How many refugees are allowed into the country?
Over 200,000 refugees were allowed to the US per year at the program’s inception in 1980; by 2022, that number had dropped to 25,465. Throughout that time, there was a significant fluctuation in the number of refugees admitted; they fell throughout the 1980s, spiked again in the 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union, and then reached a record low in 2021. The president proposes annual caps on refugee admissions, which need to be approved by Congress. President George W. Bush halted refugee admissions for a few months after the 9/11 attacks, citing worries about national security. The number of refugees accepted was capped at 70,000 and 80,000 from 2001 to 2015, however both the Bush and Obama administrations frequently admitted fewer people than the ceilings permitted.
In 2016, as part of an attempt to solve a growing migration problem brought on by the increasing violence in Syria, President Obama raised an earlier agreed ceiling of eighty thousand to admit in an additional five thousand refugees. Obama suggested that the US impose a cap of 110,000 refugee admissions for fiscal year 2017 (FY2017) as humanitarian crises abroad worsened, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Trump revoked President Obama’s proposed restriction by limiting the number of refugees admitted to the nation in fiscal year 2017 to 50,000. In 2018, he reduced this cap to forty-five thousand, and in 2019 to thirty thousand, and in 2020 to eighteen thousand. His administration said that the cutback was required in order to allocate additional funds to the backlog of asylum requests from approximately 80,000 individuals who had crossed the southern border of the United States. Trump established an even lower ceiling of fifteen thousand for FY2021—by far the lowest cap since the program’s inception—despite detractors arguing that the asylum and refugee programs have no influence on one another.
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