No safe haven: Refugee policy is dictated by political objectives, not humanitarian principles. (A New Era).(U.S. reduces number of permitted refugees)

A million Afghans joined the ranks of one of the world's largest and most desperate refugee populations as a result of U.S. retaliation against their country. Despite the urgency of this humanitarian crisis and the U.S. role in it, President Bush responded by decreasing, not increasing, the number of refugees that will be permitted to enter the U.S. this year. Together with the intensification of security screenings, this will mean that only 30,000 to 50,000 refugees worldwide will receive American sanctuary. A deeper look into U.S. refugee aid since the Cold War reveals that this closing of the door on refugees is much less about security than it is about racial discrimination.

According to the State Department, a refugee is "a person who is outside his/her country and is unable or unwilling to return to that country because of a well-founded fear that she/he will be persecuted because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group." In January 2001, the U.S. Committee on Refugees estimated that l4.5 million refugees worldwide mer the State Department's definition. Under pressure from advocacy groups, Congress apportions a certain number of U.S. refugee slots to different regions of the globe, subject to the President's approval. While 94 percent of the world's refugees are people of color, half of all refugees admitted to the U.S. in 2001 were white--either from the Balkan conflict or Jews from the former Soviet Union.

The preferential treatment of white refugees is not new. When reflecting on the refugee policy in 1982, the National Council of Churches told the New York Times, "We are saying that our doors are open only to those who are white, skilled, and fleeing from socialist governments." While a biased apportionment of refugees has been maintained since the Cold War, Arab refugees have been mostly rejected. More than half of the world's refugees come from Arab countries, particularly Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Yet only 13 percent of last year's refugee apportionments were from this region.

It's About Racism

After the Gulf War, there were 30,000 Iraqi refugees who had opposed Saddam Hussein. They were left in squalid Saudi Arabian camps. "To take 15,000 refugees at that time would have been a piece of cake," recalls Lavinia Limon, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Clinton administration and the current director of Immigrant and Refugee Services of America. "There was no political will. [President] Bush leafleted the country [Iraqi, telling people to rise up against Saddam. It was an implicit promise, and we didn't follow through."

There has been a steady flow of refugees out of Iraq since U.S. sanctions began, but the U.S. has deemed them economic migrants and thus disqualifies them from refugee status. This is doubly ironic, since western governments widely consider Saddam to be one of the world's most oppressive leaders. "It's about racism," says Limon. "It's cultural, it's religious, it's perceptions of who Middle Easterners are. They're not people we feel comfortable with."

That the U.S. and other wealthy nations would discriminate against Afghan refugees surely comes as no surprise to African refugees, who know what it is like to be lowest on the humanitarian priority list. In May of 1999, the Los Angeles Times reported on the disparities in the treatment of refugees of ethnic conflicts in Africa and in Eastern Europe. Some camps for Eritrean and Somalian refugees had one doctor per 100,000 refugees, while many Balkan camps had one doctor per 700 people, a ratio better than that of many U.S. cities. European refugee camps had children's centers, movie theaters, abundant clean water, and diets that included oranges, milk, chicken, cheese, and tarts. In African camps, up to 6,000 people died each day of disease and malnutrition as the only food available was wheat or sorghum. The cause for this horror is clear. U.N. spending in Kosovo was $1.23 a day per refugee, compared to 11 cents in Africa.