“President Joe Biden said on Saturday he will raise the cap on the number of refugees admitted this year to the United States, a day after he drew criticism from Democratic lawmakers for agreeing to keep the historically low figure in place.” Reuters
The left is critical of Biden’s inconsistent messaging and calls for a higher refugee cap.
“The Biden administration's equivocation on the refugee cap reflects the heat they are facing about the crisis on the southern border in the middle of a pandemic -- and the fear that Americans will conflate the two issues, even though they are distinctly different policy areas… White House officials alluded to the linkage between the two issues as the administration backtracked on Friday and Saturday…
“Psaki suggested Friday that the Office of Refugee Settlement, which is part of the Health and Human Services Department, currently has limited bandwidth because some officials are working both on the situation at the southern border and on refugee resettlement issues. That argument, however, was rejected by refugee resettlement groups that said they had already been preparing for an increase in arrivals.”
Maeve Reston, CNN
“While the administration bumbles its way toward a policy, real lives are at stake. Some 33,000 refugees in Africa, the Mideast and elsewhere, all of them having passed rigorous screening by the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies over the course of months or years, are stuck in camps where they await flights to the United States…
“The president would do well to re-read his own campaign’s clear-eyed pronouncements on the subject. They correctly slammed Mr. Trump for decimating America’s decades-long leadership on refugees, whose admissions to this country were slashed by more than 75 percent in four years, to fewer than 12,000 in fiscal 2020…
“‘We cannot mobilize other countries to meet their humanitarian obligations if we are not ourselves upholding our cherished democratic values and firmly rejecting Trump’s nativist rhetoric and actions,’ said the Biden campaign statement on refugees.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“If it’s true that [the] administration is so spooked by the potential backlash that it’s taking this long to even muster a small symbolic increase over the Trump administration’s limit, it’s a little hard to believe they’re going to get anywhere near 125,000…
“This is grim news not just for the thousands of refugees who might have had a chance to start new lives in the U.S. this year and now won’t, but for millions of [others] around the world, displaced by conflict and persecution. If even an administration that came into office on a platform of repudiating its predecessor’s nativism won’t take a stand on this issue, who will?”
Joshua Keating, Slate
“Over the last year, communities of faith across the country have encouraged local and state officials to register their commitment to serving refugees. In August, 540 state and local elected officials from all 50 states came forth to state their support for refugee resettlement in their communities. The opportunity to save lives, extend hospitality to new neighbors, and invite new members into our churches, synagogues and mosques, renews our own spirits with hope in the restoration of life… It is time to reclaim America’s moral voice.”
Minerva Garza Carcaño, Los Angeles Times
Dated but relevant: “The federal government accepts refugees (after vetting by the UNHCR and by federal agencies), lends them the money they need to travel to the U.S. and provides a small grant to get them started. But the bulk of the resettling work is done by nonprofit agencies, which draw much of their funding from the federal government based on the number of clients they handle. With so few new arrivals [in the past few years], the nonprofits have been devastated by eviscerated budgets, layoffs and in some cases shuttered operations…
“It will take time and money to restaff gutted consulates and other federal offices and to reinvigorate the resettlement network that collapsed under a lack of funding during the Trump years.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
The right is critical of Biden’s inconsistent messaging and indecisiveness.
The right is critical of Biden’s inconsistent messaging and indecisiveness.
“This is not a situation where Biden needs Congress to pass legislation. He can change the refugee cap with the stroke of his pen. Biden simply hasn’t gotten around to it. CNN cites unnamed sources who say Biden has resisted signing off on raising the Trump-era refugee cap because of political optics. That may be the case, but it doesn’t reflect well for Biden to publicly pledge to do something, and then renege on that pledge, because he thinks it will be unpopular – and it’s particularly bad to renege on the promise and then refuse to explain why…
“Maybe it’s like Joe Biden’s promise to not hold children in detention centers, his promise to send out $2,000 stimulus checks, his promise to establish a national commission on policing… or [his promise] to punish the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, or his promise to end the use of standardized testing in schools… Maybe Joe Biden just makes a lot of promises to a lot of people that he isn’t all that committed to keeping.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“The refugee resettlement numbers are only the latest ‘confusion’ on Biden's statements… Earlier [last] week, Psaki announced that the United States had finalized a deal with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries wherein they would beef up their border security to stem the tide of migrants heading north. Guatemala almost immediately issued a statement basically saying they had no idea what she was talking about, that there was no new deal, and the border security measures had been in place before Biden was even sworn in…
“Then there was the issue of using eminent domain to seize property along the southern border for the construction of the wall. This was one of Joe Biden’s most fervent and repeated promises on the campaign trail. That was all going to end ‘on day one.’…
“But then, this week, a Texas family lost their land in an eminent domain suit for precisely that purpose and we learned that another 140 nearly identical cases were pending. A spokesperson for the Justice Department told reporters that there was some ‘confusion’ over the timeline for prosecuting such suits while the White House continued to insist they weren’t going to be doing that…
“Biden’s team is making public announcements that last only as long as it takes for either AOC or the CCP to complain about them and then the story changes, sometimes making a 180-degree turn. So does this mean that we’re getting intentionally deceptive information from the White House, that they don’t know what’s going on internally, or that Biden just keeps changing his mind in reaction to the backlash he receives? I’m honestly not sure which choice would be worse.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
Dated but relevant: “Rather than continue to give the executive branch all the power in setting refugee quotas, Congress should reclaim some of its authority… One way to do this is for Congress to set a floor and ceiling for refugee admissions based on historical admissions. For example, over the past 20 years, the U.S. admitted an average of a little over 61,000 refugees annually. Throw out the four highest numbers and the four lowest, and you get a ‘normal’ range of 53,000 to 73,000 refugees per year…
“Why not leave the president free to set refugee levels within this historical range but require that any cap outside this range be submitted to Congress for approval? This would maintain the president’s authority to prescribe ‘normal’ limits on refugee intake but give the people’s representatives a meaningful say in the matter whenever a president wants to go historically high (as Mr. Obama did for fiscal 2016 and 2017) or low (as Mr. Trump has done for fiscal 2018)…
“After all, if it is so clear to the administration that the U.S. needs to be taking many more or many fewer refugees, then it should be clear enough for Congress to debate and vote on as well.”
David Inserra, Heritage Foundation