White House Increases Refugee Quota to 110,000

Obama will be making a formal announcement of the refugee quota increase at the UN next week. Image credit: AP

The United States will be accepting a total of 110,000 refugees in the 2017 fiscal year over the number of 85,000 set aside for the current fiscal year, the Obama administration announced in a report to members of the Senate and House judiciary committees on Tuesday.

The new quota represents an almost 30% increase over the 2016 quota and a near 60% increase over the 2015 quota. The previous US record for admitting refugees took place in 1995, when President Clinton approved a quota of 112,000.

The US executive branch sets the quota for accepting refugees each fiscal year.

The announcement will be formally announced by President Obama at next week’s United Nations General Assembly meeting during a summit on refugees.

The resettling of Muslim refugees, particularly from Syria, has been openly debated at the state level and in the presidential campaign following the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. In 2015, Republican governors in around two dozen states formally requested to not receive Syrian refugees. Some of the states even filed lawsuits to stop the resettlement but these were unsuccessful.

The United States exceeded its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrians in fiscal 2016.

The total refugee quota for fiscal year 2017 will draw 40,000 refugees from South Asia/Near East, which includes Syria, the most of any global region, noted the report to Congress. Africans will make up the second-largest refugee group, with 35,000. Some 14,000 spots have not been allocated yet.

Ahead of hosting the “Leaders’ Summit on Refugees” at the UN on September 20, “[Obama] is trying to send a signal to other countries that they should increase the number they resettle,” said Jennifer Quigley, a refugee protection advocacy strategist with nonprofit group Human Rights First, to the Wall Street Journal.

Quigley added, however, that Congress signaled it might limit spending on refugee resettlement in the 2017 budget, an unprecedented move. Money allocated to the program goes toward providing housing, job placement, in-person interpreting services, education and other resettlement programs.

The Syrian conflict has displaced an estimated five million Syrians but only one-fifth of 1 percent has been admitted to the US as refugees, the State Department attests. In terms of humanitarian assistance to Syria, however, the US has contributed more than any other donor country with almost $5.6 billion, states the Obama administration’s refugee report to Congress.