Refugee Act

The Act recognizes that it has been the historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands and to provide assistance, asylum, and resettlement opportunities to admitted refugees. The goal of the Refugee Act was to create a uniform procedure with which to provide these opportunities to refugees.^[1]

The Act amended the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 by defining a refugee as any person who is outside his or her country of residence or nationality, or without nationality, and is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.^[1] This was necessary to guarantee the United States followed the definition used by the 1951 Refugee Convention. so that American law was in line with international law.^[4]

The annual admission of refugees is set to a 50,000 cap per fiscal year, but in an emergency situation, the President may change the number for a period of twelve months. The Attorney General is also granted power to admit additional refugees and grant asylum to current aliens, but all admissions must be reported to Congress and be limited to 5,000 people.^[1]

The Act created the position of U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs who was initially responsible to the president for the development of overall US refugee admission and resettlement policy. However, the agency that now coordinates these issues is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which falls within the division of Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Title IV of the Immigration and Nationality Act was amended here when the Act created the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for funding and administering federal programs for domestic resettlement and assistance to refugees. The office must make available resources for employment training and placement for refugees to be economically self-sufficient, provide opportunities for English language training, ensure cash assistance, and guarantee gender equality in all training and instruction. The Office must also create grants for these projects, consult with state and local governments about sponsorship and distribution of refugees, and develop a system to monitor the use of government funds using evaluations, auditing and data collection. To receive assistance for programs, the States must first explain how they plan to accomplish the goals of these programs, meet the director's standards, and submit a report at the end of each fiscal year.^[1]

The Secretary of State was authorized to take on the role from 1980 to 1981, and the new director worked with them to develop and implement programs for existing refugees and eventually took up the position from 1982 onward. The director must submit a congressional report at the end of each fiscal year to committees on the Judiciary of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. The reports should contain information on the geographic location, employment status, and problems of the refugees and also contain suggestions for alternative resettlement strategies. The Office was authorized $200,000,000 during 1980 and 1981, and that number is now decided at the beginning of each fiscal year based on the results received at the end of each year.^[1]

However, not all states have resettlement programs; Wyoming has the distinction of being the only U.S. state that has never resettled refugees.^[5]

It was only after World War II that the United States began to differentiate the term "refugee" from "immigrant" and began creating policy that dealt specifically with refugees while working outside of immigration policy.^[6] Early action came in the form of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, and the Refugee-Escapee Act of 1957.^[2] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which was later amended in 1965 to include policy for refugees on a case-by-case basis, was the first Act that consolidated U.S. immigration policy into one body of text.

The creation of the Refugee Act began with hearings by the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security from 1965 to 1968, which recommended for Congress create a uniform system for refugees, but received little support. Edward Kennedy began writing to propose a bill to reform refugee policy in 1978 and first introduced the idea to the United States Senate in 1979. With his proposal, he hoped to address the need for a reformed policy that was not specifically designed for people from communist regimes in Eastern Europe or repressive governments in the Middle East, as it was in the past. At the time, there was an average of 200,000 refugees coming to the United States, most of which were Indochinese and Soviet Jews.^[3] The cost of resettlement was close to $4000, but most refugees eventually paid that amount in federal income taxes.

The House version of the bill did not have as easy a path as Kennedy's Senate bill, but ultimately both bills achieved synchronicity through a conference committee vote of 207 to 192 on March 4, 1980. One key element of the House bill, was a legislative veto if the president requested more than 50,000 refugee admissions, but this feature was removed from the final version that went to the conference report.^[4]

Many Americans feared a floodgate scenario with a large and sudden increase of the refugee population, but the 50,000 cap would account for only 10% of immigration flow to the U.S. and would allow one refugee for every 4000 Americans,^[3] small numbers compared to those of countries like Canada, France, and Australia. The bill was adopted by the Senate by a unanimous vote on September 6, 1979, and it remained essentially intact until it was signed in 1980. However, not long after, the United States was hit with an influx of Cuban refugees as a result of the Cuban crisis, about 115,000 Cuban refugees arrived in Florida.^[3] This caused the administration to temporarily pause the use of the act. On April 14, 1980, President Carter signed an executive order for the emergency provisions of the Refugee Act to respond to an appeal on behalf of 12,000 Cubans in Havana.^[3] The United States welcomed 3,500 Cubans after partaking in international resettlement efforts.^[3] Eventually the Cuban refugee influx was significantly Controlled to the point where the United States was able to return to the practice of the Refugee Act.

In 2020, HIAS commemorated the Refugee Act with the following statement:

"Fortieth birthdays are opportunities to celebrate one’s hard-earned accomplishments and an opportunity to look ahead to what the future might bring. It is no different for the United States Refugee Act of 1980, the landmark piece of legislation that established the contemporary U.S. refugee resettlement program and asylum system. Nearly 40 years ago President Jimmy Carter signed the Act into law–March 17, 1980. It is a good time to remember what this legislation has meant to our country."^[7]

Between 1975 and 2023 (Sept. 30th), the United States accepted 3,552,558 refugees from every continent except Antarctica.^[8] Although there were years where the government accepted fewer than the 50,000 refugee-ceiling cap set by the 1980 Act, those often followed specific events. For example, 146,158 refugees were admitted in 1975, but certain states felt overwhelmed by the numbers, so admissions fell to 27,206 in 1976. Admissions also dropped from 69,886 in 2001 to 27,131 in 2002, ostensibly due to post-9/11 restrictionist policies.^[8] President George H.W. Bush had the highest number of admissions per year for a presidential term (just under 120,000) and the only president to lower the refugee ceiling was President Donald J. Trump.^[9]

• US Dept. of Health and Human Services page about the Refugee Act