Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
5 Facts about refugees in America
5 Facts about refugees in America
Nov 30, 2025 3:03 AM

Today is World Refugee Day, an annual observance created by the United Nations to memorate the strength, courage and perseverance of millions of refugees.” Here are five facts you should know about refugees and refugee policy in the United States.

1. The U.S. government defines “refugee” as any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who 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.

2. Thefirst refugee legislation in the United Stateswas theDisplaced Persons Act of 1948, which brought 400,000 Eastern Europeans to the U.S. Other refugee-related legislation included theRefugee Relief Act of 1953(which brought in 214,000 refugees munism) and theFair Share Refugee Act of 1960(which mostly brought those still living in displaced persons camps after World War II). The U.S. government also used the Attorney General’shumanitarian parole authorityto bring refugees into the country, beginning in 1956 with Hungarian nationals and ending with hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees in the 1970s.

3. The number of refugees admitted into the U.S. each year is decided by the President. Before the beginning of each fiscal year, the President, in consultationwith Congress, establishes anoverall refugee admissions ceilingas well as regional allocations. So far in So far during the 2017 fiscal year, 45,732 people have been admitted. The total number of refugees authorized for admission in 2015—the last year for which official statistics are available—was 69,920. The largest regional allocation was from Burma (18,386), Iraq (12,676), Somalia (8,858), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (7,876).

4. Since 1975, the U.S. has resettled more than3 million refugees, with nearly 77 percentbeing either Indochinese or citizens of the former Soviet Union. Since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, annual admissions figures have ranged from a high of 207,116 in 1980, to a low of 27,100 in 2002. In 2013, theleading countries of nationalityfor refugee admissions were Iraq (28 percent), Burma (23 percent), Bhutan (13 percent), and Somalia (11 percent). Seventy-five percent of refugee admissions in 2013 were from these four countries. Other leading countries included Cuba (6.0 percent), Iran (3.7 percent), Democratic Republic of Congo (3.7 percent), and Sudan (3.1 percent).

5. TheOffice of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)is the federal government agency charged withproviding benefits and servicesto assist the resettlement and localintegration of refugee populations. Some of the ORR programs include Refugee CashAssistance and Refugee Medical Assistance (for up to 8 months); Refugee Social Services, such as job and language training (for up to 5 years); and temporary custody and care to panied refugee children. But according to a recent paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by the time refugees who entered the U.S. as adults have been here for 20 years, they will have paid, on average, $21,000 more in taxes to all levels of government than they received in benefits over that time span.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Removing Faith from Public Life, Again
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, at a meeting with German President Christian Wulff in Moscow today: “I am deeply convinced that modern civilization is making the same mistake as the Soviet Union. It doesn’t matter very much why you are removing faith from pubic life. The final result, as engineers say, is the same: you get dismantling of religious consciousness,” the Patriarch said. The Russian Church has lived for decades in a country where the official ideology was the ideology of...
ENI: WCC Head Addresses Lausanne Congress
World churches’ leader’s speech reaches to evangelical Christians By Munyaradzi Makoni Cape Town, 18 October (ENI)–The head of the World Council of Churches has reached out to a global gathering of Evangelicals saying Christians of different traditions need to learn from each other to participate together in God’s mission. “We are called to be one, to be reconciled, so that the world may believe that God reconciles the world to himself in Christ,” the WCC general secretary, the Rev. Olav...
How Do You Say ‘Crony Capitalism’ in Hebrew?
It turns out there’s a phrase for the reality of ‘crony capitalism’ in Hebrew: hon v’shilton, which is “literally translated as capital and government, an expression Israelis use to describe the rich’s influence on government.” Check out Bloomberg Businessweek for an overview of current controversy on Israel’s “business elite.” Of course business need not corrupt government. But the temptation for those with a concentration of economic power to turn that into political advantage in order to retain economic dominance is...
Acton and Cape Town 2010
This year’s Lausanne Congress, Cape Town 2010, is underway and all reports are of a massive event, with substantial buildup and coordination of efforts of and implications of various kinds across the globe. (Dr. Anthony Bradley, a research fellow at the Acton Institute, participated in one of the conversation gatherings last month leading up to the Cape Town event.) In my book published earlier this summer, Ecumenical Babel, I mentioned Cape Town 2010 as one of the major ecumenical events...
Meaningful Work and the Economics Nobel
This week’s Acton Commentary. Sign up for our free, weekly email newsletter here. While you’re at it, pick up a copy of Victor Claar’s new monograph, Fair Trade: It’s Prospects as a Poverty Solution, in the Acton Bookshoppe. +++++++++ Searching for Meaningful Work: Reflections on the 2010 Economics Nobel By Victor V. Claar This year’s Nobel economics prize was awarded to two Americans and a British-Cypriot for developing a theory that helps to explain why unemployment can persist even when...
Culture and Poverty
Here is an interesting article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about the role of culture in poverty: ‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback While it is obvious to most observers that culture plays an important role in shaping norms and habits, and thus would have impact on poverty–discussions of culture have not been within the domain of polite conversation for the last several decades within many academic circles. As Patricia Cohen writes: The reticence was a legacy...
Rev. Robert Sirico: Tea Party Must Define Ideas
A new Detroit News column by Acton Institute President and co-founder Rev. Robert A. Sirico: Tea party must define ideas By Father Robert Sirico If the recent analysis by the New York Times on the success of the tea party movement is correct, the influence of this movement favoring limited government and low levels of taxation may have a decided impact in the ing elections, particularly in holding the Republican leadership’s feet to the fire on a variety of related...
Community, Culture, and Confession
Inspired by Art Prize, I wrote a blog about culture, technology, and the universal desire munity. This appeared on Ethika Politika‘s blog today and an excerpt can be found below: Last week as I was wandering through Grand Rapids’ Art Prize (the world’s largest petition), I came across the very simple interactive piece that is pictured below. Confess is a large board where people can anonymously write their confessions. Everything from the dark, to deeply personal, to lighthearted, to witty...
Rev. Robert Sirico: The Tea Party Movement and Catholic Social Teaching
Rev. Robert Sirico talked about the Tea Party movement and Catholic Social Teaching yesterday with Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio. Click on the link below to listen: [audio: From Kresta in the Afternoon: The Tea Party Movement: How Does it Gel With Catholic Social Teaching? Since their not-so-quiet arrival on the U.S. political scene, the tea party has garnered a great deal of attention and found growing support among disgruntled Americans, many of whom are Catholics. A missioned earlier...
Were Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jesse Helms Kindred Spirits?
Estelle Snyder makes an excellent case that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jesse Helms had similar humble backgrounds and beliefs that helped form a deep bond between the two men, despite being separated by language, culture, geography, and an Iron Curtain. In a paper published by the North Carolina History Project titled “Champions of Freedom: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jesse Helms,” Snyder argues that their relationship was an important one in terms of confronting the evils of Communism with a more aggressive posture,...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved