Buried in the details of President Bush's 2006 budget is a new humanitarian initiative: increased aid for the world's 12 million refugees.
The post-9/11 reduction in immigration affected all categories of immigrants to the United States, including refugees fleeing persecution. This reversed a long American tradition of rescuing these victims of persecution and war-men, women and children who are the very "huddled masses yearning to be free" of the Statue of Liberty's inscription.
Thankfully, the president is changing course. His 2006 budget includes $893 million for refugees in camps overseas and for those being admitted to the United States-17 percent more than in 2005.
President Bush also seeks an additional $81 million for other refugee programs such as aid for the Sudanese victims of ethnic cleansing in Darfur and other victims of unforeseen crises.
In 2002 and 2003, refugee admissions sank to fewer than 29,000 annually after an average throughout the 90s of about 88,000 a year.
Even before the drop-off, refugees only made up 5 to 10 percent of the U.S. annual inflow of immigrants, but they were an important minority. Among immigrants, refugees are the most in need of immediate help. But after arrival, they typically form vibrant, civic-minded communities across the United States, from the Vietnamese of Los Angeles to the Cubans of Miami to the Irish who fled famine and helped build New York.
A U.S. return to the refugee admission levels of the 1990s, as now seems likely, can make only a small dent in a global problem. Nevertheless, the President's request marks an important reversal, and should bring some relief to victimized populations.
They include the 100,000 North Korean asylum seekers who have escaped to China, where they try to eke out a living beneath the radar of the state. In deference to Pyongyang, China has forcibly returned at least 7,800 refugees to North Korea, where they have been sentenced to forced labor as punishment for leaving.
They also include Liberians, of whom nearly 400,000 victims of internal strife have fled the country. Of those, 5,000 reached the United States as refugees. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was President Bush's meeting with a young Liberian woman, whom militants had left for dead on a pile of bodies, that helped convince him to restore America's refugee assistance program.
Having fled violence and persecution at home, refugees often find themselves stateless, denied the right to work or own property, and confined to remote, squalid camps.
This dramatically increases their vulnerability. In Africa, where more than two million refugees have been warehoused-stuck in the limbo of refugee camps for more than five years-disasters in refugee camps are commonplace. Last summer Hutu extremists massacred 180 Congolese, mostly women and children, in a camp in Burundi.
In Thailand, meanwhile, some 128,000 Burmese refugees are thought to have lived in areas affected by the recent tsunami. But only 22,504 were registered with the Thai authorities. The refugees' lack of legal status made it difficult for them to get disaster relief, or even to count the missing.
By fully granting Bush's refugee budget requests, Congress can help these groups and dozens of others.
The United States understandably over-reacted when, in the name of fighting terror, it stopped admitting any refugees at all for six months after 9/11. But now it's time to return to a more sensible humanitarian policy. Not a single terrorist has even entered the United States as a refugee, an unsurprising fact considering that there are much easier ways to get into the country.
The burden of proof for receiving refugee status is high and the process timeconsuming. And even after the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has recognized a refugee, it is just as likely to resettle him in Europe or Australia as the United States.
The United States used to rightly pride itself on leading the world in rescuing refugees, but for the last few years has been sending the signal that they are no longer welcome. The new budget request gives hope for change.
Philip Peters was a State Department official during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. He is now vice president of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
