Why So Few Syrian Arrivals At CRIS? A Comprehensive Explanation

By Anna Berger, CRIS Resettlement Program Intern         

CRIS has been extremely grateful in the last two months for the outpouring of community support concerning Syrian refugees. We have received many messages from community members interested in donating household items and clothing to Syrian refugees or wanting to mentor a Syrian refugee family. Our response until very recently has been the same-- "We have not yet received any Syrian families, but we do have a lot of other refugee families arriving each week who would appreciate your support!” With much media attention in the end months of 2015 on the civil war in Syria and the stance of the U.S. on accepting refugees fleeing this conflict, it may seem difficult to believe that CRIS only in January 2016 received our first Syrian case. What about all the pictures of little boats full of people crossing the sea from Turkey to Greece, and what about the hundreds of thousands of people who applied for asylum in Europe in 2015? The dearth of Syrian refugees that CRIS has thus far received is due to the complex international refugee resettlement process.

In understanding the different situations which the United States and European nations such as Germany are experiencing due to the Syrian crisis, it is imperative to discern the difference between asylum and refugee resettlement. According to the internationally recognized definition of ‘refugee’ as enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, a refugee is a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” While a person must be classified as a "refugee" under this definition to be eligible for refugee resettlement, not every refugee undergoes refugee resettlement.

When people flee their home countries due to any of the reasons listed in the UN Refugee Convention, they arrive in a new country and register as refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international organization mandated with protecting refugees.  After they are registered, there are three options for refugees: returning to their home country if conditions improve; staying in the secondary country under asylum laws; and being resettled to a third country. Less than one percent of these refugees are chosen by UNHCR to be resettled to a third country; this one percent is considered the “most vulnerable” by UNHCR. The first option, returning to the home country, is also often not viable, and therefore many refugees choose the second option of staying in the secondary country and applying for asylum. Asylum seekers apply to be legally allowed to stay in the second country based on their refugee status and, in many cases, are provided an eventual route to full citizenship in that country.  While their applications for asylum are being processed, asylum seekers live in what they hope will be their new host country.

Most of the Syrians that the media has focused on in the last four months--those trekking through the back roads of Macedonia and those crowding Keleti train station in Budapest hoping to be let onto a train for Germany--have been asylum seekers. They traveled to Europe hoping to apply to permanently stay in countries such as Germany and Sweden as opposed to applying to be resettled in one of the major resettlement countries such as Australia, South Africa or the United States. All refugees, whether those who stay in a secondary country as asylum seekers or those who are slated for refugee resettlement, have undergone great tribulations and struggles.

For the one percent of refugees classified as "most vulnerable" by UNHCR and selected to be resettled in a third country, time becomes the primary antagonist. The Syrian family that CRIS received in early January left Syria in 2011, the year that the Syrian Civil War started, and spent the next four years living in a refugee camp in Jordan. Four years is not an unusual length of time to spend in a refugee camp or otherwise in the intermediary processing stage of resettlement; many of the Nepali-Bhutanese clients that CRIS receives lived in refugee camps for nearly two decades. If UNHCR refers a refugee to be resettled in the U.S, then the State Department undergoes its own security process of interviews and fact checking that can take anywhere from one year to 18 months. Therefore, any families who did not flee Syria at the outset of the civil war in 2011 who are seeking refugee designation are, for the most part, still going through the period of registration and processing by UNHCR and the U.S. State Department. This is why countries such as Germany have seen much higher numbers of Syrian refugees than the U.S.--Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. must wait for their resettlement applications to be processed while Syrian refugees coming to Europe do not have to wait for their asylum applications to be processed to be allowed temporary refugee.

If not now, then how about in the future? Will CRIS see a sudden uptick in the coming years as a result of increased numbers of Syrian refugees being processed by UNHCR and the State Department? While an increase is certainly possible, it is not likely that the number of Syrians that CRIS resettles will rival the numbers of our biggest populations (Somalis, Iraqis, and Bhutanese-Nepalis) anytime in the next few years. The U.S. has decided to raise the total number of admitted refugees to 85,000 in 2016 and 100,000 in 2017, but a little-understood detail of these numbers is that they are further broken down into regional ceilings. Each country of the world is grouped in one of five regions (Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, and the Near East/South Asia), and caps are placed on the total number of refugees to be admitted from each of those regions (a small number of the total spots is retained for an “Unallocated Reserve Region” in case of unforeseen crises and to help with backlog).

For the 2016 Fiscal Year, which began on 1 October 2015 and runs through 30 September 2016, the Near East/South Asia category, of which Syria is a part, has a cap of 34,000 persons. Of these, at least 10,000 are projected to be Syrian refugees. This region also includes countries such as Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iran and Iraq, countries from which many refugees have settled in the U.S. in the last eight years. Therefore, Syrian refugees have a lot of competition, so to speak, to be admitted to the U.S. as a part of the resettlement program. 

If 15,000 Syrians are resettled in the U.S. in 2016, then this averages out to 300 Syrian refugees in each state. An additional 300 Syrian refugees settled across the state of Ohio would not mean a large increase in the number of cases CRIS or any other individual state refugee agency would receive; in Columbus alone there are three refugee resettlement agencies! Although some states  receive more refugees than others, thinking in averages is a good way to understand the effects of this cap on the make-up of cases at CRIS.

While the Syrian crisis is the largest source of displaced persons at this time, it is not the only world nation from which people are fleeing. CRIS continues to receive multiple clients and their families each week; already in the 2016 fiscal year we have had arrivals from Uganda, Eritrea, Iraq, Burma, Ethiopia, Colombia, Somalia, and Bhutan. We look forward to the arrival of more Syrian clients, whenever in the future that may be, just as we look forward to every arrival: as an opportunity to help some of the world’s most vulnerable people find a new home in Columbus.

Sources:

http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.phphttp://www.state.gov/j/prm/releases/factsheets/2013/210135.htm“Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration Office of Admissions Processing Center Summary of Refugee Admissions as of 31- December-2015.” accessed on 12. Jan. 2015 from http://www.wrapsnet.org/Reports/AdmissionsArrivals/tabid/211/Default.aspxhttp://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c125.htmlhttp://www.state.gov/j/prm/releases/docsforcongress/247770.htm