Saturday 17th April 2021
Stick with Trump’s upper limit
Biden breaks promises about refugee plan
In February, US President Biden announced that he would take in over 100,000 refugees a year – just like in Obama’s time. Now the incumbent head of government is putting the plans on hold: a maximum of 15,000 refugees are allowed into the USA – the “shockingly low” number of his predecessor Trump thus remains.
US President Joe Biden has put the promised significant increase in the number of refugees on hold. Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the ceiling of 15,000 refugees this year set under former President Donald Trump would remain in place until further notice.
The US program to take in particularly vulnerable refugees, who are selected by the UN for resettlement, will only have to be “rebuilt” after the Trump years, Sullivan said. There are also problems because of the corona pandemic. The Biden government recently announced that it would raise the limit to 62,500 refugees this year. At the beginning of February, Biden even announced a future ceiling of 125,000 refugees.
Sullivan said that the admission program had been “decimated even more than we thought” under Trump. It must therefore be completely rebuilt. This is already in the works so that the number of refugees admitted can be “significantly increased” in the coming years. Sullivan did not want to give exact numbers.
Criticism comes from Democrats too
Trump had continuously reduced the number of refugees allowed into the country in the course of resettlement by the United Nations, in his last year in office to the record low of 15,000. Under his predecessor Barack Obama, more than 100,000 refugees were admitted each year. Biden had promised a return to the previous level.
The postponement of the plans now also caused criticism from Biden’s Democrats. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Bob Menendez, called the number of 15,000 refugees “shockingly low”. In the face of “the largest global refugee crisis in history, with 29.6 million refugees worldwide, resettlement is a critical tool in protecting those fleeing persecution”. In the US, the reception of refugees is a “proud, bipartisan tradition”.
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