January 01, 2007

United States Unwelcoming to Iraqi Refugees

Link: Few Iraqis Are Gaining U.S. Sanctuary - New York Times.

Until recently the Bush administration had planned to resettle just 500 Iraqis this year, a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who are now believed to be fleeing their country each month. State Department officials say they are open to admitting larger numbers, but are limited by a cumbersome and poorly financed United Nations referral system.

“We’re not even meeting our basic obligation to the Iraqis who’ve been imperiled because they worked for the U.S. government,” said Kirk W. Johnson, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development in Falluja in 2005. “We could not have functioned without their hard work, and it’s shameful that we’ve nothing to offer them in their bleakest hour.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who is taking over the immigration, border security and refugee subcommittee, plans hearings this month on America’s responsibility to help vulnerable Iraqis. An estimated 1.8 million Iraqis are living outside Iraq. The pace of the exodus has quickened significantly in the past nine months.

Some critics say the Bush administration has been reluctant to create a significant refugee program because to do so would be tantamount to conceding failure in Iraq. They say a major change in policy could happen only as part of a broader White House shift on Iraq.

“I don’t know of anyone inside the administration who sees this as a priority area,” said Lavinia Limón, president of the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a nongovernmental refugee resettlement agency based in Washington. “If you think you’re winning, you think they’re going to go back soon.”

For Iraqis, a tie to the United States is a life-threatening liability, particularly in harder-line Sunni neighborhoods. In 2003, Laith, an Army interpreter who would allow only his first name to be used, got a note threatening his family if he did not quit his job. His neighborhood, Adhamiya, was full of Baath Party loyalists. A month later, his father opened the door to a stranger, who shot him dead.

Laith’s mother begged him to stop working, but his salary, $700 a month at the time, supported the entire family. Then someone threw a sound grenade at the house. Graffiti appeared on a wall in ugly black paint accusing Laith of selling information about insurgents to the military. Laith and his family moved out of the house. Soon after, it was broken into and photographs of him with American soldiers were found in a family photo album.

“They know me,” he said, sitting in one of Baghdad’s hotels, because his family would not allow a Western reporter inside the house. “They know when I come and go.”

Many Iraqis who worked for Americans have already fled the capital or the country, and many plead for help or asylum on a daily basis. Of some 40 nationalities seeking asylum in European countries in the first half of 2006, Iraqis ranked first with more than 8,100 applications, according to the United Nations.

Remarkably few apply for refugee status in the United States, mainly because most Iraqis, even those who have worked for the United States government here, simply assume that getting American status is all but impossible. Iraqis cannot apply directly for refugee status in the American Embassy in Baghdad.

The United States has even run similar programs in Iraq, helping to resettle about 40,000 Iraqi refugees in the United States and other countries after a failed uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991. In 1996, about 6,500 Iraqis who had links to an American-sponsored coup attempt against Mr. Hussein were granted asylum.

The Bush administration suspended resettlement of Iraqi refugees after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it did not resume until April 2005, after the process had begun for other Arab countries. A total of 198 Iraqis were resettled in the United States as refugees in the fiscal year of 2005, and 202 in 2006, but most were in the pipeline before the 2003 invasion, and few of the cases address the increasingly dire situation for Iraqis today.

Iraqis who work with the military often have to live separately from their families, to avoid putting them in danger. One 25-year-old interpreter left home when his parents in Mosul, in northern Iraq, learned of his work. Now in Baghdad, he has been back home rarely.

Laith lives with an aunt, away from his wife, in an area where no one knows him. After a visit to his parents several months ago, a stranger asked about his 8-year-old brother at a boys’ school. The family fears that it was the early stages of a kidnapping.

“I bring a lot of troubles when I go to visit my family,” he said, smoking a cigarette.

...Congress approved one program last year to help get special immigrant status for Iraqi interpreters who have worked for the United States military. Laith has tried to apply. The law, which also applies to Afghan interpreters, is capped at 50 a year. Laith was told he needed a senior officer to vouch for him, but he has not worked with one recently, and the one he had worked with is now back in the United States.

...The State Department has made it clear that it is deeply concerned about the fate of Iraq’s religious minorities, including Christians. Officials at the department say that any refugee program must also be geared to those vulnerable groups.

As many as 100,000 exiled Iraqi Christians have relatives in the United States and would want to resettle there if given the chance, said Joseph T. Kassab, the executive director of the Chaldean Federation of America, a Michigan-based umbrella group that represents Iraqi Christians. Mr. Kassab said his group’s estimates were based on questionnaires devised by University of Michigan professors and filled out by several thousand Iraqi Christian refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon in recent months.

Posted by Anupam Chander on January 1, 2007 at 07:45 PM in Globalization | Permalink