The Foreign Service Journal, March 2008

The Resettlement Process Still, in early 2007, a year into the refugee exodus from Iraq fol- lowing the Samarra bombing, State had little infrastructure in place to deal with the refugee sit- uation. Nor had it made any sub- stantial moves to distinguish its method for processing Iraqis from the standard procedures it uses for refugees in other parts of the world. That process, which typically takes eight to nine months, involves several laborious steps. First, a refugee is not classified as such until he has fled his or her home country. There usually is no allowance for processing displaced persons still living in their home country (though State does process some for resettlement inside Cuba, Russia and Vietnam). Then, to be considered for resettlement in the United States, an individual must be referred to State’s U.S. Refugee Admissions Program by the United Nations, a U.S. embassy or an authorized nongovernmental organi- zation. More than nine out of 10 cases result from a referral by the U.N. To win a referral, the refugee must prove he or she faces a legitimate fear of persecution in his or her home country. After being referred to the Refugee Admissions Program, the refugee is then interviewed by staff at one of State’s overseas processing entities, which are non- governmental organizations working under contract with the department. For Iraqi refugees in Turkey and Lebanon, that’s the International Catholic Migration Commission. In Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Iraqi refugees are interviewed by the International Organization for Migration. After that, the refugee must be interviewed by a Department of Homeland Security Citizenship and Immigration Services officer and undergoes security checks. If the case is approved by DHS, the refugee is assigned to a resettlement agency in the United States that will oversee his or her transition upon arrival in the U.S., and undergoes medical examinations and cultural orientation. State’s processing entity then organizes trav- el to the U.S. Foley says that setting up an infrastructure to work on the Iraqi cases in 2007 took a “rather impressive effort” that involved everything from the mundane task of renting office space to hiring and training staff. “An entire infrastructure was cre- ated in very short order in the region,” he says. But a number of problems arose, most prominently in Syria, where, in mid-2007, the govern- ment stopped allowing Home- land Security Department offi- cials into the country to interview refugees. That, Foley says, se- verely crimped the government’s ability to build a pipe- line of cases that would generate large numbers of admis- sions to the United States. In May, Congress stepped in again, passing legisla- tion by the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, and Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., to expand the number of Iraqi and Afghan translators allowed to apply for special immigrant visas. “Foreign nationals who are willing to risk their lives and those of their family members by supporting our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve recognition,” Lugar said when the Senate approved the bill. President Bush signed the law in June, the same month Sen. Kennedy introduced his Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act. At the same time, pressure on State to step up pro- cessing was mounting from nongovernmental organiza- tions that work with refugees. Writing in the Wall Street Journal last June, Anna Husarska, a senior policy adviser at the International Rescue Committee, detailed the cases of three Iraqi refugees she’d met while traveling through the Middle East. All of them had worked for U.S. agencies or contractors and had received death threats for having done so. But the U.S. government, she alleged, had not protected them. “The lives of these men and their families are now in shambles because of their previous service to the U.S., and none of them has been told they’re on the short list to be let into the country,” she wrote. By contrast, Husarska pointed out, the United States had shown in previous conflicts how quickly it could evacuate worthy allies when it simply decided to do so: “In the first eight months after the end of the Vietnam War, at the direction of President Gerald Ford, the U.S. F O C U S 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 8 According to Human Rights First, 65,000 Iraqis currently work for the Defense Department and 81,000 work for USAID.