International Rescue Committee says 21,292 refugees will be admitted to the US this year, far below administration’s 45,000 limit

The Trump administration is on pace to resettle fewer than half of its own reduced target for refugees, according to an analysis by the International Rescue Committee, an aid group advocating for displaced people.

Last September, Donald Trump slashed the cap on admitting refugees to the US to 45,000 people, far fewer than the average of about 75,000 over the last decade, and less than half of Barack Obama’s 110,000 target for 2017.

But according to the IRC, the US will resettle only 21,292 refugees in fiscal year 2018. State Department figures show that 53,716 were resettled in fiscal year 2017.



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The figures emerged as Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, telling business and political leaders he welcomed investment but not directly addressing the immigration policies that have drawn angry rebukes from world leaders.

“Now is the perfect time to bring your business, your jobs, your investments to the United States,” he said. “When the United States grows, so does the world.”

In 2016 Obama raised the refugee cap, in part to try to help some of the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing civil war in Syria. The IRC compared refugee demographics across years and found that, if its projections hold, only 13% of refugees arriving in the US this year will identify as Muslim, compared to 48% in 2017.

It also estimated that Syrian refugees will account for about 0.5% of people admitted to the US this year, compared to 15% in 2017. A large factor in the drop in admissions was the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to ban travel from several Muslim-majority nations, including Syria. Though initial iterations of the ban were eventually blocked by courts, they briefly threw airports and refugee programs into chaos. The supreme court has allowed a third version of the ban to go into effect while it reviews whether the order is unconstitutional.

IRC calculated its projections by examining admissions between October 2017 and 23 January 2018, the first quarter of fiscal year 2018. The US has resettled only 34 Syrian refugees and 81 Iraqi refugees in states since 1 October, compared with about 4,670 Syrians and 4,700 Iraqis settled over the four-month period a year before.

The aid group’s estimates roughly accord with a Pew report published last year, which analyzed State Department data and found a sharp decline in refugee resettlements. a

The US has an arduous refugee referral and vetting process, which can take up to two years and involves background checks with several federal agencies, plus interviews and medical checks. How many refugees the US admits varies from year to year, often depending on foreign crisis; in the early 1990s, for example, the US accepted an average of 112,000 refugees every year, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fiscal year 2016, the US accepted 84,995 refugees, 19% of whom were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 15% from Syria and 15% from Burma.

The Trump administration has taken anti-immigration positions on a range of issues, including the reduced refugee caps and a current campaign to curb legal immigration by ending visas for family members of US citizens.

The president of IRC, the British politician David Miliband, condemned Trump’s policies, saying its “determination to squeeze the life out of the refugee resettlement program will harm the lives, and life chances, of some of the most vulnerable people on the planet”.