The Foreign Service Journal, March 2008

government and the U.S. armed forces facilitated the movement to the United States of over 131,000 South Vietnamese refugees,” she wrote. The U.S. also evacuat- ed refugees in short order fromHungary and Cuba in the 1950s and from Bosnia in the 1990s, she added. But the hammer dropped in September when a cable sent by the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, was leaked to the Washington Post . Crocker said it would take as long as two years to admit all the refugees who’d been referred for resettlement by the United Nations, citing “major bottlenecks” slowing the process. He pleaded with Washington to speed it up because, he said, it wasn’t clear that Jordan and Syria could ensure the refugees’ safety: “Refugees who have fled Iraq continue to be a vulnerable population while living in Jordan and Syria,” he wrote. “The basis for resettlement is the deteriorating protection environ- ment in these countries.” The cable brought out into the open longstanding ten- sions between State and DHS over processing proce- dures. In a letter to Crocker first reported in the Post , Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division, wrote that Crocker’s account of the situation “does not reflect an accurate picture of DHS’s commitment or performance to date.” But soon thereafter, leading conservative activists in Washington, such as former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and David Keene of the American Conserva- tive Union, came out to demand quicker action on reset- tlement. Two Czars Are Born Within days, the Bush administration responded by appointing two refugee czars: Foley and Lori Scialabba, who assumed the title of associate director of refugee, asylum and international operations at the Homeland Security Department. The czars haven’t solved the problem yet. In fact, refugee admissions dipped after the two were appointed, F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33