It is the president Biden’s pledge to buck this negative trend. He increased the yearly admissions cap to 62,500 for the remaining months of 2021 in May 2021, then in October he quadrupled the cap to 125,000 for FY 2022. Subsequently, Biden declared that he would keep the cap at 125,000 for FY2023, with the majority of admission slots going to Southeast Asian and African migrants. Additionally, he announced the launch of the Welcome Corps initiative, which enables civic groups to independently sponsor and assist refugees through a partnership with charitable organizations. Reversing the Trump-era reductions has proven challenging, though. Less than 12,000 and 26,000 refugees, respectively, were admitted into the US in 2021 and 2022—well below the threshold imposed by the government. Protest organizations contend that the annual cap ought to be raised in proportion to the global refugee crisis, but immigration policy experts have stated that it will be difficult to meet even the present admissions target due to lengthy processing times and the COVID-19 pandemic’s lingering effects.
Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America have continuously sent refugees to the United States, while the overall amount of admissions has fluctuated significantly for some regions in the years since the establishment of the U.S. program for refugee resettlement. More than two hundred thousand refugees—the largest number in recent memory—were admitted to the nation in the immediate aftermath of the 1980 act’s passing; the great majority of them were originally from Southeast Asian nations like Cambodia and Vietnam. Beginning in 1989, there was a significant increase in the number of refugees from former Soviet nations who were admitted to the United States. The three countries with the largest numbers of refugees between 2010 and 2020 were, in descending order, Bhutan, Iraq, and Myanmar. In contrast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Myanmar, and Sudan were the nations that allowed the most refugees into the United States in 2022. Trump signed an executive order in 2017 that permanently blocked all Syrian refugees from entering the country and temporarily barred nationals of seven Muslim-majority nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. (Syrian admissions resumed in January 2018.) Additionally, the executive order strengthened the visa restrictions that Obama had placed on those seven nations. Amidst legal challenges, the Trump administration made two revisions to the order before the Supreme Court upheld the third version in April 2018.
Trump also harshly criticized an Obama-finalized resettlement agreement with Australia that called for the United States to accept 1,250 refugees who were being detained overseas by Australian authorities. A significant number of these refugees came from Somalia and Iran, two nations covered by the third version of the visa ban. As agreed upon, the United States resettled close to a thousand refugees by January 2022.
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