Donate Now Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC
After admitting record numbers of Iraqi refugees in the final months of fiscal 2008, the United States is off to a slow start in the first months of the fiscal '09.
The country admitted 705 Iraqis as refugees in October and 738 in November, according to numbers released last week by the State Department. That's a steep decline from the more than 2,000 per month who landed here in July, August and September.
The 1,443 admitted in the first two months of fiscal 2009 is also well off the pace required to reach the minimum of 17,000 predicted for the year by Ambassador Thomas Foley, the top State Department official on refugee issues. But it does follow a pattern: Admissions started slowly last year, too – just 812 were admitted in the first two months of fiscal '08 – before picking up in the final months to soar past the goal of 12,000. In the end, 13,823 were admitted.
Officials say refugee admissions are cyclical in nature, and that a target of 17,000, for example, doesn't mean that one twelfth of that number will be admitted every month. They still anticipate reaching their goal by the time the fiscal year ends next September.
"Refugee resettlement numbers are always lower at the beginning of the fiscal year," a State Department official said today. "There is a hiatus as the cooperative agreements with the [non-governmental agencies] who do the processing overseas and the resettlement here expire on September 30th every year, and are re-negotiated and signed at the beginning of each fiscal year."
Refugee advocates say the record numbers reached over the summer demonstrate a capacity that is now being underused.
"Just look at what we've achieved in the last three or four months," Human Rights First analyst Amelia Templeton told me in September. "If we were to continue that, that would put us at about 24,000 admissions for next year. I think, as a starting goal, that we ought to at the very least commit to doing what we're doing right now."
(Updated 12/9/08 with State Department comment)