After news broke in The New York Times Friday that President Biden would not raise the refugee admissions ceiling for fiscal year 2021 — instead maintaining the historic low cap of 15,000 — backlash ensued and the administration later backtracked, Laura Barrón-López reports for POLITICO.
"He's basically broken his promise, and he's abandoned his commitment," said Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, in an interview earlier on Friday. After the reversal, she added: "Who knows if they’ll follow through on it which means 15K may remain in
place."
"Given the decimated refugee admissions program we inherited, and burdens on the Office of Refugee Resettlement, [Biden's] initial goal of 62,500 seems unlikely," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki in a release. "[W]e expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15."
Welcome to Monday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].
FOR THE CALENDAR — We’re proud to join the George W. Bush Institute and the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (ERLC) to bring you a
conversation with President George W. Bush on his upcoming book, Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, a powerful collection of 43 portraits painted by President Bush and accompanying stories that exemplify the promise of America and our proud history as a nation of immigrants. President Bush will be joined by Dr. Russell Moore, President of ERLC and Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Register here for the event on May 6 at 11:30 CT. In a recent interview for CBS, President Bush said he wants to "help set a tone that is more respectful about the immigrant, which may lead to reform of the system." He also penned an op-ed for The Washington Post on how to restore confidence in our immigration system.
SIV — Local allies were critical to the U.S. military’s fight against global terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq "to help build bases, support our forces, and perhaps most vitally, interpret," write The Association of Wartime Allies co-founders Kim Staffieri and Matt Zeller in an op-ed for TIME. While the U.S. created the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program more than a decade ago to offer a path to citizenship for those Afghans and Iraqis who worked with the U.S. in their home countries, "more than 18,000 applicants in Afghanistan alone are awaiting decisions on their applications, with an average family size of four. Most of them have been waiting for at least four years, despite Congress directing the government to process their visa applications in nine months or less." As I wrote in an op-ed for The Hill, when it comes to U.S. forces leaving Afghanistan, the Biden administration should take lessons from the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and welcome Afghan refugees.
WRISTBANDS — Sandra Sanchez at Border Report explains the elaborate colored wristband system that Mexican cartels have created to "identify migrants who have paid them for passage across the Rio Grande, how many times they have tried to cross, and who is eligible to cross again if they’ve been sent back." The system underscores how the lack of a humane, modernized approach to legal
immigration pathways only benefits smugglers. In a new special episode of "Only in America," we get an on-the-ground look at the U.S.-Mexico border from Joanna Williams, executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, former Reagan White House official and Forum
Senior Fellow Linda Chavez and Danilo Zak, senior policy & advocacy associate at the Forum.
VARTAN — An absolutely remarkable human being passed away on Friday. I met him three times, perhaps four. Spoke in front of his board a couple times. Saw firsthand how his Armenian community so revered his leadership and vision at a conference in Yerevan. Vartan Gregorian was, as Geri Mannion from the Carnegie Corporation — which Vartan led — "a force of nature." In one person, he was everything the United States could hope for from a
new American. Brilliant, compassionate, passionate — a person that people of all stripes believed in. And, most importantly, he believed in them as well. I wish I was fortunate enough to know him better. I feel so incredibly lucky to have crossed paths with him a few times.
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