Still Few Iraqi Refugees Admitted, Except in Sweden

The Inquirer watched closely last year as the refugee crisis in Iraq spiraled out of control and the US State Department ostensibly redoubled its efforts to start admitting Iraqi refugees into the States.

For some reason, the US still can't manage to allow Iraqis into the country.

According to new numbers from the State Department, to date only 1,400 have been admitted in the last four months. Officials had pledged to process 7,000 by the end of last year. To put this in context, during the intense violence in Iraq last year, at times more than 60,000 Iraqis were fleeing their country every month. In comparison to the US, Sweden has admitted thousands.

 Perhaps the most excruciating reporting on the subject was done a while back by George Packer in a piece for the New Yorker entitled, appropriately, "Betrayed," in which he chronicled the frightening lives former Iraqi employees of US forces now lead.

Packer has since adapted the piece into a play of the same name. He told Gothamist that he, "didn't write the play to draw attention to the issue, which is why I wrote the article. I wrote it to do justice to the Iraqis who I met and to explore their situation more deeply and personally. I mean, it's theater, it's a human story. It's a complicated one about loyalty, hope and disillusionment and I don't expect that it's going to get the attention of anyone in Washington whose attention I've already gotten, without much result. I don't have any illusions it will be a battle cry; I just hope people come see it in order to be made to think and feel more deeply about this human situation."

The human situation, it's clear by the numbers, has been bungled. The State Department reportedly employs charts and graphs and colors to code prospective entrants to the States, what seems to be an array of ways to hold up the process.

To suggest that the tragic holdup owes itself to either budgetary or coordination complications is clearly bunk. Government can be brilliant in creating stoppages, but as was evidenced by the mobilization for war—which included far more complex and involved management maneuvers—no offices dragged their feet.

A truly human situation.

Comments

[sammy]

You are not telling all of the story. this from the Brits..........

An estimated 1,000 people a day are returning across Iraq's borders having previously moved abroad to escape the violence, Iraqi authorities say. Most of the returnees are coming from Syria - and very few from Jordan, where better-off refugees tended to go.

An improving security situation - but also the lack of job opportunities for Iraqis in Syria - may account for the move, correspondents say.

Violence falls in a region which has become markedly more peaceful since Sunni tribesmen joined forces with the US military to tackle al-Qaeda militants last year.

Over 4.4m Iraqis are thought to have been displaced by violence since the US-led invasion of 2003 - but a growing trickle of those who fled the country are now coming back.

Iraq's ministry of migration told the BBC about 1,000 people were returning every day.

The UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR, estimates about 45,000 Iraqis returned from Syria in October - the first month of the school year.

One factor in their return is likely to be a sharp and sustained drop in all kinds of violence, particularly in parts of the capital Baghdad, following a US-Iraqi military "surge".

But the stream of returnees from Syria is not being matched by return traffic from Jordan, where there may be as many as a million Iraqi refugees.

That is probably because those in Syria are poorer, so their savings have run out more quickly, says the BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad.