Refugees and racial/ethnic relations

SIGNIFICANCE: The controversies attending large refugee flows into the United States have been both a product of and a determinant of US refugee policy. Fears of increased cultural and racial heterogeneity and the perceived international political interests of the United States have affected public policy and practice in this area.

Refugees are viewed by some factions within the White majority population in the United States as being relatively nonaffluent and unwilling to assimilate to American culture. Furthermore, these factions and some well-established minority groups have expressed resentment over the success of the “ethnic enclave” strategy that has created significant local political power and prosperity for more recently arrived groups. In addition, some refugee groups have expressed anger at the perceived discriminatory application of refugee legislation. The result has been an exacerbation of tensions across racial and ethnic lines.

History of US Refugee Policy

In 1951, the United Nations held the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which established the still-accepted definition of a refugee and prohibited “refoulement,” that is, forcible repatriation. The United States was instrumental in establishing that to be a refugee, a person must be fleeing personal governmental persecution, not economic deprivation. This definition served US Cold War interests by embarrassing new communist regimes that were generating large refugee populations. However, the United States did not sign the convention, preferring to handle asylum issues through domestic legislation.

Throughout the 1950s, the United States avoided making commitments to refugees that were of little political value to the nation. The ideological focus of US refugee policy that developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s is illustrated by the fact that from the mid-1950s through 1979, only 0.3 percent of refugee admissions were to people from noncommunist countries.

“Political” vs. “Economic” Refugees

US legislation still extends asylum to “political refugees,” but those fleeing bad economies are termed “economic migrants” and are deported if they immigrate illegally. Awareness is growing that governmental oppression, economic malaise, and widespread social problems often go hand in hand, making it increasingly difficult to disentangle the reasons that people leave their homelands. Many displaced people are fleeing reigns of terror perpetuated by their governments, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, and systematic and severe economic deprivation, but these war refugees are not always technically eligible for asylum. Although it seems clear that unprecedented numbers of forcibly displaced people are inadequately protected, the official recognition of a broader definition of “refugee” is unlikely because of the undeniable economic and perceived social and cultural costs of growing populations of people who have received asylum.

The US government has become increasingly concerned about the dramatically increasing numbers of asylum seekers, especially those who enter the country illegally, outside of established refugee-processing channels. The government’s position is understandable, as is that of the illegal entrants. For example, from 1980 to the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled in the face of death squads that had murdered their relatives and associates, and a similar situation existed in Guatemala. Yet, during this period, only fifty-four Salvadorans and no Guatemalans were accepted for resettlement in the United States, in spite of the fact that Central American refugee camps could assist only a small fraction of these people. Many of those remaining entered the United States illegally.

Charges of Political and Racial Bias

US refugee policy was openly directed by Cold War considerations until 1980. Although there was some criticism of the United States’ refusal to extend asylum to those fleeing the regimes of US-supported authoritarian leaders—the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi), François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines—the flow of refugees was controlled, and a possible domestic political backlash avoided.

The 1980 Refugee Act removed the requirement that refugees be fleeing communist regimes. That year, eight hundred thousand immigrants and refugees entered the United States legally, a number that surpassed the combined total for the rest of the world. Growing sentiment for more restrictive policies emerged. The administration of President Ronald Reagan responded by reducing refugee admissions by two-thirds and heavily favoring those from communist countries, in spite of the new law. The Mariel boatlift (1980) brought 130,000 Cubans to the United States in five months, and the policy of forcibly returning Haitians, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans to brutal governments while admitting less physically threatened refugees from communist countries was soundly criticized in some quarters.

The differential treatment accorded asylum seekers from Haiti and Cuba has generated charges of racial bias. As tens of thousands of desperate Haitian refugees were deported or detained at sea and returned before reaching the United States, the US government welcomed hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s regime. The Congressional Black Caucus set up a task force to study the issue and, after failing to change the US policy, joined prominent church leaders and the Voluntary Agencies Responsible for Refugees in stating publicly that racism was behind the differential treatment of Haitians and other asylum seekers because of a reluctance on the part of the United States to admit large numbers of black refugees. Even as this controversy raged, the government announced that all Vietnamese and Laotians who reached safe haven would be considered refugees, while those fleeing Haiti were subjected to case-by-case screening and deportation.

The Refugee Act of 1980 also led to the creation of the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), an organized effort to monitor the resettlement of thousands of refugees yearly. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is in charge of referring refugees to the program and works in conjunction with agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services to provide resettlement services. According to the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration in 2013, the USRAP was responsible for resettling more than fifty-eight thousand refugees in 2012 alone.

President George Bush continued Reagan’s policies. After the fall of the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti created an upsurge of “boat people,” the Bush administration successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to lift a ban on forced repatriation and intercepted and returned tens of thousands of Haitians. The administration of President Bill Clinton continued this practice and then forced the reinstatement of the Aristide government in an effort to stem the flow of refugees.

According to the Pew Research Center in 2014, the number of refugees admitted to the United States decreased by 60 percent in the two years following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. However, those numbers began to increase again in 2004 and have remained steady. Since taking office in 2009, the Barack Obama administration has also faced challenges concerning refugee resettlement. Civil wars such as those taking place in Syria have prompted the United Nations to pressure countries such as the United States to aid in the resettlement of such a large number of refugees. This prospect has ignited the debate over the possibility of increasing domestic terrorist threats. By late 2014, the administration approved an in-country refugee/parole program for children in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This program was launched in response to the influx of unaccompanied minors forced to make dangerous journeys to cross the border into the United States to escape treacherous conditions in their home countries. Parents residing in the United States who qualify can legally apply to have their children brought from those countries to the United States as refugees.

In 2015 the debate over US policy regarding refugees of the Syrian civil war came to the forefront, and the issue quickly split along partisan lines. After one of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists implicated in the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, France, was found to have posed as a Syrian refugee, many politicians and observers objected to the admittance of more refugees to the United States on security grounds. Thirty-one states, nearly all led by Republican governors, voiced protests to allowing in Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, many Democrats and liberal advocacy groups framed the issue as a humanitarian crisis, claiming that in order to combat terrorism the United States must embrace values of compassion and acceptance. President Obama was among those of the latter viewpoint, criticizing those who suggested banning refugees or allowing only Christian candidates rather than Muslims. Obama had previously planned to allow ten thousand Syrian refugees into the United States in fiscal year 2016, but ended up granting legal residence to 12,587. In September 2016, President Obama announced that for fiscal year 2017, which started on October 1, 2016, the ceiling for refugee admissions would increase from 85,000 in fiscal 2016 to 110,000, due to the increase in the number of people displaced by conflicts worldwide.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the United States was engulfed in a global issue shared by economically advanced countries in which non-immigrant populations in developed countries experienced declining birth rates and longer life expectancies. The result was that older societal segments in the developed world were growing larger, while numbers in younger demographics contracted. Many Western countries met labor shortfalls by encouraging the entrance of a large number of immigrant workers. These same societies, nonetheless, came to feel their native cultures were at risk by the presence of foreign newcomers. Right-wing nationalist movements emerged and threatened to become the popular ruling party of many Western governments, a situation not experienced since the end of World War II in 1945. Countries demonstrating these trends included France, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, and others.

In the same vein, after taking office in January 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that indefinitely suspended the entry of Syrian refugees and placed a ninety-day entry ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations. These included Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Trump’s order was deemed unconstitutional by a federal district court judge in Seattle, Washington. The Trump administration issued a new ban, which excluded Iraq from the list of nations whose citizens were temporarily barred from entering the United States, but the new order was also struck down by the courts.

The issue of immigration remained at the forefront of American political campaigns during the early 2020s. While President Joe Biden tried to expand refugee policies during his administration, Republican leaders took up the immigration mantle with actions such as Texas governor Greg Abbot's deployment of the Texas National Guard to its border with Mexico, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign to bus immigrants to northern states. By 2024, these efforts succeeded to some extent as Americans had come to view immigration controls as a national priority and favored more entry restrictions. Immigration had a prominent role during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. In addition to portraying the US border with Mexico as a scene of chaos, the Trump campaign vilified immigrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, as dangerous criminals. Empirical data, however, did not support Trump's claim. A 2024 report by the Brennan Center for Justice cited numerous studies showing immigration was not linked to crime. Statistics showed, instead, that immigrants were less likely to have encounters with law enforcement and that immigration was, in fact, linked to a reduction in burglaries and violent crimes such as murder. Following Trump's win in November, the new administration prepared to make good on promises to close off the US border with Mexico and implement mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

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