Enduring mystery: How did Delaware dodge the
refugee bullet for decades? by Ann Corcoran 5/12/17
There is a short news item at Delaware
Public Media about
how a Jewish refugee agency in Delaware is waiting for seven families (likely Muslim
families based on their country of origin) they hope they will soon be settling
in Delaware—the First State. So I thought I might revisit a topic I
haven’t discussed for a long time and that is the origin of the Refugee Act of 1980.
Senators Biden and Kennedy are
responsible for the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program. See list below of other
Senators deeply involved in 1979.
The state of Hawaii’s stay on
Trump’s second travel ban suspends the FY17 cap for refugees – currently set at
50,000.
That opens the door for refugee families from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq
and the Eastern African country of Eritrea in
line to come to the First State, but none of them have travel plans in place
yet.
Jewish Family Services of Delaware
Refugee Resettlement Coordinator Sarah Green says that currently, the families
are stuck in Jordan and Ethiopia.
“It’s hard to know what’s
happening,” Green said. “We just have to wait and see. We get a very limited
view of what’s happening over there.”
She says her agency is taking the
approach that these families could arrive any day – and working to ensure they’ll
be comfortable when they reach Delaware.
There’s reason to expect
they could arrive soon. According to the U.S. State Department, 900 flights for
refugees to the U.S. are being scheduled every week.
As of this morning, 831 new refugees
arrived in the US in the past week (5/5-5/12) according to Wrapsnet. And, that puts
us at 44,072 this fiscal year.
At this rate the Trump
Administration will hit 50,000 in about 7-8 weeks. Will they stop at 50,000 which should happen around the first week of
July? That is the question!
Delaware, in some ways, is more
interesting to me than some of the other very low refugee admission states
(LOL! including Hawaii). And that is because then Senator Joe Biden was one
of the chief sponsors of the Senate-generated Refugee Act of 1979 (S.643) which became the Refugee Act of
1980 when Jimmy Carter signed it in to law the following
year. You can learn more about it here. Pay special attention to the part about how states
were NOT to be burdened with welfare costs of refugees. Here are the co-sponsors of S.643
another of Senator Ted Kennedy’s swamp-America-with-immigrants bills:
See Chart on original posting: Mostly
Dems of course! So how is it that Delaware is in the bottom ten locations for refugee
seeding when then Senator and now former Vice President Joe Biden is that
state’s most prominent political figure? Did he welcome refugees to
America in 1979, but keep them from swamping Delaware with diversity for
decades?
Wrapsnet data only goes back to FY2003, but that gives us
enough years to see a pattern. (For researchers more diligent than I am, you
can go back through all the previous annual reports and
put the data together from the very beginning, but I expect the pattern is
similar in the early years.)
So from FY03 through today (in FY17)
we admitted 886,324 refugees to America (not including asylum seekers) and
Delaware got a whopping 139 of them!
In the years Joe Biden
was Vice President, Delaware got only 50 refugees.
See chart on original posting: Here
are the last ten locations for refugee placement from FY03 to the present. What the heck is “Unknown State?”
Does that mean 68 refugees were placed secretly somewhere? Yikes!
If Delaware Public Media really wanted to do some
important work, reporters there should try to find out exactly why and how
Delaware dodged a bullet for so many years when their claim to fame, Veep Joe
Biden, sponsored the original law and then apparently kept diversity-seeding
from the state! (It is not because of the state’s small size since Rhode Island
got thousands more than Delaware).
For new readers, this post is filed
in my ‘where to find information’ category
and in ‘Refugee statistics.’
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