As attention focuses on the separation of families on the southern border, the Trump administration’s refugee policy is having a chilling effect on other parts of the US immigration system.
The number of refugees admitted to the US in 2018 is likely to reach between 21,000-22,000, less than half of Donald Trump’s 45,000 stated target, largely as a result of bureaucratic inaction.
“The president says he wants to bring in 45,000 refugees, but the behind the scenes the processing of those refugees has slowed to a crawl,” said Ruben Chandrasekar, executive director of International Rescue Committee in Baltimore.
Federally-supported resettlement programs are now facing closure as refugee arrivals slow.
The threshold to apply for federal funding is 100 refugee cases. Chandrasekar estimates the number of resettlement offices, which help people start a new life in the US, has fallen from 350 to around 250 since the travel ban.
IRC’s Baltimore office has itself seen a drop in $1m in federal assistance; despite increases in private donations, three IRC locations have been forced to close.
“It’s death by a thousand paper cuts from an administration that our CEO David Miliband recently described as ‘malevolent and competent’. The resettlement system is being dismantled, and the government has already said not all nine resettlement agencies will be funded next year,” said Chandrasekar.
A supreme court decision on Hawaii’s challenge to the Trump administration’s ban on travellers from predominantly Muslim nations – which could come as soon as Thursday – may not result in any significant change to the number of refugees coming to the US or the restoration of degraded US resettlement programs, whichever way the justices rule.
Baltimore, which has long recognized the benefit of immigrant communities, is now faced with the knock-on effect of those reductions.
“Communities like this have stopped receiving refugees and as result were being deprived of the energy they bring to cities like this that are trying to grow their populations,” Chandrasekar said.
The focus on a sanctuary city like Baltimore coincides with UN World Refugee Day and the release of This is Home: A Refugee Story, a powerful, closely-observed documentary that follows Syrian refugees as they establish new lives in the city.
New York-based film-maker Alexandra Shiva, who was in the city for a screening this week, said she was drawn to depict the struggle of refugees to establish themselves in a new country. “I wanted to show it through intimacy, and not do it through headlines or trying to make it overtly political.”
Still, Shiva allows, the immigration debate is more emotional than other Trump administration policy efforts because “it is actually about de-humanizing people who are already in trouble”.
Shiva came to the subject through the Princess Firyal of Jordan, whose country currently registers 650,000 of the 5.5 million Syrians who have fled the country since 2011. In addition, there are 3.3 million refugees in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon ; another half a million Syrian refugees now reside in Europe. (Canada and the United States have taken in approximately 50,000 and 18,000, respectively.)
Lamentably, the US accepted just 11 Syrians refugees in the first four months of 2018, compared to 15,479 in the last year of the Obama presidency and 3,024 in 2017. But that sharp reduction in number is affecting not only those still awaiting US resettlement; integration is one that benefits from force of numbers.
The film is currently being screened around the country at IRC-organised or through religious outreach organisations and community centers. “We want to get it to wherever there are refugees so we can say this is happening in your neighborhood, and this what you can do to help,” says Shiva.
“If this film can do that, and it provides opportunity to take action, that’s fantastic. I think people want to get involved. We were complacent in 2016 when I started the project, and now there’s more support as a result of the anti-Muslim sentiment in our political climate.”
The effort to draw attention to the global plight of Syrian refugees received a boost earlier in the week when UN refugee agency special envoy Angelina Jolie visited the Domiz Camp, in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, which is home to 33,000 Syrian refugees.
Jolie said funding received by the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) to help Syrian refugees has dropped by half since last year.
“There are terrible human consequences. When there is even not the bare minimum of aid, refugee families cannot receive adequate medical treatment. Women and girls are left vulnerable to sexual violence, many children cannot go to school, and we squander the opportunity to invest in refugees,” she said.
The latest UNHCR figures, published Tuesday, estimates that more than 68 million people were forced to flee their homes last year as a result of war, violence and other forms of persecution, up from 65.6 million in 2016.
Last week, one of those featured in Shiva’s film, Madiha Alghothani, who dons a stare-and-stripes hijab after she became a target of racial abuse, told the Guardian that while she was happy to be in the US, she was still sad to be separated from her homeland.
“I’m happy for my children, but maybe it’s more difficult for me. All my family are in Syria. But if they had the same opportunity, of course they’d come.”
- This is Home: A Refugee Story is released on Friday through Epix
