FAIR Take | April 2024
Despite the Middle East becoming increasingly volatile, the Biden Administration has announced it will open new refugee processing centers in the region. Specifically, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will open new offices in Qatar and Turkey with the primary goal of helping process refugees who will be admitted to the United States. At a time when the Middle East is becoming increasingly unstable, and the risk of a wider conflict not beyond the realms of possibility, positioning two refugee centers so close to potential trouble spots could only make the United States’ struggles with mass immigration even more complicated.
There was a time when USCIS was reducing the number of overseas offices. At their peak, there were 23 offices around the world, reduced to 8 under the Trump Administration, with obvious savings to the taxpayer. With the opening of these two new offices under President Biden (and the recent reopening of a field office in Honduras), there will be 11 international offices focused on adjudicating immigration benefits and, in particular, high levels of refugee processing.
Refugee processing has fluctuated under recent years based on overarching immigration policies of the executive branch. The numbers of refugees processed went from about 85,000 to 110,000 under President Obama, down to 15,000 under President Trump in Fiscal Year 2021. Now President Biden wants to dramatically increase the level to 125,000 each year. This is all at a time when asylum caseloads are at an all-time high, and asylum seekers continue to surge our borders.
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Moreover, the U.S. is setting up refugee processing centers in a region where most countries stubbornly refuse to help their neighbors and mitigate tensions. Egypt has bluntly refused to accept migrants from Gaza during the current conflict. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War, fabulously wealthy Gulf States like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar all refused to take in refugees. Their refusal seems to have been rooted in security concerns. Sadly, the U.S. seems less cautious in this respect, and asylum seekers in the U.S. have subsequently been linked to terror groups like ISIS.
The U.S. is already seeing that asylum applications, refugee status, and humanitarian parole authority are being routinely exploited by economic migrants to gain quick entry to the U.S. The two new refugee processing centers in the Middle East could only make this easier, increasing our national security risks.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has warned that a large scale terror attack on the U.S. homeland is likely, comparing the scale to the concert attack in Moscow in March that killed 133 people. He stated he would be “…hard-pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once.” Iran, one of the main belligerents in the Middle East has already explicitly threatened the U.S. with terror.
The U.S. is under no obligation to put itself and its people at risk of terrorism. This country has a long history of helping genuine refugees escape persecution. However, the desire to help others must be tempered by awareness of the potential risk to Americans from admitting people with nefarious goals. The U.S. does not need two new refugee reception centers on the other side of the world when the Biden Administration is failing to address our wide-open borders and mitigate the humanitarian crisis here at home.
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