By KELLY KERR
Observer contributor
April 23, 2008

The U.S. government has allowed less than a quarter of one percent of the total number of Iraqi refugees produced by the current war to resettle in the United States, experts say. This represents a massive shift from the generous resettlement policies that stemmed from previous conflicts.

Despite government promises to allow an additional 12,000 refugees to relocate to the United States this year, a total of only 5,742 Iraqis had been successfully processed and resettled here, according to a report by the Center for American Progress.

“We really thought we’d see more by now,” said Carol McElhinney, director of the Richmond branch of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond’s Refugee and Immigration Services in Virginia, who said the agency had only resettled four Iraqi families so far.

Violence and sectarianism has caused 2.5 million refugees to flee Iraq since the war began in March 2003, mostly to the neighboring countries of Syria, Jordan, and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Iraq also has 2 million internally displaced persons living within their borders; these people are not classified as refugees despite being forced from their homes.

Previous conflicts saw much higher percentages of refugees accepted into the United States. Overall, the United States has resettled 900,000 refugees resulting from the Vietnam War, accounting for over 50 percent of all refugees created by that conflict. It has been one of the government’s longest-running refugee resettlement operations.

The United States also allowed a significant portion of Bosnians to resettle here during their 1992 strife, taking 33 percent of Bosnia’s 442,000 refugees. Over a 20-year period (1970-1990) during the Cold War, 600,000 Russian Jews were settled in America, accounting for 30 percent of those refugees, according to the Center for American Progress report.

The Bush administration has cited security concerns as the reason for the slow intake of refugees, many of whom have worked for the United States while in Iraq. Lengthy background checks must be run on each Iraqi hoping to resettle in the United States, which takes time. And, according to Brian Griffith, representative of the Center for Immigration Policy, this is a valid concern.
“Certainly, we need to be concerned about security. We knew who the South Vietnamese coming in as refugees were. They were our allies. It isn’t so cut and dry in Iraq,” Griffith said. “In Iraq, the majority that were treated as allies were on the wrong end of the stick before the invasion.”

Griffith explained that prior to the Iraq War, many people that the United States now call allies, were linked with groups the government would traditionally call enemies, such as Kurdish separatist organizations.

He said he did not think the fraction of a percentage of resettled Iraqis represented a shift in government policy towards refugees. This situation is different, he said, because the conflict in Iraq is ongoing.

“This will depend on the outcome,” Griffith said. “After the war, when we might possibly expect more refugees, [the Center] will devote more time and resources to studying this issue. Until then, it won’t be a major issue.”

Joseph Kassab, director of the Chaldean Federation of America, said his organization has filed for the resettlement of 4,000 refugee families, of which only 1,000 had been processed and approved by the U.S. government.

“We’ve never had a group like this before — such qualified, educated people. The U.S. should welcome them as a benefit and not a liability,” said Kassab, adding that the refugee organizations needed grants and funding to bring the refugees to their full potential.

Kassab also said there were many more refugees waiting in Iraq’s neighboring countries, stranded without visas by security concerns.

“We want them to be rescued, so they can reunite with their families and do the right things based on their skills and benefit the U.S.,” he said.

Russell Allen, a U.S. military contractor who recently returned from Iraq, said security concerns should not be a problem for the government. No one deserved to be resettled in more than the Iraqis who worked with U.S. forces, he said.

“Anyone who even smiles at an American over there is liable to get assassinated, let alone those who actually work for us,’ Allen said. “Who else has shown truer dedication to us than them?”

Allen said one of his Iraqi friends recently managed to get a visa after trying for four years. She almost didn’t pass the security check because various familial names on her records were spelled differently, a common problem when words are translated from Arabic to English.
The two young Iraqi women, who had served as linguists for Allen’s unit, were also desperately trying to get visas, said Allen.

“They hadn’t been back to their homes since they started working for us,” he said. “It wasn’t safe for them to even leave the base,” a place where they were frisked on a routine basis by military police for weapons and bombs.

His boss at Camp Victory had to “call in every favor and pull every string he had” to get the women visas to the United States.

“We treated them like second class citizens in their own country, like prisoners,” he said. “And I don’t know of one who wasn’t absolutely desperate to get here.”

Allen said rather than security concerns, he believed the Bush administration’s fear of admitting failure in Iraq, combined with an anti-immigrant sentiment in the Republican Party, accounted for the low percentage of Iraqis resettled.

“People are so afraid in the United States right now, because of Sept. 11, because these [would-be refugees] are Arabs, they’re Muslims, and it’s just plain xenophobia,” Allen said. “It’s disturbing.”