Refugees

“Refugees” refers to individuals who are forced to leave their home countries because of war, conflict, or persecution. The causes for displacement [Page 1818]range from ethnic, religious, and tribal violence to government upheavals and social movements. Refugees are persecuted on the basis of their race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and membership in a social or political group. Unlike immigrants, refugees do not receive any protection from their government: In most cases, their governments are the persecuting entity. As a result, refugees have a well-founded fear of returning to their home country.

Refugees and immigrants are distinct from one another in this sense: Refugees are forced to move out of their countries for fear of their lives and freedom, whereas immigrants move of their own volition and for opportunity. For these reasons, international laws treat refugees and immigrants distinctly. Generally, the condition of the refugees’ country of origin takes time to improve, and as a result, many refugees reside in refugee camps for years, even up to decades. Nations also provide aid to refugees through resettlement and humanitarian aid.

The term refugee emerged at the same time as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The treaty assigned populations to new territories and created the concept of a sovereign state. In 1685, the Edict of Fontainebleau outlawed Protestantism in France. As a result, about 200,000 Huguenot Protestants left France, settling in non-Catholic places in Europe, such as the Netherlands and Germany. This was the first historical event of a population feeing their home country for fear of persecution, and it brought the word refugee into the English language.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that in 2010, there were 264,574 refugees living in the United States. In 2011, an estimated 800,000 people became refugees across international borders, while approximately 4.3 million individuals were displaced because of persecution or conflict.

Refugees in the United States

On March 17, 1980, Congress passed the Refugee Act, which is a commitment to provide refuge to victims of religious, political, ethnic, and other forms of persecution. The law developed the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program to grant the effective resettlement of refugees and to assist them to achieve economic self-sufficiency as quickly as possible after arriving in the United States. The law also created the legal status of asylum and provided the framework for resettlement programs across the world by outlining the guidelines for establishing refugee eligibility in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

A Sudanese refugee staying in a refugee camp in 2010 after her family escaped from the janjaweed in Sudan. Sudanese families such as hers are among recent refugee groups that have been admitted by the United States.

Over the years, the United States has admitted refugees from conflicts, wars, and persecution. Some examples are the Vietnamese who escaped the fallouts of the Vietnam War; the Bosnians and Kosovars who fed their region's civil war and ethnic cleansing; the Rwandans, Burundians, and Congolese who escaped from the extreme [Page 1819]political and ethnic violence of their respective countries; the Sudanese who broke away from the attacks on the minority populations of the Darfur region; the Burmese who were displaced by the military regime's persecution; and Iraqis who worked with the United States during its military tenure in Iraq.

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