On Monday, Joe Biden announced he would quadruple the historically low ceiling imposed by his predecessor on refugee resettlements for the current fiscal year. But in the same breath, Mr. Biden said he wouldn’t reach his own limit of 62,500 admissions, which, excluding the draconian annual caps of the Trump era, is itself the lowest such number since the modern refugee program’s inception in 1980. Mr. Biden’s announcement is a recommitment to the level of refugee resettlement set by his own campaign — a commitment from which he retreated last month as unaccompanied Central American minors and families surged over the southern border, seeking asylum. In fact, those undocumented minors and families have nothing to do with the refugee program, which, with bipartisan support, has admitted migrants after rigorous security and health screenings and provided support for resettling them here for decades. Unhelpfully, the president himself, by allowing concerns over one policy to subvert his plans for the other, has conflated the two, thereby doing his GOP critics a favor as they lay plans to use immigration as a weapon against him in the 2022 midterm elections. Symbolism is important here. By resurrecting his original cap for refugee admissions for the current year, and pledging a new ceiling of 125,000 in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, Mr. Biden is signaling that this country will reassert its moral and humanitarian leadership on the world stage.
The challenge in increasing refugee admissions is not about a shortage of resources, as some officials have suggested. In fact, admitting more refugees would unlock existing resettlement funds already in the federal budget. And once the government has vetted refugees fleeing violence, war, and natural disasters, the heavy lifting of resettling them in communities across the country is handled by nine nonprofit agencies, not by bureaucrats.
And once settled in those communities, who have no say in the decision, the financial burden is shifted from the resettlement organizations to those communities.