Refugees

The Catholic Church resettled 17,823 refugees in 2008, through Migration and Refugee Services of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB/MRS) and its network of diocesan entities, representing 30 percent of the total refugees admitted to the nation. Overall, the U.S. government admitted 60,192 refugees during the fiscal year that ended September 30. This number represents a 31 percent increase over last year in the number of cases handled by MRS. In 2007, MRS resettled 13,631 of 48,281 refugees or 28 percent of all refugees admitted into the United States. In 2008, MRS resettled people from 45 countries. The largest groups came from Burma, Iraq, Cuba, Bhutan, Burundi, Somalia, Iran, Vietnam, Congo, and Liberia.

The Holy See's permanent observer at the U.N. offices in Geneva is warning that there are millions of displaced persons uprooted by causes that are not covered by international protection agreements. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi made this observation when he addressed the U.N. refugee agency's annual Executive Committee meeting, which ended Friday. "The international community has managed to enact clear and courageous instruments to protect refugees from violence and persecution through the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, and through additional regional agreements," he noted. "Existing refugee instruments constitute the start of a continuum, at the opposite end of which we could place the conventions and agreements enacted by the United Nations and by the International Labor Organization in order to protect labor migrants and their families."

Laith Kasshana left Baghdad, Iraq, early in 2007, when his 2-year-old daughter Media was an infant. In Baghdad, Kasshana's life was threatened and his brother was shot. "I felt so afraid," he told Catholic News Service. "Even today, when I talk about Iraq, I feel full of anxiety." But Kasshana, his wife and his two children -- 10-month-old Mathew was born in Lebanon -- left Sept. 7 for resettlement in San Diego. All through the family's troubles, Kasshana's 25-year-old wife, Ban, never lost faith that God would do something for her family.

The State Department cannot resettle in the United States about 25,000 Iraqi interpreters and other refugees who worked for the U.S.-led coalition over the next two years because of limits on the number of applications that can be reviewed, according to Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte. Human rights agencies, led by Refugees International, say roughly that number of refugees are in danger because they were employed by the U.S. government, the military or their contractors.

While doing good work in Africa and other parts of the world, local faith groups aren't forgetting people who've come to the U.S. and need their help. The American Islamic Center and the REP: Refugee Empowerment Pathway are two of many religion-related efforts assisting the area's flood of immigrants. Primary resettlers are the International Rescue Committee and Catholic Charities' Refugee and Empowerment Services. Both are nonprofit agencies that aid anyone in need, regardless of religion.

Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq have endured extensive persecution since 2003, including the murder of their religious leaders, threats of violence or death if they do not abandon their homes and businesses, and the bombing or destruction of their churches and other places of worship. According to one Iraqi Christian leader, half of Iraq's Christians have fled the nation since 2003, and some have likened the situation to ethnic cleansing.

According to U.S. groups who advocate for the cause of refugees, thousands of Iraqis eligible to immigrate have not yet reached this country. They remain either stranded in Iraq, vulnerable to retaliation from anti-U.S. groups, or elsewhere in the Middle East, waiting out the long and cumbersome approval process. State Department officials said the delays have stemmed in part from overburdened consular offices in Iraq and nearby countries, and in part from the bottlenecks caused by a need for exhaustive background checks by the Department of Homeland Security, especially for immigrants and refugees from Middle Eastern countries, in an era of heightened terrorism concerns.

Our war has displaced 4 million Iraqis since 2003, including 2 million now living beyond its borders in tough conditions. Yet we have allowed this vast, potentially destabilizing refugee burden to be borne mostly by Syria and Jordan. We have provided some aid to host countries but none to Syria, and we have allowed only a trickle of Iraqis (fewer than 10,000 so far) to resettle in the U.S. -- far fewer than have been taken in by Sweden. For five years, the U.S. has failed to make Iraq's refugee exodus a focus of national or international attention. The U.S. has allowed the crisis to be managed by concerned but second-tier American officials, and it has been slow to provide financial assistance. This year's aid, the most generous so far, will surpass $200 million -- but it is still only a quarter of what is needed.

Despite the dispatch of United Nations peacekeepers to Darfur and the issuing of international arrest warrants for leaders of the genocide, the killing goes on. So does the burning of villages, the bombing of schools and the systematic rape of women and girls. And it will continue until the Security Council shows the will to stop it. The Council needs to get more peacekeepers, helicopters and reconnaissance planes in the field, enforce the arrest warrants and increase diplomatic and financial pressure to get Sudan to stop obstructing the work of the peacekeepers. But the Council has shown little urgency in doing any of that.

The global number of refugees and displaced people reached 67 million last year, the UN refugee agency said on Tuesday, swelling those under its charge to an "unprecedented" number. Afghanistan and Iraq continued to top the list of the country of origin. Almost 3.1 million refugees were Afghans or 27 percent of the global refugee population in 2007. Meanwhile, Iraqis made up the second largest group, with 2.3 million refugees. Of these, about two million had sought refuge in Jordan and Syria.