The President’s 2006 budget, called “austere” by some in the mainstream media, provides for an increase in spending for refugee resettlement by $154 million, allowing for the arrival of about 20,000 more refugees in 2006.

President Bush has taken a personal interest in refugee resettlement, and the consensus among immigration restrictonists, both within and outside of government, seems to be that raising objections to growth in the resettlement program is not worth the effort. That is not irrational, considering the bad press that such objections would bring, and in light of the refugee program’s size relative to other immigration programs.

In 2005, the U.S. refugee program will admit approximately 5 5,000 people—the same number who illegally cross the border, intending to stay, every three weeks or so. The Bush amnesty could eventually make permanent legal residents of up to 12 million aliens who either crossed the border illegally or overstayed a non-immigrant visa. Direct relatives of the newly legalized could swell the U.S. population by 50 million in a few years.

Against this, the refugee program seems insignificant.

But the refugee program is tightly interwoven with both legal and illegal immigration and has effects that go well beyond the official quota. Changes are under way in the program that will amplify these effects, ultimately driving up all forms of immigration.

The U.S. refugee-resettlement contracting industry is abuzz over a recent State Department study calling for more refugee numbers, more power to NGOs in selecting refugees, and use of more relaxed criteria in die definition of a refugee. According to the study, the State Department’s refugee bureau must

develop a sense of mission about adding one or two new [refugee] groups to the |U.S. refugee] pipeline development process each month and think of itself as the component in the decision making system that gives tire benefit of the doubt to resettlement.

In other words, the State Department must become the principal backer of the U.S. refugee-resettlement NGOs and must more actively promote resettlement here rather than treat resettlement as a last resort.

According to Kelly Ryan, deputy assistant secretary of the State Department, the government-commissioned recommendations, entitled “The United States Refugee Admissions Program: Reforms for a New Era of Refugee Resettlement,” were the result of an “independent study.” The author of the study, former INS counsel and University of Virginia professor of international law David Martin, said that many in government wanted to see higher refugee numbers, and the study was the result of “anger” over recent lower admission numbers. Mrs. Ryan claims that tire “best ideas come from the advocacy community,” when it comes to selecting groups to admit under the refugee program. Essentially, “advocacy community” means the federal contractors who profit from the program.

Some U.S.-based refugee agencies are establishing overseas posts at which to seek out candidates. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a federal contractor in search of a mission since Jewish emigration from the former Soviet Union slowed and shifted from the United States to Israel, opened an office in Nairobi, Kenya, the hub of global officialdom’s response to Africa’s refugee crisis. HIAS’s increasing role in bringing Muslims to die United States has understandably upset many American Jews.

Ralston Deffenbaugh, Jr., director of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LiRS), which was founded to assist World War II refugees, states that, today, more than half of the refugees his agency resettles are Muslims, mostly from East Africa, where LIRS maintains a presence “on the ground.”

As if anticipating criticisms regarding the obvious conflict of interests at work, the study notes that,

Given that the new era may require a dozen or more decisions each year on new resettlement initiatives, more occasions may arise for critics to charge improper influence. Some recent legislative proposals meant to give NGOs wider authority to help set admissions priorities through refugee response teams perhaps composed exclusively of NGO personnel, are freighted with long-term peril of this sort. Such proposals might succeed in getting admissions numbers up but at the likely cost of feeding a backlash against what critics will see as interest-group distortion.

The United States has always conferred refugee status to entire groups, with membership in the group providing a presumptive “well-founded fear of persecution” required by law. The sea change envisioned in this study is the designation of one or two new refugee groups each month under relaxed selection standards in order to ensure a steady flow of refugees. When picking a group for the program, the criteria usually used to identify a refugee will be complemented by such imponderables as the extent to which individual “human potential” has been wasted. The study would identify numerous, but smaller, groups to supplement the major Gold War flows from the Eastern bloc and Southeast Asia, which are declining in numbers.

The groups receiving most-favored-refugee status would be tightly defined, resulting in an ideal size of 5,000 to 15,000, according to the study’s author. So, for example, to prevent dozens of new flying wedges for ever-growing groups, U.S. refugee status would be conferred on members of tribal group A from country B, resident in a U.N. refugee camp in country X for N or more years.

The resettlement of Somali Bantu from camps in Kenya, which began recently, will serve as the model for the new program. But it is a highly problematic and untested model. Though currently limited to under 15,000 individuals, the Bantu have direct clan relationships with at least 100,000 others in Somalia. Based on experience, it is realistic to expect that most of these will make it here one way or another. Another one million Bantus live in Somalia, of which many can be expected to try to emigrate, thanks to expanded ethnic networks, their enhanced chances of success, and what, for many, is a newfound ethnic identity conferred upon them by international bureaucrats.

Even the study’s supporters cannot hide concerns about the explosive potential of a revamped refugee-resettlement program and have proposed comical controls such as conferring most-favored-refugee status in secret—an impossible task when relying on ethnic clubs in the United States with extensive ties in the sending countries to recommend the next favored group.

The desire for secrecy is based on sound impulses and an understanding of how refugee resettlement really works. Whenever a group is designated as favored for resettlement, it attracts large numbers of new members. According to David Martin, those who are not in any danger in their home country arrange to adopt the favored group’s characteristics, even moving to a refugee camp, if that increases their chances of resettlement. Also, any hint of a chance at resettlement causes the potential beneficiaries, advised by their “advocacy community” and helpful federal contractors, to refuse to consider other options, such as going home or resettling in a nearby country.

Expectations of a generous reception in the West contributed to the refugee outflows of the 1980’s and 90’s and continue to exert a strong pull in the decision to seek asylum in the West today. No refugee flow to the United States has ever stopped with the originally designated group, and, in fact, the small groups model is likely to set off multiple self-propagating flows, some of which have the potential to reach the size of the Cold War flows from Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union.

Until the 1980’s, the program was limited by the absorptive capacity of the organizations involved in the program. But then the charities morphed into moneymaking government contractors —lately they call themselves “faith-based”—with huge incentives for program growth. The State Department now audits the use of government funds by some 400 NGOs dedicated to refugee resettlement in the United States. (Another 160 are mainly involved in refugee assistance overseas.) Most of the staff of these NGOs are recent refugee arrivals. The study states that they should not be expected to

shy away from supporting refugee groups to which they have ties. Our democratic system makes such advocacy legitimate, even on the part of persons or entities affiliated with organizations that have contractual ties with a government program.

Until very recently, the program was tethered by U.S. foreign policy and national interest. Foreign policy now plays a very diminished role. A favorite discussion topic when refugee contractors meet with their contracting government agencies is “refugee resettlement as a weapon in the War on Terror.” To some in the Bush administration, this is a way to repair our image in the Third World—the open hand of hospitality for those who are with us; the sword for our enemies.

Indeed, our foreign entanglements would seem to present endless opportunities to use refugee groups as currency in international transactions. The United States, for example, could promise to resettle a restive minority in exchange for a concession to our interests from the country trying to expel the minority. “Ethnic cleansing” is made easier and is a more tempting goal for tyrants when Washington is willing to lend a hand in the process. Of course, such arrangements would never become official policy, but it would be more than naive to think this will not happen as part of a system in which the United States commits her refugee program to finding a dozen or more new resettlement groups each year. Such a system would be increasingly reliant on international deal brokers with their own narrow agendas.

A global human-rights lobby overwhelmingly floated by government money largely dictates the shape of the refugee program today. This government-supported lobby can claim a string of legislative victories enlisting the American welfare state for this or that group outside of our borders.

The NGO lobby is gearing up to meet recommendations from the new study with a publicity campaign for expanded refugee resettlement to the United States, complete with the usual appeals to “traditional American values”—but nothing about this is traditional.