If slashing the number of refugees allowed into the United States to a record low of 45,000 nearly a year ago wasn’t limiting enough to foreigners looking to escape violence in their home countries, President Donald Trump announced plans to scale the number back to 30,000.
A cut to the refugee program is a slash to the United States’ image and ability to claim moral authority on international issues, but more importantly, a compromise to the safety of refugees who have nowhere else to turn.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo justified the limit by saying it addresses the “humanitarian crisis” of too many people attempting to claim asylum in the United States. He said refugees have to be weighed against a backlog of 800,000 asylum seekers — however, the Department of Homeland Security reports the figure to be around 320,000.
Pompeo is seeing a humanitarian crisis for a reason. Hundreds of thousands of people are coming to the border escaping gang violence, drug cartels and poverty, and the solution is not to turn a blind eye or hand the problem to someone else.
The DHS must find a way to streamline the process of sorting through applications for those seeking asylum. It seems as though the Trump administration is using the high-number of asylum seekers as justification for abandoning refugees, while also inflating the number of asylum seekers and making no effort to speed up the process.
Thirty thousand may sound like a big number, but compared to the size of the U.S. population, it’s not. The argument that refugees and asylum seekers present a burdening influx of people is exaggerated. For comparison, how many tourists does Manhattan see in a day? How many undergraduates attend Boston University?
Trump cannot pretend that his issues with immigration surround its legality. Reducing the cap for refugees will move away from a system that prioritizes giving aid to persecuted people and toward a system favoring refugees with skills that can be of benefit to the U.S. workforce, a selfish move that isn’t surprising from an administration that is making no effort to allocate more resources to immigration policy.
In Massachusetts, nearly 5,000 Haitian refugees live under a Temporary Protected Status protection after a 2010 earthquake created dangerous living conditions in Haiti. TPS will expire in July, meaning they may no longer be able to live and work legally in the Commonwealth. Boston’s cultural atmosphere may be permanently altered.
It’s easy for U.S. citizens to distance themselves from the experiences of those living anywhere else. Compassion can be an exhausting thing to muster, and people often reserve their compassion for those in closest proximity to them — their family, the people in their town. By the time they’re supposed to care about refugees from Syria or Haiti, all of their compassion has been spent.
Pompeo argues that the United States needs to prioritize those who arrive at the border, rather than refugees overseas. At the border, though, asylum seekers have reported being told to return at a later point and are subjected to extreme wait times that some suspect are intentional — border officials are restricting the number of people allowed to be processed at border crossings each day to deter asylum seekers.
The administration cannot pretend they are dealing with one issue before the other when they are, in fact, dealing with neither.
It’s absurd for the administration to expect people to buy the argument that this is about a backlog — they have shown that they don’t want new people. They don’t want illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, asylum seekers or refugees. For Trump, taking in 30,000 people would be charity work as opposed to a moral and ethical responsibility.
