How Many Refugees Are There in the World?
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There were 26 million refugees on the planet at the end of 2019, according to the United Nations report published on World Refugee Day, June 20, 2020. We generally think of refugees as those who have been forced to flee their homes due to a natural or a human disaster, to an environmental calamity or to an economic collapse. The UN’s definition is more specific, however, and is directly related to war and conflict. Refugees, in the terminology developed by the United Nations just after World War II, are those who have been forced to flee their own countries because of “a well-founded fear of persecution.”
The UN reports on the worldwide status of refugees every year, and when they do they include two other groups. One of those groups is asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are refugees because they have fled persecution, but they are refugees who are in a country where they wish to remain, and where they have officially applied for asylum. The other group, internally displaced persons (IDPs), are those who have fled conflict zones within their own countries, but who have remained within the borders of that country.
The Forcibly Displaced
Together these three groups make a total of 79.5 million people who come under the mandate of the UN Refugee Agency as “forcibly displaced.” The Agency’s most recent report, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2019, is packed with statistics, charts and country-specific information. It’s not a breezy read — the UN like facts, figures and precision. You could take a glance at the data summarized by the opening graphics and think, well yes, it definitely sounds bad, and move on.
A step back to consider the overall picture, however, makes it clear that we are living in an era characterized by vast waves of migratory movement taking place on a planetary scale. A closer look at the human component reveals that these waves consist of thousands of difficult and dangerous journeys undertaken by individuals, families and groups churning with aspiration, desperation, fear and hope as they search for better lives for themselves and their children.
When thinking about the current refugee situation, it’s important to consider the scope of the UN’s mission, the conflicts that give rise to refugee flight and the international and national institutions that manage that flight. First, to imagine the sheer number of people involved some comparisons with the US population might help. Looking at the two most populous states, will we get to the total of forcibly displaced if we combine the populations of California and Texas? Not quite, that puts us at about 68.4 million, so working from Wikipedia statistics we’ll have to add Arizona and Oklahoma to hover around the 79.5 million total.
Breaking the UN numbers down into the three main groups, the refugee total of 26 million is about equal to the combined populations of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. We’ll get close to the 45.7 million IDPs if we add up the populations of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia. The number of asylum-seekers, 4.2 million, is slightly more than the current population of Los Angeles.
An idea of the scale will help us appreciate the logistics of the UN Refugee Agency’s mission. That mission was defined in in 1948 when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established “to help millions of Europeans who had fled or lost their homes.” The 1951 Convention and Protocol was drafted in the post WW II era to “assure refugees the widest possible exercise” of “fundamental rights and freedoms.” The Convention specifically defined refugees as those forced to flee their countries out of fear of persecution “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”
The UN also developed a set of criteria designed to grant refugees protection in an international legal framework. According to UNHCR, Refugee Status Determination (RSD) is “the legal or administrative process by which governments or UNHCR determine whether a person seeking international protection is considered a refugee under international, regional or national law.” Those fleeing persecution seek legal status in order to avoid ‘refoulement’, the official term for being sent or forced back into a potentially fatal situation in one’s own country. Applicants for RSD are required to be outside the country from which they seek recognition, and they must be approved for such status by that country or by UNHCR.
The global situation has, of course, changed considerably since WW II and the UN’s mission has expanded in concert. Today, the United Nations and its allied agencies furnish “protection and assistance to nearly 59 million refugees, returnees, internally displaced and stateless people” in 126 countries. What is more, the Agency has had to contend with the fact that the world refugee total has doubled in this decade, from 10 million in 2010 to 20.4 million in 2019 (Global Trends, p. 16; a page number refers to the downloadable pdf version, a link with no page number leads to the shorter online version).
Where do they come from? Two thirds of the world’s current refugees originate in five countries, Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar (p. 3). Syria, with the largest number of forcibly displaced persons in the world at 13.2 million, has produced 6.6 million refugees since the civil war began with protests against president Bashar al-Assad in 2011. 3.6 million refugees have fled Venezuela in an ongoing social and political crisis that became increasingly exacerbated after the contested re-election of Nicolás Maduro in 2018 (p. 8). This situation has brought 1.8 million Venezuelan refugees into Colombia (p. 22).
Columbia also has the highest number of IDPs in the world at 8 million, a consequence of conflicts dating from the mid-1960s involving left-wing guerilla groups, government forces and right-wing paramilitaries. Other countries with large numbers of IDPs include Syria, with 6.1 million as a result of the civil war, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 5 million, attributable to cyclical political conflicts and the legacy of colonialism. Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan also have high levels of IDPs (p. 30).
Refugees have been fleeing Afghanistan since the Soviet-Afghan War between 1979 and 1989, a conflict that was followed by a series of civil wars and then by the ongoing American war which began in 2001. The 2.5 million Afghan refugees are described by the UN as the “largest protracted refugee population in Asia.” Myanmar has produced 1.1 million refugees, most of whom are Rohingya Muslims fleeing ethnic and religious persecution that began to increase in August, 2017 (p. 20). The Rohingya are not considered citizens by Myanmar, and are therefore among the 4.2 million persons classified as “stateless” by the UN (p. 56)
Refugees in the United States of America
Every country has a different set of institutions and mechanisms for selecting and settling refugees, so in order to take a more in-depth look at the way the process works, we’ll focus on the United States. The US does not itself vet refugees, but depends on the United Nations for recommendations. The requirements for refugee status are detailed on the website of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). According to the US Refugee Admissions Program, there are three current priority groups for refugee-status interviews: those who are referred by UNHCR, a US Embassy or a designated non-governmental organization (NGO); certain groups that are of “special humanitarian concern” to the US; individuals who are candidates for family reunification. The wording on the USCIS site makes it clear that receiving an interview does not in itself guarantee an affirmative decision.
Once an applicant’s priority status for the US is verified, she, they or he will be connected with a Resettlement Support Center. These Centers are charged with pre-screening and educating applicants, with preparing case files and with initiating biographic security checks. At this point the USCIS undertakes its own verification process, which includes further security checks with the Department of Defense, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. You can follow the USCIS flowchart here
The applicant’s claim can then be approved, denied or held for further review. If approved, they, she or he will receive a medical screening and a cultural orientation, travel to the US will be arranged, and the State Department will assign the case to one of the nine US NGOs that help with social integration and economic stabilization. A legal refugee can work and apply to bring family members and, a year after arriving in the US, must apply for a Permanent Resident Card. After five years of residence, legally settled refugees may apply for citizenship.
Since refugees were designated as a group deserving international legal protection in the aftermath of World War II, refugee flows have shifted with the rise and fall of conflict and persecution in various parts of the world. The US, for its part, welcomed more that 400,000 Europeans in the years following World War II. Cubans began to flee when Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and by 1980 the Cuban immigrant population in the US had increased to more than 600,000. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 caused several refugee surges and brought more than half a million Vietnamese to the United States by 1990. In the late 1970s and the 1980s more than a million immigrants came to the US because of wars in Central America.
Upward of 300,000 Iranians have immigrated to the US since the Islamic Revolution in the late 70s, and some 300,000 refugees came from the collapsing Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s. More than 130,000 refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina fleeing the collapse of Yugoslavia had settled in the US by the mid-90s. Somalis escaping civil war and natural disaster began to arrive in the early 90s, and numbered about 140,000 by 2015. Between 2008 and 2016, the majority of refugees admitted to the US came from Myanmar, Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2017, 2018 and 2019 the Democratic Republic of the Congo headed the list, followed by Iraq and Syria in 2017, then by Myanmar and Ukraine in 2018 and 2019.
The general tendency is to settle refugees near others from their country or culture, Iraqis in California and Michigan, for example, or Cubans in Florida and Arizona. The most populous states accept the highest numbers, and overall since 2001 California, Texas, New York and Florida have led in refugee settlement. In historical terms, the US has welcomed more refugees than any other country, about 3 million since the Refugee Act of 1980 established the legal terms for resettlement.
Each year the American President, in consultation with Congress, sets the number of refugees to be accepted out of the hundreds of thousands of individuals identified by UNHCR as eligible worldwide. In the early 1980s the cap was at 230,000 per year, but dropped quickly through the mid-1980s to 70,000. It rose through the late 1980s and early 1990s to a cap of 142,000, dropped again through the early 2000s, then levelled off in the 70–80,000 range until the most recent presidential election.
Since the election of Donald Trump in late 2016, the number of refugees admitted to the US has declined precipitously. The Obama administration had set a cap of 110,000 for 2017, but the incoming administration promptly lowered it to 50,000. For 2018 the cap was reduced to 45,000, with 22,491 actually admitted. According to the Pew Research Center, the 2019 cap dropped to 30,000, while current UNHCR data shows 21,159 resettlement departures to the US for 2019. The 2020 ceiling had been set at 18,000, the lowest US refugee allotment since the program began in 1980, but due to the pandemic the UN suspended all departures in March, 2020. As a result of the decline in US acceptance rates, Canada is now the world leader in resettlement.
Asylum in the United States of America
Although asylum seekers are refugees they face a different set of obstacles because, by definition, they are in the country where they seek protection. According to the UN report, 2 million new asylum applications were registered worldwide in 2019, bringing the total since 2010 to 16.2 million (p. 36). In the US itself 301,000 people applied for asylum in 2019. The US application pool was the largest, followed by those of Peru, Germany, France and Spain (p. 39). For the last decade, Germany and the US received the most asylum applications, 2 million and 1.4 million respectively, while the greatest number of asylum applications worldwide came from Syria, 1.4 million, and Afghanistan, 1 million (p. 40-41).
In order to request asylum in the US, seekers must file either a defensive or an affirmative application depending on the situation. Those who arrive at the border or a port of entry without proper legal documentation face immediate removal, but may request asylum based on the criteria known as “credible fear” of persecution if they return to their country of origin. If an asylum officer agrees with this assessment, the candidate then files a defensive application with the Immigration Court in order to prevent removal.
These cases are heard in adversarial courtroom proceedings but, unlike criminal trials in the US, legal representation is not guaranteed, so candidates must often represent themselves. Not only are they frequently in precarious financial circumstances, but applicants must also deal with formidable barriers of language and culture. Legal aid is available in some locations; see the UNHCR reference page for a list of resources.
Asylum seekers who are in the US and not in removal proceedings must apply for affirmative asylum through the USCIS by filing an I-589 application within one year of arrival. Applicants may work after 150 days while their applications are pending and, if asylum is granted, may apply for Permanent Residence and can petition to bring their families to the US. If an applicant from this group is turned down, the individual is placed in removal proceedings and the case is referred to an Immigration Judge at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). The applicant may then file for defensive asylum and a new hearing will be conducted independently of USCIS.
Those who have entered the US seeking asylum have traditionally been permitted by law to remain in the country while their cases are decided, but actual practice began to change in 2018. As illegal entries of largely Central American migrants began to climb at the US-Mexico border in April of that year, the Attorney General ordered the adoption of a “zero-tolerance policy.” In May, the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive requiring that unauthorized migrants who did not pass through a legal port of entry be referred to federal prosecution.
Since the ports of entry were overwhelmed, the directive resulted in parents and children being separated when adults were sent to federal court and children were assigned to juvenile facilities. Figures from litigation against the Trump administration by the American Civil Liberties Union indicate that more that 5,400 children were separated from parents between July 1, 2017 and June 26, 2018, when a federal judge ordered a halt to the practice. Photographs along with first-hand evidence and eyewitness accounts confirm that conditions in what amounted to detention camps were at best difficult, at worst squalid, traumatizing and dangerous.
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The border was soon in the news again when, in October 2018, a group of migrants left Honduras and began the trek north toward the United States. Others from El Salvador and Guatemala joined along the way, and in November a caravan of 7,000 women, men and children fleeing violence and poverty in Central America arrived in Tijuana at the US-Mexico border. The Trump administration characterized this and subsequent caravans as an “invasion,” threatened the use of force, and dispatched troops to the border. In an attempt to stem the flow of asylum seekers, the administration instituted two new programs, the Migrant Protection Protocols and a policy known as ‘metering’.
The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) were issued in January of 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security. Also known as the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, the Protocols allow most asylum seekers to be returned to Mexico while their cases are evaluated. Although he Protocols were blocked in April of 2019, the injunction was lifted in May. Asylum seekers waiting in Mexico were also subjected to metering when US and Mexican officials at ports of entry established limited lists of candidates to be interviewed on any given day. This process forced those not chosen to wait in already overburdened border towns in Mexico.
In spite of turn-back efforts and terrible conditions at ports of entry, migrants continued to come. By April of 2019 arrivals had reached nearly 100,000 per month, and by September there were more than 1 million cases backlogged in immigration courts. In July, 2019 the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security instituted a “safe third country rule” requiring that seekers request asylum if they pass through a third country offering protection. The rule was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in September, 2019, and in July and September the US signed third country agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
The number of migrants had already begun to fall several months before the agreements were signed, however. In May, 2019 President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on imports from Mexico if the Mexican government did not increase control of the border. Mexico complied by sending National Guard troops, and this initiative, combined with prolonged wait times in Mexico succeeded in turning away seekers. By September migrant arrivals had dropped significantly, and by December, 2019 there had been a 70 percent decline from the previous May. Vox has reported a generalized abandonment of asylum seekers at the border, where thousands of migrants are exposed to the weather, lack basic necessities and are menaced by crime and deteriorating health conditions.
It is as yet unclear how the situation at the southwest border has affected US asylum numbers. Data on the asylum statistics page of the Department of Homeland Security is current through fiscal year 2016, and indicates that the number of asylum grants per year in the US has fluctuated in the 20,000 to 30,000 range since 1995 (the fiscal year runs from October of the preceding calendar year through September of the year listed). Data for FY 2017 and FY 2018 are available on another DHS page, the Annual Flow Report on Refugees and Asylees (Table 9). According to those statistics, 26,509 asylum grants were issued in FY 2017, and 38,687 in FY 2018.
The US government has not yet published FY 2019 numbers, but there is data on the TRAC Immigration statistics page of Syracuse University. That site shows that 19,831 persons were granted asylum in FY 2019, somewhat low, but not alarmingly so. There were, however, 67,406 asylum cases adjudicated, a record number. That means the denial rate was 69%, which is the highest it has been since the late 1990s. In contrast to overall denials in FY 2019, the denial rate for Chinese applicants was 25%. The percentage of grants by nationality in 2019 was highest for China (18.3% of the total), El Salvador (12.2%) and India (10.1%), in 2018 the top three were China (17.8%), Venezuela (15.7%) and El Salvador (7.7%).
The War
At this point it is more than evident that the Trump administration has been working and will continue to work assiduously to reduce the number of non-residents legally permitted to settle in the United States. The annual total of refugees admitted has dropped abruptly since 2017, and asylum denials have risen sharply. What is more, there has been an outright assault at the US-Mexico border directed against asylum seekers fleeing the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala and San Salvador.
Here, the actions of the administration have taken on the trappings of a de facto war whose tactics include the activation of the US and Mexican militaries and the criminalization of large numbers of people for the act of seeking a better life within international norms. The war has dictated the separation of families and the detention of thousands of children in degrading and dangerous conditions, actions which both reduce asylum numbers and serve as a clear-cut warning to future seekers.
Language has been a significant weapon in this conflict, and its use has been characterized by the pointed manipulation of labels to generate or exacerbate distrust toward groups who have become a focus for anti-immigrant rhetoric. The use of derogatory terminology by the American government to describe asylum seekers can be traced, in recent history, to the George W. Bush administration. In the early 2000s the DHS Secretary began using the term “catch and release” to refer to the practice of detaining then releasing asylum seekers to wait for their hearings. Both the Obama and Trump administrations continued to use this expression to refer to migrants as if they were animals to be marked and tracked for experimentation.
More recently President Trump and like-minded commentators have made frequent use of the terms “invasion” and “invaders” to describe the caravans of women, men and children from Central America. Now another term seems to be entering the lexicon. Early in 2020 the Supreme Court permitted the DHS to implement the “public charge” rule beginning on February 24. It allows USCIS to deny admission, a green card or a visa to certain categories of immigrants who are deemed likely to depend on government benefits at some point in the future. In this Minority Report scenario, the law will permit officials to judge potential residents based on supposed future actions, and those marked as likely ‘public charges’ can be excluded for something that has not happened, and that might never take place.
On June 10, 2020 the Trump administration sharpened the language weapon to a finer point in a truly Orwellian move that seeks to hollow out key historical terms bearing on international protection. The notice of proposed rulemaking by the Department of Justice intends to identify “frivolous” applications and, worse, to amend the definitions of key terms such as “political opinion” and “persecution.” If the rule change goes forward, it will permit immigration judges to terminate applications without a hearing, to judge chosen cases as without merit, to adjudicate claims under the redefined terms and to bar asylum claims even when “credible fear” is in evidence. As numerous commentators have noted, the rule would basically dismantle the US asylum system as we know it.
The recourse to language intended to demean immigrants and asylum seekers, to characterize them as less than human and unworthy of protection, has a long history. Terms like wop, spic, dago, frog, mick, wetback have been in circulation since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the word ‘alien’ itself has been and remains the official term for those who are not of the nationality in question. Its use in English for ‘foreigner’ dates from the 14th century, and it is omnipresent in legal and juridical documents. A search on the USCIS website for ‘alien’ generates more than 3,000 results, bringing up terms such as “alien fiancé(e)” and “alien relative.” In 2016, in the wake of a campaign by Dartmouth students, the Library of Congress attempted to stop using “illegal aliens” as a bibliographical search term, but the US Congress reinstated it.
The warlike crusade to denigrate, expel or bar particular categories of migrants and to severely restrict access to international protection has hardly been limited to the Trump administration, however. In Europe in recent years divisiveness over immigration has led to political battles that became particularly pitched when migrant flows began to increase in 2014 due to conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Nigeria. In the peak year of 2015 more than a million migrants arrived in Europe, many of whom were brought by human traffickers to Greece from Turkey on a sea journey that saw thousands perish. In parallel with the situation at the US-Mexico border, asylum seekers continue to languish in detention camps in Greece.
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Like its equivalent in the United States, the European war has been fought with physical and verbal weapons and has had significant political effects. Migrants have been threatened with mass deportation, been accused of undermining Christianity and described as an invading force. They have been assaulted at borders by military and police forces, and rescue boats have been refused emergency docking rights. As a result of the 2015 crisis, centrist governments were weakened and far right parties came to life. The 2017 German elections saw the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany become the first far right party in the German Parliament since the 1950s. In Italy the 2018 elections brought about the fall of the center-left government following gains by Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant parties. In Spain, the ultra-nationalist, anti-feminist, anti-Muslin party Vox won 10% of the vote in the 2019 elections, this in a country that had not seen an active far right party since fascist dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975.
Futures
The war on refugees and asylum seekers conducted by the United States and the European Union clearly demonstrates that neither is prepared politically, socially or logistically for waves of mass migration. Although both the US and the EU have developed institutionalized and regulated approaches to immigration that are undergirded by international conventions, each system remains subject to prevailing political winds.
The EU does not have a Union-wide policy on immigration and asylum, but functions through directives and regulations implemented within the legal frameworks of each country. This leads to widely differing responses over which the Union has little control. Although the US government is centralized, the implementation of refugee and asylee policy depends almost entirely on the political inclinations of the administration in power.
Given the current state of geopolitics, the socioeconomic and political issue of large-scale migration is likely to become more rather than less volatile. In a 2015 article in The Guardian, Alexander Betts points out that two of the main drivers of mass migration, failing states and population mobility, are likely to become more pronounced in the future. Weak or unstable states are unable to offer protection to their citizens, others provide little economic opportunity, many have become sites of ongoing conflict and authoritarian regimes worldwide stifle basic rights. In addition, numerous scientific voices indicate that climate-change based migration appears likely in coming years. The result of these various factors can be, as we have seen in the Americas and Europe, the mass displacement of populations desperately seeking better and more stable lives.
Professor Betts makes several timely suggestions centered around access, shared responsibility and asylum categories. When borders are closed, seeking asylum becomes illegal, which allows smuggling, confusion and duplicity to thrive. Rethinking the UN definition of persecution would begin to bring the reality of economic survival migration into focus, while sharing responsibility at the state level would take the burden off the most physically accessible states. Rather than packing refugees into camps, establishing a system of self-reliance could help the displaced make positive contributions and, ideally, rebuild the societies they have fled.
Such reform will take political will, of course, not to mention national and international cooperation, all of which are in short supply at the moment. And the question remains, why should the residents of any country or region welcome more immigrants?
One prevalent line of reasoning is based on the notion of human dignity, an argument that can be traced to eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his attempt to construct a universal basis for ethics, Kant contended that all human beings have an inherent value because they, we, are rational agents. As such, we all have the right to dignity and respect, and should be considered as ends in ourselves, not as a means to the ends of others. Humans, for Kant, have “an absolute worth, something that, as end in itself, could be a ground of determinate laws” (see pages 36–37 in Kant’s 1785 work).
The second important strand in this line of thought is that of human rights, a tradition that runs from seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke through Montesquieu, Paine and Mill, among others. The notion of rights became enshrined in the 1689 English Bill of Rights and, a century later, in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Other significant events, all related to war, were the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, the signing of the Lieber Code during the American Civil War, and the promulgation of the first of four Geneva Conventions in 1864. In the twentieth century, Articles 22 and 23 of the post WW I Covenant of the League of Nations seek to protect the inhabitants of former colonies by enshrining freedom of conscience and religion and by guaranteeing humane labor conditions.
The Covenant leads directly to the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to its much broader and more inclusive conception of rights. The first sentence of the Preamble links the Kantian notion of “inherent dignity” with the idea of “inalienable rights,” as the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” The 30 articles set forth the universality of rights in terms of race, gender, opinion and origin. They emphasize freedom from slavery, torture and arbitrary detention, promote equality before the law, the presumption of innocence and the right to legal redress. The framers also included the economic and cultural spheres with the rights to work, to an adequate standard of living, and to an education.
Two of the Articles are directly relevant to refugees and asylees. Article 14 details the right to seek asylum from persecution, and 28 emphasizes the right to an international order in which the principles of the Declaration can be realized. Further elaboration was undertaken by the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, promulgated in the wake of the mass displacement crisis following WW II, and by the 1967 Protocol, which expanded the refugee question beyond Europe and removed time limits. According to the Asylum Insight website, 145 of the 193 UN member states had ratified the Refugee Convention as of September, 2016.
Centuries of thought have gone into refining and expanding the concepts of dignity and human rights, and years have been spent building institutions to safeguard, promote and put these ideas into practice. Not everyone, however, is persuaded by such arguments or supportive of the institutions that have arisen to embody them. For many, the idea that human beings have inherent rights seems a foolish, dangerous or philosophically suspect notion, for others it is a potential obstacle to the accretion of power or to the flow of trade. Indeed, even those who are sympathetic to rights in the abstract may waver when they have the sense that ‘others’ with different languages and ways seek to settle near them.
Since even the noblest of intentions can take a distant second place to social and economic anxieties, let’s look at a more utilitarian approach to immigration based on just these concerns. To do so, we’ll focus on the demographics of the United States. Recent data has shown that the US is likely to experience a prolonged period of low or no population growth in the near future because deaths have begun to surpass births in some areas of the country.
One result of this trend, as the Census Bureau notes, is that the US population will age significantly in coming years as the elderly begin to outnumber the young. Another consequence involves two of the three factors in population growth, deaths and births. If deaths catch up with or outnumber births, zero growth, or even population loss, become distinct possibilities for the US.
The third and potentially decisive factor in the population equation is immigration. With that now in flux, the Census Bureau has developed three scenarios to project future US population growth based on zero, low and high immigration rates. In the low scenario, the population increase will be 53 million by 2060, in the high scenario 124 million by 2060. In the zero scenario, the population will peak in 2035 and then decline (A Changing Nation, p. 2).
Most alarming is the fact that the population of children (0–17) is expected to decline in both the zero and the low scenarios. Finally, the analysis points out that an increased immigration rate “produces a larger, younger, and more diverse population, while the absence of immigration over the next four decades will have the opposite result” (A Changing Nation, p. 20).
In addition, a low immigration rate will inevitably have economic consequences. A brief by the National Foundation for American Policy predicts that if current anti-immigration policies are not changed, economic growth may slow considerably. Their analysis focuses on recent reductions in refugee admissions, on the public charge rule, and on travel bans instituted by the Trump administration. The brief emphasizes the fact that “a large cut in immigration can do a great deal of long-term damage to the U.S. economy.”
Well, you might think, these dire scenarios may seem plausible, but who really knows what will happen in the future? The numbers are a bit abstract and besides, a smaller population wouldn’t be so bad, would it? After all, the US does seem crowded now, at least in some places, what difference could fewer people make, even young people?
You may be right, but then again it is possible that, in a few years, your child might need, let’s say, braces. Oh, sorry, there weren’t enough dental students to fill out the cohort that year. Water line spring a leak? Maybe next month, all the plumbers are on other jobs. Will your elderly parents need nursing home care? It’s too bad so many health care aides were deported a few years ago, nobody wants those jobs now.
And somewhere along the line we’re all descended from immigrants. Unless they were Native Americans, our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or great-great grandparents came to the US from somewhere else. In reality, many contemporaries that we think of as American-born immigrated to the US, Charlize Theron, for example, or Bruce Willis, Sammy Sosa, Joni Mitchell, Sergey Brin, Einstein, Carlos Santana, Audubon, Steinbeck, Jamaica Kincaid, immigrants all. And it’s important to remember that immigration cuts across all professions and economic categories, not all are physicists, artists, athletes or tech innovators, some are electricians, doctors, biologists, field hands, seamstresses, meteorologists, bricklayers. Or they could be, and will be if given the chance.
Still not convinced? Does the rights and dignity approach leave you cold? Does the utilitarian argument about practical advantage and economic growth seem to evoke nothing more than vague futures? Okay, one more argument and that’s it. According to the UN report, there were 153,000 unaccompanied or separated children in the 2019 refugee population, and another 25,000 children applied for asylum worldwide (Global Trends, p. 46). The UN likes official vocabulary, so for the sake of clarity let’s belabor the obvious, “unaccompanied or separated” — these kids were often alone when they arrived at their destinations or were taken into custody. What is worse, the figures are considered an undercount, because not all countries report data, and some don’t break it down into age levels.
Of the 153,000 child refugees reported for 2019, almost half originated in South Sudan, which has been in turmoil since it won independence from Sudan in 2011. The countries that housed the largest populations of registered refugee children in 2019 were Ethiopia, 41,500, and Uganda, 40,000, while Kenya and Cameroon also harbored large numbers. Since 2010 about 400,000 children have applied for asylum worldwide, the largest numbers in Germany, 87,000, Sweden, 60,600, Italy, 30,000, and the UK, 22,000. The majority of these applicants were from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Syria (p. 46).
The United States is not exempt from child migrants, and thousands are taken into custody every year. These “apprehensions,” as the Border Patrol calls them, are undocumented immigrants under 18 who are not accompanied by a parent or legal guardian. They are taken into custody even if they are with a non-parent relative, such as a grandparent or sibling, and are transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). ORR is required to adequately shelter and care for them until they can be released to sponsors as they wait for an immigration hearing. Sponsors may be parents or relatives who are already in the US, but they can also be other adults who meet the ORR’s requirements.
The official term for these young people, Unaccompanied Alien Children or UACs, is predictably demeaning. The fact that they are children is mitigated by the label ‘alien’, so that any sympathy a child might generate is blunted by the implication that she or he is not from here, and thus should probably not be here. ‘Unaccompanied’ insinuates that they either have no family, have left
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their families or that their families have left them, while the fact that they are classed as ‘apprehensions’ makes them de facto criminals. As a whole the terminology suggests that those in this group are not worthy of consideration as humans, that they can and should be relegated to the category of the sub-human and treated in a manner appropriate to, at best, delinquents or, at worst, objects.
Which is in actuality what often happens, as was made abundantly clear when parents and children seeking asylum were separated at the US-Mexico border. The fact is, though, that large numbers of unaccompanied children, sometimes as young as two or three, have been taken into custody for years. The ORR data on children released to sponsors in the US can be unsettling: 42,497 in FY 2017; 34,953 in FY 2018; 72,837 in FY 2019. The Customs and Border Patrol statistics page indicates that 76,020 Unaccompanied Alien Children were apprehended just at the southwest border in FY 2019. Once they’re in the custody of sponsors in the US, however, children are not necessarily out of danger. They are often trafficked, mistreated or abused, and sponsors themselves are potentially at risk of arrest and deportation if their immigration status is found to be irregular.
As if the situation for migrant children wasn’t already difficult enough, on March 20, 2020 the US government issued a decree that closed the northern and southern borders to immigration. Citing the coronavirus epidemic and the danger of transmission “between the United States and Mexico,” the decree suspends protections previously in place for unaccompanied children. At the end of March DHS began to send minors back to their home countries. Unaccompanied children who are no longer permitted to remain in the US are being summarily returned to Mexico or flown to Central America without the previously mandated referral to the Office of Refugee Resettlement; as of this writing, the decree has been extended to September 21, 2020.
Migrant children in Europe have fared no better, and facilities at the main detention centers in Greece are particularly overburdened. Writing in the UK HuffPost, Juliet Ferguson describes “sub-human conditions in camps in the five hotspots on the Aegean islands” with 8,300 children in detention, 1600 of whom are unaccompanied. Her article also emphasizes the fact that EU methodology is inconsistent, and that accurate data is hard to come by. Worldwide, the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty estimates that “at least 330,000 children are detained for migration-related purposes per year” (p. 16).
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The ways in which the most vulnerable members of society have been and are being treated is surely the most nefarious aspect of the global response to mass migration in the early twenty-first century. We have come to the point where we consider children as invaders, criminals or undesirables because they or their families seek shelter from persecution or from economic precarity. Like their adult counterparts, children are demeaned by the labels we use to describe them and degraded by the institutions responsible for their care. To add insult to injury, refugees and asylum seekers of all ages have become fodder for political rhetoric and pawns in a deadly game that has drawn even seemingly well-meaning institutions like the European Union into committing base and unworthy actions.
The picture is grim and the results have been deadly, but there are some signs of hope. Several European countries have begun to take in children from the Greek camps, and the 2018 UN Global Compact on Refugees addresses burden-sharing, refugee self-reliance and safe return. According to Global Trends, in the last decade 20 million people have received refugee or protected status as individuals or as groups in 183 countries or territories (p. 36).
The fact remains, though, that on the planet Earth millions of forcibly displaced humans live on the edge of extinction and, what is worse, that 40% of those 79.5 million are children (p. 2). I’m not arguing that the US, the EU or any other country or region should “take care of the entire human race” as some have characterized immigration reform. I am arguing for a comprehensive, equitable and well thought-out approach that is free from short-sighted manipulation and cynical political exploitation.
There are many organizations focused on immigration and numerous reform plans in circulation (see below). We know that immigration will require decision-making, planning and action on institutional, national, regional and global levels. But in democratic societies it is perhaps first and foremost a question that begins with individual conscience. Whether you are open to the dignity and rights argument, prefer a utilitarian approach, or are inclined to reject the idea of immigration altogether, conscious choices have to be made.
Even if you would rather wait and see which way the wind blows and then acquiesce in the majority voice, the ways we deal with immigration, and the ways in which we treat immigrants, will affect not just those of us who are on the planet now, but all those who follow us as well.
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Further Research
If you are interested in pursuing the question of immigration and asylum or in continuing to evaluate and weigh the arguments, there are numerous organizations of various political inclinations actively engaged with the issues: the American Immigration Council “believes that immigrants are part of our national fabric”; the Center for Immigration Studies “seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome”; the Fair Immigration Reform Movement is a coalition “working to build an America that values and respects the dignity of every person;” the Migration Policy Institute argues that “pragmatic immigration and integration policies are critical” for the future; the National Immigrant Justice Center “offers a wide range of legal services to low-income immigrants”; the National Immigration Law Center is “dedicated to defending and advancing the rights of immigrants with low income”; the National Immigration Forum seeks to make the “immigration system serve the national interest.”
All photos are in the Public Domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
