The Foreign Service Journal, April 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2016 33 local bus. The children were registered in school, doctors’ appointments were made, and she was enrolled in English- language classes and a job search program. Seven years later, Aisha has a job cleaning offices. Her children are picking up English much faster than she, and she often relies on them when they go shopping or visit a doctor. After a year, she received the coveted green card giving her permanent residency and was beginning to feel comfortable in the United States. She hoped and prayed that her sister and her children would soon be able to join her. But then, following last summer’s bombings in Paris, Aisha began hearing that many Americans wanted to keep any more refugees from coming. Aisha’s experience is far from unique in both respects. But that does not mean the hostility toward refugees and legal migrants shown by some Americans who got here earlier in our history is any less pleasant. The Role of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees People, of course, have migrated throughout human history for various reasons: fleeing war and violence, or seeking a better life economically, polit- ically and socially. But with the advent of the nation-state system, and the demarcation of defined borders, govern- ments began to regulate such mass movements more closely—particularly the flow of refugees, a specific category of migrants governed by interna- tional agreements. To be precise, under international law refugees—as distin- guished from internally displaced persons, or IDPs, who have been uprooted from their homes but remain in their country— are defined as “individuals who have fled from their country of nationality or habitual residence, having a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality or mem- bership in a particular social or political group, and owing to such fear are unable or unwilling to return to that country.” The first step for a person fleeing his or her own country is to seek refuge in a neighboring country—in international parlance, the country of first asylum. A refugee is thereby distinguished from an individual who applies to immigrate via the visa application process. Young children at a Tanzanian refugee camp during the 1990s civil war in Rwanda. CAROLCOLLOTON Of the millions of refugees in the world, who should be selected for resettlement?