The refugee cap, the climate summit, and the 25 million that fled for extreme weather events
Whatever communication plan the Biden administration had in mind on the refugees' cap, it failed. First, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki commented last week that President Biden remained committed to raising the refugee cap to 62,500. Then there was today's emergency determination, signed by the President, that his predecessor's admission of up to 15,000 refugees per year would stay in place. It was formulated as: it "remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest."
I am puzzled by the words "justified by humanitarian concerns."
79.5 million
The data: we have a worldwide record-breaking refugee situation with 79.5 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. That is more than 1 percent of the world's population. Nearly 30 million of them are refugees who have sought asylum in other countries.
Last year, the number of refugees resettled in third countries had fallen to 107,000; that is a considerable drop compared to163,000 in 2016. The U.S. resettlement figures have declined dramatically. Canada receives more refugees than the U.S. that has a nearly ten times bigger population. These are 2019 numbers. The numbers for 2020 will come out this summer, but I fear that the pandemic will not have been helpful in any way to improve the worldwide refugee crisis or the resettlement programs.
A vague additional policy plan was added this morning, stating that if the cap would be reached before the end of the current budget year and the emergency refugee situation persists, then a presidential determination may be issued to raise the ceiling.
I would say that is a clear yes on both criteria. Some 35,000 refugees living worldwide in camps are already approved to travel to the U.S., more than twice the 15,000-cap. And on the second criterium: I do not doubt that the record-breaking refugee situation persists. It would be naive to assume that this crisis for 30 million people will be over before the U.S. budget year ends in less than six months. And this crisis certainly won't be solved if the President was last week still committed to raising the refugee cap to 62,500 but this week decides to follow the footsteps of Donald Trump.
The reactions
The blowback from the public, NGOs, and from within Biden’s own party was immediate and outspoken. Twitter exploded within minutes. When I retweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the tweet was less than a minute old and had already more than 500 retweets.
Trying to control the damage, the White House then abruptly changed its course and said that the President is planning to lift the Trump cap by next month, but mentioned no numbers.
125,000
Let's go two months back, to Biden's foreign policy address at the State Department in February, where he promised to raise the cap significantly:
" This executive order will position us to be able to raise the refugee admissions back up to 125,000 persons for the first full fiscal year of the Biden-Harris administration".
So, for now, it is unclear if the Biden Administration will allow up to 62,500 refugees before the fiscal year ends on October 1, and some people start to doubt if Biden will keep his promise for next year's 125,000. One of them is the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Democrat Bob Menendez. He wrote to Biden last Friday that the President's undermining of his declared purpose to reverse Trump's refugee policies make it unlikely to hit next year's target of 125,000.
The Earth Day Summit
Next week, on April 22, it is Earth Day. President Biden has asked 40 world leaders to join for a two-day summit to increase efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Biden will most likely announce an increased ambition for the 2030 target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
We can best see the urgency of the climate crisis in the world's regions where you find the most refugees and internally displaced persons. Climate change adds to other causes that make people decide to leave everything behind and flee to safer places. Therefore, it is often called a threat multiplier, and climate change has its dirty fingerprints on many extreme-weather related disasters as well as on many conflicts. Unlike refugees fleeing for causes like violence, fighting, or persecution, there is no international convention to protect climate refugees. The individuals involved are so often forgotten once we speak about millions. Still, their life in refugee camps is often similar to those that fled their homes for other than environmentally-related reasons. Accepting refugees in western countries relieves the pressure for those that remain behind.
Responsibility for climate refugees
University College Londen published a paper in 2017 about who is responsible for the climate refugees. That may be an impossible task because there are too many variables, and there is too much guessing involved. But, as scientists like to tackle complicated problems, they gave it a try, and one of the factors included was the CO2 emissions per capita. A quote from the report on the share of each countries' responsibility: "Findings Results suggest that under present circumstances, Australia and the USA each should take responsibility of 10 percent each of the overall global share of climate refugees, followed by Canada and Saudi Arabia (9 percent each), South Korea (7 percent) and Russia, Germany, and Japan (6 percent each)".
You will surely get different outcomes with different inputs. But what I want to stress here is that the countries that have historically been burning large amounts of fossil fuels, and the countries that are still doing so, have contributed to the climate refugee crisis. Most of these refugees come from countries that have contributed practically nothing to the climate crisis, but they are most vulnerable to its impacts.
And the numbers are enormous. UNHCR estimates that in 2019, weather-related hazards displaced nearly 25 million people in 140 countries. Without ambitious climate action and disaster risk reduction, the number of climate-related disasters could double the number of people requiring humanitarian assistance to over 200 million each year by 2050.
In short, I do not believe that keeping the refugee cap at 15,000 people per year in a country of some 330 million people is "justified by humanitarian concerns."
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Notes:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/16/politics/biden-refugee-cap/index.html
https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/5ee200e37/unhcr-global-trends-2019.html
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10024654/
https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2020/
Your reporting is, as always, clear and lacking hyperbole . Thank you for that.
Where we are in Maine, the influx of refugees and integration into local communities has been well met by community outreach to assist with ESL, housing business startups. Etc.
A meaningful percentage of the effort has been to offset xenophobic resistance. But it’s working regardless the naysayers
State and local governments will become the eventual first line of support . This is where coalitions can be built , not by federal edict
Doug DeLaMatterjust now
Thank you for a very clear analysis of this aspect of the humanitarian crisis. Climate change will present many conundrums for us to deal with and this is perhaps the most heart-wrenching so far. I fear there will be many others. I certainly agree that the richer countries should bear responsibility for the refugees they create whether by conflict or environmental degradation, but immigration may not be the magic bullet we seek just yet.
Resettlement into America or other developed country effectively takes a low-carbon citizen and turns them into a high-carbon citizen. We must recognize and deal with the misery each individual family is immersed in. We must also convert the "developed" societies into carbon neutral entities. It is within our abilities to do both.
Perhaps a change in attitude will help. These people with low-carbon life skills should be brought to America and like countries as contributors to a new social order rather than as "objects of charity". They have much to teach us if we are willing to learn.
I think of people who have lived in refugee camps for years. What skills can they share with North Americans who are suffering mental and emotional distress during Covid-related lock-downs?
I think of farmers who grow all their own food in small plots with the help of perhaps one animal, feeding their families using only solar power. Their knowledge and techniques are far superior to our industrial farmers who grow one crop over vast acreages and replace depleted nutrients with artificial fertilizers.
Would our entitled citizens object to welcoming "skilled low-carbon educators" as much as they do to admitting hundreds of thousands of "charity cases"? Seeing ourselves as recipients of education from refugees might be a pill that our self-entitled society finds to swallow, but that medicine offers a solution to what is otherwise a very bleak outlook for both groups.
Is it worth a try?