When the Trump administration set the 45,000 mark, it was a historic low for the country, which has kept a relatively high refugee ceiling. It also marked a dramatic shift in the way the U.S. has approached refugee resettlement—moving away from seeing it as an international obligation to framing it as a potential national-security threat.
Donald Trump has made that sentiment clear over the course of his presidency. In June, at a meeting of the National Space Council, Trump said he didn’t want the U.S. to turn into a “migration camp.” He added: “You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places, we can’t allow that to happen to the United States.” At the start of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order that temporarily banned the travel of refugees and immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries and called for a 120-day suspension of the refugee program.
The administration’s decision to lower the refugee ceiling is reflective of a general attitude to crack down on legal immigration. While it’s not clear what the cap will be in the upcoming fiscal year, reports suggest the administration will either maintain the current ceiling or lower it.
As it stands, the U.S. is on pace to fall behind other countries in the number of refugees admitted. The Pew Research Center analysis of data from the UN refugee agency found that the U.S. had resettled 33,000 refugees in 2017, less than half as many as other countries had resettled. Canada trailed the U.S. slightly, resettling 27,000 refugees. This year, however, Canada could outpace the U.S. in the number of refugees admitted. According to UNHCR, the resettlement admission target for Canada in 2018 is 27,000, which is more than those admitted to the U.S. a month away from the end of the fiscal year.
The scaling back of the U.S. resettlement program comes at a time when the number of refugees worldwide is climbing. The UN refugee agency estimates that there are nearly 25 million refugees. More than half of them are children. Syria leads the world in refugees, with 6.3 million, followed by Afghanistan (2.6 million), South Sudan (2.4 million), Myanmar (1.2 million), and Somalia (986,400). In response to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, Barack Obama raised the nation’s refugee ceiling to 110,000 during his final year in office. By contrast, the Trump administration is expected to take in fewer than 100 Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2018.
While the uptick in Syrian admissions under Obama was significant, it didn’t match Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, which took the largest share of Syrian refugees. The U.S. also generally trails other countries in how many refugees it admits per capita. Newland noted that even when the cap was set at 85,000, the per-capita share was lower than that of other countries—“less than 0.3 refugees per 1,000 U.S. residents, compared to a 1.29 rate in Canada and 1.14 in Australia.”