Cuban « Marielito » refugees in Key West, Florida, in 1980.

Lexington: A lesson in American greatness

The Economist, March 1, 2018

Nothing is more American than Emmanuel Makender’s story. A 35-year-old taxi driver in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Mr Makender has a comfortable four-bedroom house and two cars outside it. He earns $40,000 a year, the average family income in Grand Rapids, which means his pregnant wife need not work. Yet when congratulated on his achievements, he says he hopes “to be successful one day”. “Still living the American dream, we struggle on!” he says, at the end of a two-hour catch-up.

Lexington had met Mr Makender 18 years before, in different circumstances. He was then a destitute war orphan living in a refugee camp in northern Kenya. A fugitive from the war in Sudan, which had claimed an estimated 2 million lives, including most of Mr Makender’s family, he had fled his village after soldiers attacked it one night. They killed his father, three of his siblings and, he thought, his mother, leaving him, aged around 12, terrified and alone in the dark. He joined a straggling column of fugitive children who trekked hundreds of miles east to Ethiopia. But another war broke out there, so they trekked back to Kenya. The arduousness of the journey made them a celebrated disaster story. They were known as the Lost Boys, and, on November 4^th 2000, the day your columnist visited Kakuma refugee camp, America offered them sanctuary. Over the next year 3,800 Sudanese children and teenagers were resettled in 18 states. It was one of America’s biggest resettlement projects.

It also illustrates two of the Refugee Admissions Programme’s traditional strengths. Since it was launched in 1980 it has had an average quota of 95,000 refugees a year, more than any other rich country. America has also tended to take the most forlorn cases, reflecting the values and self-confidence of a country founded by fugitives, which, over the ensuing four centuries, has been relentlessly successful at turning them into productive citizens.

Those traditional strengths no longer apply, however. Because refugee policy is one of the few bits of the immigration system President Donald Trump controls, he has ravaged it. This year’s refugee quota, 45,000, is the lowest in three decades, and is not expected to be met. Mr Trump also excluded a lot of wretched people from it, by temporarily placing additional restrictions on anyone from a secret list of 11 countries, which is said to include South Sudan, as well as Syria and Iraq.

The argument against refugees, which Republican governors in Texas and Michigan were making even before Mr Trump’s election, is that they are a financial burden and security threat. Both charges are unfounded. For though it is true that refugees represent a bigger upfront cost than other migrants—America spends between $10,000 and $20,000 resettling each one—they repay that in spades. A decade after their arrival, the average income of a refugee family is close to the American average. Mr Makender has paid over $100,000 in taxes. Americans can also relax about their odds of being killed by a refugee. None of the 3m-odd fugitives America has taken since 1980 has been involved in a fatal terrorist attack. That reflects the rigour of America’s vetting, refugees’ hunger for advancement – and America’s ability to feed it.

Not all the Lost Boys have thrived; some hit the bottle and ended up in jail (as might anyone orphaned, shot at and chased by crocodiles). Yet a few have done extremely well: one is a diplomat, another a chess master. Mr Makender is more representative. He started out in Michigan with a family of white evangelicals and attended high school while working evenings in a grocery. He then worked in a factory, making granola bars, and completed two years of a three-year nursing degree. He did not finish it because he had such little luck finding an internship he began to suspect that America, though short of nurses, was not ready to hire an African man as one.

After a trip to South Sudan, where he was joyfully reunited with his mother, he started sending most of his wages to her and to pay for the education of three nephews. That illustrates another virtuous potential of refugees. They tend to be generous to those they leave behind and better at targeting their assistance than aid agencies. That is good for their new country as well as their old one. The businesses Somali-Americans have started in Mogadishu may head off more anti-American rage than any counter-terrorism measure.

There is, of course, another argument for barring refugees. Some Americans simply don’t want more foreigners in their midst, and it is their right to hold that view. Yet the politicians who dignify it with specious arguments are making fools of themselves and harming America.

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Refugees and asylum-seekers in the US

The US defines a refugee as any foreigner that is of special humanitarian concern and “has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” The difference between refugees and asylum seekers is that the latter claim asylum after they already are on the American soil, while the former find themselves abroad when they apply for refugee status. They usually do so at local American embassies or through the United Nations, and go through a security screening process that may take as long as three years. Then, when their applications are accepted, the International Organization for Migration and the US Office of Refugee Resettlement work with voluntary agencies like the International Rescue Committee or Church World Service to organize their resettlement across the US. Once resettled, local non-profits such as ethnic associations or church-based groups help the refugees learn English and find jobs. After 90 to 180 days, financial assistance from federal agencies stops and the refugees are expected to become self-sufficient. 

True to its origins as a haven for the religiously persecuted, the US proved to be generous to refugees for much of its history. After World War 2, the country took in some 500,000 displaced Europeans. After the fall of Saigon in 1975 it welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. The numbers peaked in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter signed the US Refugee Act, the year of Cuba’s Mariel ‘boat lift’ [1]: the law created the US Office of Refugee Resettlement and raised refugee quotas. Later on, the George H.W. Bush administration increased levels of protection of Chinese nationals from deportation after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and special efforts were also made for refugees from Europe fleeing turmoil in the former Soviet Union and war in the Balkan area, those escaping the conflicts in Nicaragua and other Central American countries, as well as Haiti, in the late 1990s.

As a whole, the US has thus received more than 3 million refugees since 1975.

Yet, refugee admittance dropped off steeply in the early 2000s. Fewer than 30,000 were allowed into the US each year in 2002 and 2003, down 60% from pre-9/11 levels. Upticks in the numbers did come in the following years, with a wave of Somali, Burmese and Bhutanese refugees. But when the worst refugee crisis in recent history broke in the Middle East in 2010-2011, the number of people admitted into the US remained fairly low. Between 2012 and 2015, the Obama administration capped the annual number of refugees to be accepted at 70,000.[2] In September 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry did announce the US would resettle 85,000 refugees in the coming year and 100,000 in 2017, marking a significant improvement.[3] Among them, the administration pledged to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees: the final numbers eventually reached 15,479 in 2016, a huge improvement from the mere 249 of 2014, but still a far cry from the hundreds of thousands being admitted in European and other Middle-Eastern countries since the beginning of the Syrian civil war.

One of the explanations for these small numbers is geography. Indeed, countries facing the biggest impacts from refugees today are those closest to political or war-torn instability, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. Still, the US too has plenty of conflicts in its own Central American backyard. In fact, the small numbers are above all a matter of political choice and reflect the anxieties of Americans in the post 9/11 era.

Indeed, the context of terrorism has changed the perception of refugees from vulnerable to threatening. Typically, days after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, more than 30 Republican Governors and one Democrat suspended the resettlement of Syrian refugees: the move was unconstitutional, but it revealed an increasing animosity against refugees, especially Muslim refugees from the Middle East and growing fears about those that some conservative commentators have dubbed “refujihadis”…

These fears are far from being unprecedented. In fact, while the U. administration’s policy had often been generous towards refugees in the 20^th century, American people themselves remained consistently ambivalent about them, as can be perceived in the results of opinion polls conducted by Gallup since 1939. Even in the years leading up to World War II, a majority Americans were suspicious of Jews fleeing the Nazis: in 1939, 67% of Americans actually opposed allowing Jewish children from Germany to come to the United States to live.[4] The only exception, it seems, was the majority that supported allowing in Albanian refugees from Kosovo in 1999.

Likewise, in 1953, 48% of Americans said they disapproved of President Eisenhower’s plan to let in 240,000 refugees from communist countries in Europe (against 47% who approved the measure). In 1980, another poll showed that 62% of Americans considered that it had been a mistake to accept the Marielitos from Cuba and that Fidel Castro had made the US look foolish when he had made it take “criminals, mental patients and other misfits”. Again, in 1993, 63% disapproved of giving Haitian refugees asylum from the military dictatorship there.

Sadly, suspicions against refugees are disconnected from facts now just as they were then. For one thing, they ignore the rigorous screening refugees go through. Indeed, refugees must apply for resettlement at American embassies or through the United Nations, and then go through a process that is more thorough than for any other foreign traveller, and may take as long as three years, sometimes longer, including background checks by the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as defence and intelligence services. As a result, out of the 800,000 refugees that came to America between 9/11 and 2017, only two were arrested on terrorism-related grounds (two Iraqis in Kentucky) and none were charged with trying to commit an attack in the country.[5] In fact, not only has no refugee been responsible for any terrorist act on American soil, but almost every terrorist attack since 9/11, as well as most of the attacks that were foiled, were committed by an American citizen or a green card holder who had been in the country for a decade or more.[6] That means that the attackers were largely radicalized in the US and that there is no evidence that halting the flow of refugees might have any effect.

[1] In April 1980, Fidel Castro announced that Cubans who wanted to leave the island were free to go, provided they left by the port of Mariel: some 125,000 Cubans – dubbed marielitos – took up his offer that year, most of them heading for Florida. Most were law-abiding, but the Cuban leader took advantage of the situation to open prison and mental institution doors too. The term “marielitos” thus became associated with criminals for a time, which stigmatized others who came on the boatlift, a situation not helped by Brian de Palma’s movie Scarface, in which Al Pacino plays a Mariel refugee who becomes a coldblooded Miami drug lord.

All in all, more than a million Cubans have come to the US, many of them in vast exoduses by sea, since the island’s 1959 revolution. More than 250,000 were granted residency under the Obama administration under the law.

Yet, on January 12, 2017, in one of its very last foreign policy initiatives, the Obama administration ended the special status accorded migrants fleeing Cuba who, upon reaching the US, were automatically allowed to stay. The new rule put an end to the so-called “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy adopted by the Clinton administration in 1996, at a time when illegal seaborne migrants were flooding across the Florida Straits. The policy differentiated between those reaching U.S. soil – who were allowed to stay – and those intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, who were returned to Cuba or sent to third countries. The new rule does not alter the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants Cubans green cards after they have been in the US for one year. But illegal immigrants will now be subject to removal the same way as those from other countries. The new agreement also ended the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, adopted under the George W. Bush administration, which targeted Cuba’s policy of sending medical professionals abroad as a form of humanitarian aid by encouraging them to defect. These decisions were part of the normalization of the US’s relations with Cuba that began in December 2014, when President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announced they would end more than a half-century of estrangement.

[2] Even some of the foreigners who put their lives on the line for America have been shown little mercy. For instance, since 2011, the US has promised visas to thousands of Afghans who worked as interpreters and assistants for American military and diplomatic personnel during the war. But the 4,000 additional visas for these people have been blocked by Congress since, even though they and their families are at risk in Afghanistan because they were allied with Washington.

[3] Eventually, California, Texas and New York alone resettled 20,738 refugees, i.e., about a quarter of the 85,000. Then came Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania and Illinois, which each received 3,000 or more refugees. At the other end of the spectrum, Arkansas, the District of Columbia and Wyoming resettled fewer than 10 refugees each, while two states – Delaware and Hawaii – took in none at all. In terms of refugees resettled per capita, it was Nebraska (76), North Dakota (71) and Idaho (69) that resettled the most refugees per 100,000 residents.

[4] The Roosevelt administration initially followed public opinion by infamously turning away more than 900 Jews, mostly children, fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, because of worries that some might be spies, conspirators or Communists; more than a quarter of these refugees eventually died in the Holocaust.

[5] There had been several cases of terrorism or attempted terrorism involving refugees before 9/11, though, such as the case of a Somalian refugee who entered the country in 1999 and participated to the 2004 Ohio shopping mall bombing plot.

[6] This includes Omar Mateen, the Queens-born gunman claiming allegiance to the Islamic State who killed 49 people in a gay club in June 2016.