeptical Trump administration’s own HHS published a detailed report—suppressed by the White House—showing refugees in the United States to (eventually) assimilate, get jobs, and pay taxes. Bier summarized the entire report in a detailed, chart‐​filled post but here are a few highlights (quoting him):

• While refugee and asylee high school graduation rates are lower than all U.S. adults, refugee and asylee college graduation rates are slightly higher.

• Adult refugee and asylee full‐​time employment grows over time to be slightly higher than all U.S. adults.

• Refugee and asylee median family income almost doubles over time from $32,539 to $59,433, virtually identical to the U.S. average.

• The U.S. refugee and asylee population paid $63 billion more in taxes than they received in benefits to all levels of government from 2005 to 2014, and the per capita annual net fiscal effect of each refugee or asylee was positive $2,205 compared to a national average of $1,848 from 2005 to 2014.

The report also found refugees and asylees are generally to be younger than the general population (81 percent are between the ages of 18 and 64 years old, versus 63 percent for all U.S. residents)—another benefit for our aging population.

These data, of course, are supported by countless anecdotes of refugee families in the United States starting businesses, going to school, supporting their communities, or otherwise living the “American Dream” here. (The NFAP’s Stuart Anderson provided a great new example this week in Northern Virginia, which is home to many Vietnamese refugees and their families.)

Surely, resettlement transitions take time and not every refugee story has a happy ending—these are thousands of people coming from all sorts of hardship and often not speaking the language—but the facts obliterate the all‐​too‐​common myth of refugees being a helpless, permanent drag on the U.S. economy and government resources. (They also dovetail nicely with other research showing—as I briefly discussed in May—how immigration generally boosts U.S. innovation and economic growth and strengthens “essential” domestic industries along the way.)

Security. There’s also little reason to think that Afghan and other refugees pose a serious risk to Americans’ safety and security. Instead, a liberal U.S. refugee policy has long been a pillar of American foreign policy, especially during the Cold War. As Nowrasteh and co‐​author John Glaser explained:

Similar considerations apply today. For example, several members of Congress wrote to Biden to explain that, “If we fail to protect our allies in Afghanistan, it will have a lasting impact on our future partnerships and global reputation, which will then be a great detriment to our troops and the future of our national security.”

Opening our doors to people fleeing oppressive regimes also can weaken adversaries via “brain drain.” Most famously, leading scientists who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s later were core contributors to the Manhattan Project. And, as I explained a few weeks ago, new research shows that past U.S. restrictions on immigration pushed multinational corporations to move their R&D activities offshore and ended up benefiting China, which traditionally struggles to attract human capital.

At the same time, Nowrasteh on Monday explained that there is little evidence that Afghan refugees are a major threat to national security or public safety:

He also cites data from a recent paper on immigrant criminality, showing Afghan immigrants to be incarcerated in the United States a rate far below that of native‐​born Americans—so they’re not a serious criminal threat either.

More broadly, a previous report from the (decidedly more hawkish) Heritage Foundation examined data on refugees and Islamic terrorism‐​related offenses and found that refugees in the United States posed a tiny (and totally manageable) threat to national security. And Nowrasteh’s most recent paper on immigration and espionage—which includes the first‐​ever database of identified commercial and state spies who operated on U.S. soil from 1990 through 2019—finds a similarly low and manageable level of risk (even for immigrants from China).

Given the moral, economic, and foreign policy reasons to expand U.S. refugee and asylee admissions, none of these small risks can justify a restrictionist policy regime.

So What Now?

Given the current situation and direct U.S. responsibility therefore, Afghanistan remains the immediate priority, and Anderson notes three categories of Afghans who are likely most in need of help: 

• Individuals who worked with the U.S. military; per Anderson and others, there are 50,000 to 88,000 allies and family members in the SIV process.

• Men and women who worked with U.S. and Western governmental or nongovernmental organizations in capacities that put them at significant risk. 

• Afghans whose actions or political opinions make it impossible for them to live safely under Taliban rule.

Nowrasteh conservatively estimates that there could be more than 400,000 of these refugees in the near future (maybe far more). Most will go to neighboring countries or Europe, but the United States should take more than its fair share—if possible. Unfortunately, the only available policy option at this point may be for Biden to exercise his parole power and airlift Afghans to safer locales for processing there and eventual admission into the United States. This would be messy and imprecise, but—given the stakes—it’s probably the best option (and one that, as Haley explained a few weeks ago, both U.S. lawmakers and the house delegate from Guam support).

More broadly, however, the U.S. government needs to rethink our approach to refugees in this country and to reverse the long‐​term deterioration of support for those fleeing oppression and violence around the world—in not only the middle east but also Cuba, Venezuela, China, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Perhaps the best policy reform would be to allow American citizens to sponsor refugees, similar to the Private Sector Initiative that President Reagan created for Cuban anti‐​communists in the mid‐​1980s or to the process for citizens sponsoring their immigrant family members. Regardless, it’s clear that more needs to be done.

Regarding public support, on the other hand, things certainly look bleak at the moment—at least on certain influential segments of the right. But we’d be good to recall that it was only a decade ago that Glenn Beck proudly recited the same Lazarus poem as in that 1975 Senate resolution, explaining its message of American acceptance and confidence (“Even the people that you reject can make it here. That will give it all to be successful here. You can make it here!”), to a raucous, standing ovation at … CPAC.

I certainly don’t harbor any illusions that next year’s conference will feature a similar speech, but maybe Afghanistan can be the start of something—if our political leadership will have the courage to let it.

Chart of the Week

Millennials are earning more than previous generations

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