2004 Annual Conference of State Coordinators of Refugee Resettlement (SCORR)

(As Prepared for Delivery)

I am very happy to have this opportunity to address your national conference because my staff and I at the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration have such a fine working relationship with SCORR. Now, here is my chance to personally say "thank you" for your great cooperation.

We consider your input important as we develop and implement refugee admissions policy and as we review placement planning. You have a seat on our annual review panel that considers voluntary agency proposals. In addition, we send state coordinators all volag proposals we receive and we seek coordinators’ endorsement of new affiliates that volags propose to establish in their states. We have linked you into our Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System—WRAPS—our automated case information tracking system.

We want you in the loop. And we hope you will keep us in the loop. We welcome you to contact us when issues come up in your respective states. We share your interest in promoting improved service delivery at the local level and in good planning and information sharing at all levels.

Thanks in part to your efforts, refugee stories overwhelmingly turn out to be success stories—for the refugees, for the states and communities where they settle, and for the United States as a whole. Many refugees come here with little or no resources, but with a strong desire to escape persecution and improve their lives. They learn the language, get jobs, start businesses, and buy homes.

So let me begin by assuring you that the President and the State Department remain absolutely committed to the task of admitting refugees for whom resettlement is the appropriate durable solution. This commitment extends to our fellow federal government agencies with which we work closely, most notably the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.

We are working hard to meet the challenges presented by a changing world and by new security requirements that have been implemented to meet the threat of global terrorism. This fiscal year, the President, after consultation with the Congress, authorized 50,000 refugee admissions from the various regions of the world. In addition to the regional allocations, the President has authorized the admission of 20,000 more refugees if qualified cases can be identified and screened and if funding is available.

This is an ambitious goal, given the extraordinary challenges of the last two years, but with two and a half months remaining in the fiscal year, we have already admitted 32,000 refugees. (I will update this figure before you leave.) So we are hard at work and are on track to meet at least our allocated numbers and to exceed significantly the number of refugee admissions in each of the previous two years, when admissions were fewer than 29,000.

An author visited me recently seeking background material on a book he is writing called "The Refugee Crisis." He had already defined the crisis as the fall-off in refugee admission numbers and was looking for ammunition to support this thesis. I told him that a new world paradigm—that is, fewer refugees fleeing Communism, more refugees being able to go home, and more stringent security checks—did not, ipso facto, define a refugee crisis. I told him we are facing a worldwide humanitarian crisis, but it is the security crisis that terrorists and other anarchists pose to humanitarian workers and to DHS adjudicators trying to interview refugee admission candidates in a safe location. Our admissions program is at a crossroads, not a crisis. An intense transformation in our admissions approach is now assisting us in taking the right turn at this crucial crossroads.

As many of you may know, PRM contracted David Martin of the University of Virginia to help us assess and improve the admissions program. We are delighted that David completed the work this month; we received his final report just last Thursday. We are in the process of evaluating it and will soon begin discussions with interested parties—both inside and outside government—as to which recommendations we will adopt.

I strongly endorse many of the principal conclusions. One of the conclusions I hope you share is this: We need a system that does not make it too hard to say "yes" when opportunities to resettle new groups of refugees arise. We want to make sure we have an institutional framework that brings to bear the good reasons in favor of resettlement, for specific and carefully chosen groups, so that generous and sensible choices can be reached to produce a program on the scale determined by the President for each year.

It is clear from his report that David understands the challenges we face in this new era of refugee resettlement that result from the proliferation of smaller programs for more diverse populations and new security requirements. I believe his recommendations will help us consolidate gains we have already made toward returning to a generous and more stable flow of refugee admissions that was interrupted by the events of 9/11.

Let me discuss these challenges, describe what we are doing to overcome them, and mention a couple of dilemmas: inadequate funding and the declining pool of refugees.

Two major earth shifts have combined to change both the composition and the complexity of the American resettlement program. First, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 necessitated implementation of new security checks that delayed processing of many persons already found eligible for resettlement. At the same time, we discovered a high degree of fraud in the family reunification program for certain populations, undermining our hallowed objective of reuniting families torn apart by war and persecution. In today’s world, we must know precisely who everyone is that comes into our country.

Even without 9/11, the tectonic plate shift at the end of the Cold War radically changed the nature of U.S. refugee admissions. People were no longer fleeing Communism in the hundreds of thousands each year. From the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s at least three-quarters of refugees coming to the United States were from the former Soviet Union or Southeast Asia. Now those flows have slowed to a trickle. From processing hundreds of thousands of refugees in two places—Indochina and the former Soviet Union—now we must work hard to admit a few thousand from some 60 locations around the world.

Some of these 60 widely scattered places are quite remote and quite dangerous. Complex logistics make the resettlement effort harder. To achieve safety for refugee interviews, we had to move two major refugee populations from their camps in Africa—Somali Bantu in Dadaab to Kakuma in Kenya, and Liberians in Danane to Abidjan in Ivory Coast. The logistics of these movements and extensive security enhancements after the moves for some 20,000 persons have far exceeded our budgeted resources. Add to this the costs of immunizations for communicable diseases—including measles, chicken pox and rubella ($400,000 for measles vaccination alone in the Hmong camp in Thailand)—and the costs per refugee admitted have almost doubled over the last two years. The process is also much more labor-intensive.

These are some of the reasons our ability to admit refugees fell sharply for the last two years. We had two choices: one, to decide that changes on the world scene were both unprecedented and insurmountable, or two, to mount the most extensive and expensive rescue operation in the history of the U.S. refugee admissions program and micro-manage a labor-intensive effort on a daily basis. We chose the latter.

In doing so, we have expanded the concept of "rescue" to include refugees who have been living in protracted unresolved situations, like the Meskhetian Turks in Russia who have lived without basic rights since fleeing Central Asia in 1989 or the Lao Hmong living in a closed camp in Thailand for about a decade. We are resettling groups such as the long-suffering Somali Bantu and those Liberians who suffered under the Taylor regime to rescue them from violence and uncertainty.

We have begun an interagency transformation of the refugee admissions process and it is working. At this stage in the fiscal year we have already surpassed the numbers in the whole of last year and of the year before. How has this been achieved? What has been the anatomy of admissions transformation?

First, streamlining of security procedures has significantly reduced processing delays without jeopardizing national security. Most background checks now take 45 days, down from many months during the difficult years of 2002 and 2003. Without compromising the threat to security of family reunification fraud, DHS is now clearing the backlog of thousands of cases through its Refugee Access Verification Unit (RAVU). The WRAPS system I mentioned earlier has now been deployed worldwide (except in Cuba) and gives our processing locations real-time access to information on any given case.

Second, we launched an intensive effort to augment the ability of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to identify and refer refugees in need of rescue and resettlement. We have poured substantial funding into UNHCR for this campaign—$6 million dollars last year and $7.6 million this year. For that $7.6 million dollars, we expect 21,250 referrals, and we are pressing UNHCR to meet that target. Already the results of this effort are evident in thousands of new referrals of Liberians in West Africa, and increased caseloads in Cairo, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Bangkok, as well as in Central and South America.

In addition to enhanced UNHCR funding, we expanded NGO involvement in the identification of refugees in need of resettlement. We have held two workshops in East and West Africa to train assistance NGO staffs and to encourage their referrals of cases of special need.

We keep constant pressure on overseas processing entities and on IOM, which does medical exams, to keep pace with each other and avoid bottlenecks.

We in PRM, as well as DHS, have been traveling overseas to work with UNHCR, host governments, and U.S. diplomatic missions to explore potential groups for processing, including Meskhetian Turks in Russia; Congolese in Angola; Liberians in Guinea, Ghana, and Ivory Coast; Central Africans in Uganda; Hmong in Thailand; Vietnamese in the Philippines and others. Some have been in protracted refugee situations. We are determined not to let them languish. I am delighted to report that the Meskhetians and Hmong are beginning to arrive in the United States.

But we don’t want domestic bottlenecks to negate our overseas efforts. In the case of the Hmong, we have appealed to the Refugee Council USA’s Committee on Resettlement to speed up sponsorship assurances for Hmong in the U.S.

Transformation of the U.S. admissions program has required daily problem-solving but also provides daily gratification. I get a report each afternoon on refugee arrivals and enjoy seeing the totals rise and break through key milestones—10,000, 20,000, 30,000.

While maintaining productivity in the year’s admissions, we must also look to next year and the years thereafter. The faint of heart fear that meeting this year’s 50,000 allocated numbers will mortgage our success in reaching that number or higher in 2005. It will be difficult, but we are sparing no effort to insure that America remains the beacon for "…the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

We will continue to strengthen the referral capacity of the UNHCR and NGOs. We will replicate in other parts of the world the pilot NGO referral program in Africa that I mentioned; we plan to develop one in Asia and possibly elsewhere with a view to substantially increasing NGO referrals.

We have dedicated and will dedicate additional personnel to admissions efforts. We are working with resettlement agencies and other NGO colleagues in establishing rosters of resettlement specialists available for possible short-term deployments to identify new groups for resettlement and assist in processing.

We hope to be able to expand use of the family reunification category. We will improve ways to identify, protect, and resettle unaccompanied children.

Finally, we sponsored the Martin report, an independent, comprehensive study of the refugee program to assess the strengths and weaknesses of our program and recommend improvements.

But we face a couple of dilemmas. First is funding. Despite strong support from the White House and NGOs, we do not as of now have adequate funding for 2005 and 2006 to maintain the program at even the current level without taking funds from life-sustaining refugee assistance and solutions other than resettlement: repatriation and local integration.

The other dilemma is a happier one: We have had great success in reducing the total of refugees worldwide, thus shrinking the potential pool for resettlement. By the end of this fiscal year, the estimated refugee population will be 16 and a half percent lower than a year ago. And by the end of next fiscal year, it is expected to be nearly 34 percent lower than last year’s total.

Of course, we will continue to fight for resources and strive to identify populations for resettlement. We are motivated by the refugee success stories we see all around us.

I personally witnessed a community-wide success story last year in Utica, New York. Utica was a city in decay that came back to life thanks in significant part to its refugees. These refugees--from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East--fixed up run-down properties and made shabby neighborhoods nice again, thus increasing the property tax base. They also set up businesses, paid income taxes, and voted. In short, they became model citizens.

During a recent trip to Kenya, I observed some activities that are giving you and your volag partners a head start in integrating refugees into your communities. The trip, and another recent trip I took to West Africa, mostly dealt with resettlement issues and gave me a chance to demonstrate the priority we place on rescuing people. What I want to highlight for you from that trip are the language training and cultural orientation activities I saw.

At the Kakuma camp, in addition to observing English teaching, I saw a classroom set up like an American home, where the Somali Bantu who are destined for resettlement learned the basics of modern life, like how to use kitchen appliances and toilets and how to open doors. These are people, remember, who have never seen a doorknob before. This kind of orientation is labor-intensive work that requires great patience and dedication from our partners who are performing it. But it works. The New York Times reported last week on Somali Bantu in Tucson who went through this orientation and are now successfully coping with the complexities of American apartments, jobs, and school. They are buying cars and saving to buy houses. Children make good grades and dream of becoming doctors.

Overseas and here at home, we are working hard to create refugee success stories. You can and should be proud of your role in this success. Let’s continue to work together to create many more of these success stories.

Thank you again for the opportunity to be here with you and for the wonderful work you are doing. I would be happy to take your questions.