Refugees and Displaced Persons

Kelly A. Gauger, deputy director in the Office of Refugee Admissions at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and Kit Taintor, vice president of policy and practice at Welcome.US and former refugee coordinator for the state of Colorado, discuss the Uniting for Ukraine program, humanitarian parole, and best practices for welcoming and supporting refugees in communities across the country.    TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Thank you, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. We’re delighted to have participants from forty-seven states and territories to discuss “Ukraine, Humanitarian Parole, and Refugee Resettlement.” Our discussion is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine, and CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. So we are so delighted to have Kelly Gauger and Kit Taintor with us today. We’ve shared their bios with you so I will give you a few highlights. Kelly Gauger is the deputy director in the Office of Refugee Admissions at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Her work includes oversight of the administration’s annual report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions, development of the bureau’s budget for the Refugee Admissions Program, and managing oversight of its seven resettlement support centers worldwide. She also helps manage the bureau’s relationship with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration and Refugee Resettlement colleagues, and governments around the world. Kit Taintor is vice president of policy and practice at Welcome.US, a national nonprofit initiative designed to empower Americans from across the country to welcome and support those seeking refuge in the United States. She previously served as refugee coordinator for the state of Colorado and specialized in efforts related to refugee and community integration such as employment, social and emotional wellness, and community empowerment. She also served as the senior advisor for New American Integration in the office of Colorado Governor Jared Polis. So thank you both for being with us today. Kelly, I thought we could begin with you. We saw on March 24 President Biden’s announcement welcoming a hundred thousand Ukrainians to the U.S. Maybe you could begin by telling us how we are doing with that commitment and talk about the different pathways that Ukrainians can make their way to the U.S., given the war in their country. GAUGER: Thank you, Irina, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Sure. So let me talk about that announcement from President Biden. That number, which, by the way, is not a set limit—we may end up welcoming more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians. It may be less, depending on how many are interested. There are two primary pathways for Ukrainians to seek protection, either temporary or permanent, in the United States. Following that announcement on March 24, on April 21 the president and, more importantly, the Department of Homeland Security announced a program called Uniting for Ukraine that allows individuals in the United States—and it’s a broad range of individuals; it’s not actually even just citizens but people who are lawfully present in the United States—can file an affidavit of support for a Ukrainian overseas who is outside of Ukraine and has fled the Russian war of aggression. And then once—this is a brand new program that the Department of Homeland Security stood up in record time, as far as I’m aware, and then allows—once the sponsors or the supporters in the United States are vetted in terms of their ability to support Ukrainians for some period of time in the United States and there is a bit of a background check as well to protect against trafficking and other such issues, then the Ukrainian overseas is able to complete their part of the application—it’s all online—and then receive, eventually, permission to travel to the United States and it gives them permission to board an airplane to the United States. DHS has relationships with airlines that, you know, facilitates this permission. The person arrives at port of entry and Customs and Border Protection makes the final decision to parole the individuals into the United States. I was on a call yesterday with DHS and they reported out some interesting statistics. So far, about thirty-seven thousand U for U supporters in the United States have filed applications indicating their interest to support a Ukrainian. As of yesterday, a little over twenty thousand Ukrainians had been given authorization to travel and, again, as of yesterday three thousand two hundred and twelve Ukrainian parolees had arrived and been given humanitarian parole at port of entry by CBP. So I think some people are a little surprised that although there are twenty thousand authorizations only three thousand have arrived. That actually mirrors what both Canada and the U.K. have seen, who have announced similar programs. They actually announced similar programs before we did. We’re a little bit behind Canada and the U.K., but they also have a relatively lagging uptake in travel authorizations when you look at actual travel, and a lot of people think that that’s because a lot of Ukrainians are applying for these permissions to travel to our three countries but not necessarily intending to travel right away but to kind of have it in their back pocket as—you know, if things drag on in Ukraine and/or get worse that they can take advantage of the travel authorization. So we’ll see how long that delta of the twenty thousand authorizations and the three thousand actual arrivals persists. OK. That’s Uniting for Ukraine. That’s a Department of Homeland Security program. I’m with the Department of State and we operate the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. We have been admitting Ukrainians and other nationalities of the former Soviet Union to the United States for many decades through a program called the Lautenberg Program, which is based on a piece of legislation that was passed by Congress in 1989 called the Lautenberg Amendment that lowered the evidentiary standards for religious minorities from the former Soviet Union seeking resettlement in the United States. So they don’t have to show a well-founded fear of persecution. They have to show that they’re a member of the protected group, and it’s a much lower evidentiary standard. It leads to a much higher approval rate, close to 100 percent, actually. So when that program was established in 1989 it was, largely, used by Russian Jews to get to the United States. These days, it is more commonly used by Ukrainian evangelical Christians and others. So we have long had this program that we’ve operated. It used to be based in Moscow until about five or six years ago when it became difficult for our partner, the International Organization for Migration, to operate in Moscow. So we moved the base of our operations to Kyiv about—I think it was about six or seven years ago, something like that. And so it’s one of our in-country programs. We have a clause in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program that allows us to do in-country processing when authorized by the president, and the president has every year authorized in-country processing throughout the former Soviet Union. So this was an in-country program. When the war began we had about eighteen thousand Ukrainians in our Lautenberg pipeline, meaning anyone ranging from people who had just had an application submitted on their behalf the day before to about to get on an airplane. So a wide range of people throughout the Lautenberg pipeline. I should mention Lautenbergs also have to have a relative in the United States to file an application for them to come through the Lautenberg Program. So we—now that program has grown and we now have about twenty-four thousand Ukrainians in the pipeline. Some of those applications are so new we haven’t even really entered them and looked at them yet. But we only currently know the location of about twenty-five hundred of those twenty-four thousand people. We believe many of them are still in Ukraine where we actually can’t process them, but a number of them have come out and have notified us of their location. So we had to temporarily shut down our office in Kyiv. We’ve relocated to Chișinău, Moldova, and we are also about to open another office in Warsaw—in Poland—because the largest number of Lautenbergs for whom we know their location outside of Kyiv are based in Poland and there are a little over a thousand of them in Poland. So we are continuing to operate this program albeit with limited staff because none of the male Ukrainian staff of our resettlement support center have been permitted to leave Kyiv. So it’s only been the female staff who have been allowed to leave and move to Moldova and Poland. We’re hiring new staff to help them out. This resettlement support center is also processing all of our Afghan P-1 and P-2 referrals throughout Europe and Central Asia. So they have a big workload. But the bottom line is there is this universe of about twenty-four thousand Ukrainians who could make their way to the United States as refugees over the course of the next, let’s say, year or two depending on their location and where they are in the process. I don’t rule out that at some point we may be able to restart processing in Kyiv, maybe more likely in Lviv, which is a little bit further to the west and a little bit safer. But so there could be a time at which we are—we will be processing in Moldova, in Warsaw, and in Kyiv. We’re also capturing cases that based out of—based from our operations base in Moldova bases in Moldova and Poland will also be traveling to process cases that are located in other countries in the region such as Hungary, Romania, even Germany. So they’re mobile. They traveled. I think I might end there just to, again, say so largest number of Ukrainians coming to the U.S. will come through Uniting for Ukraine. They won’t be coming with refugee status. They’ll have parole status. A smaller number, up to twenty-four thousand—although I think that’s really the high-water point of refugees over the next couple of years. And together I have no doubt, actually, that—I have little doubt that we will reach a hundred thousand Ukrainians who will arrive in the United States through one of these mechanisms. And I’m going to turn it back to Irina, and I’ll be happy to answer questions at the end. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So, Kit, we’re going to go to you now to talk about the work that you’re doing at Welcome.US and how are Ukrainians welcomed into your communities, and can you talk about the community partnerships that are being formed? TAINTOR: Sure. Thank you, Irina, and thank you, Kelly, so much. Great to be here with all of you. I’m coming to you live from Colorado. So great to see so many of my state and local partners here on the call. So, as Kelly said, the primary pathway that Ukrainians that are seeking refuge from the war will come here is through Uniting for Ukraine. Again, it’s a new program but it does use kind of an old tool, if you will, that old tool being the pathway of humanitarian parole, which requires somebody—a named sponsor—to sign what’s called a declaration of financial support. So it’s really like the affidavit of support that Kelly talked about before but it’s a little bit lighter touch, if you will. The responsibilities of the sponsors aren’t necessarily exactly the same. So I wanted to make sure as we use a bunch of information and acronyms that we’re on the same page about the technical details behind that work. So, as Kelly mentioned, you know, this is one of the pathways and it’s really different than what we’ve seen before in the ways that we welcome newcomers, and what I mean by that it’s really different is because it does offer opportunities for everyday Americans like you and me to lean a bit more directly in to the welcoming process as sponsors, to sort of meet people at the airports, to help them find housing, and then to make sure that they have the documents that they need to have in order to restart their lives here. And so we find it to be really exciting. We have engaged with, you know, thousands and thousands of people and organizations who have raised their hand and said, you know what, we’ve seen all those pictures that we’ve all seen in the news about Ukraine and Ukrainians. We know that there’s a crisis in Europe of 7 million folks. We know that there’s countries like Poland and Moldova that are stepping in to offer refuge for Ukrainians and we want to be part of this, and it’s been really great to sort of see everyday Americans step in and really say, you know, we see our role here. We see our role as global citizens and we really want to take a part of this program. As Kelly said, you know, that you do have to have a sponsor and a beneficiary, so an individual will need to know somebody or find somebody in order to sponsor, and once that relationship is—and once that relationship is found people can begin to start the sponsorship process. So I know that there’s some questions in the chat around sort of how do you start that sponsorship process, and so there’s two ways. One, I’m going to invite you all to visit Welcome.US’s Ukraine hub. We’ve partnered with USCIS at the Department of Homeland Security to offer a little bit of, like, plain language, if you will, that helps people understand the sponsorship process and begins to point towards the actual sponsorship application, which is actually on USCIS’ website. A couple of quick notes that, I think, are really great about their website is that, one, this is an online application. So if any of you have worked with folks to fill in humanitarian parole applications before you’ll be very excited that this is no longer paper but it is an online application and there is no backlog. So Kelly mentioned the numbers of folks that have been approved and so what that’s telling me was in the past five or six weeks that this program has been running is that it’s been running pretty smoothly and things are getting approved pretty quickly, which is a testament, definitely, to our friends at the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS that do sort of recognize that that process is relatively easy when we’re thinking about government processes. It’s not like filing taxes, to tell you the truth. It’s a lot easier to move through that process. Another thing that I really like about the USCIS website is you’re able to create an account and you’re able to create an account in a way that you can see the full application, understand the different types of materials that you might need to show in order to move through that process. You know, when you sign the declaration of financial support you’re, basically, saying that you can help make sure that person gets on their feet and stabilizes here in the United States. And so you can look through and see what sort of material you need to show that, maybe a bank statement, maybe the fact that you have a job, sort of a note from your employer, what assets you plan to use to support somebody with their housing expenses—along those sorts of lines. So just note that. You know, and things that are scary in government, this I-134 United for Ukraine application is not one of those and that’s really great to see. You know, after that happens, again, you know, folks will get approved pretty quickly and you’ll begin to prep for arrival. People can arrive wherever in the United States. In the resettlement world there are sort of hubs of resettlement. So these tend to be larger cities where there are resettlement agencies. There doesn’t need to be a resettlement agency in the city where somebody arrives, so just sort of noting that key difference. But what we are seeing are patterns of arrival that really closely mirror where there are existing Ukrainian-American populations. So you guys are active in your states and local communities so you probably know whether or not you have a large Ukrainian-American community but I’ll sort of call out those cities that come into focus for me, and those are New York, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Sacramento. So you’ll note that—again, that those are communities that have welcomed refugees before. They did just welcome Afghans and now that they are seeing Ukrainians, so just noting that that’s a pattern to be proud of because that recognizes that there are strong immigrant communities already in that space and then, again, that these are communities that are welcoming to newcomers. You know, after someone arrives people are expected to help that newcomer kind of find their footing here in the United States and begin that pathway. Note that it is really important to recognize that humanitarian parole does not confer automatic work authorization. So you do have to apply for work authorization once you arrive. If you check the USCIS website they do have a kind of tracker about how long work authorization applications are taking, depending on where you are in the United States. But I think that a pretty good marker and what we’ve seen for Afghans is around six months from date of arrival to people getting work authorization. I do want to take a time out and note that our friends at the Department of Homeland Security made some recent changes that allowed for automatic worker extensions for other populations. So people who already had work authorization here in the United States no longer have to enter, for the lack of a better word, that queue. They are able to get that sort of automatic. And so we’re still hopeful—I think everybody in this process is hopeful that that’s going to clear out that backlog and so we might not be actually looking at six months. But that’s sort of what it looks like right now. You know, once people get here, again, that sponsor is sort of supposed to help people find housing, connect with healthcare. One of the things that beneficiaries have to do soon after they arrive, for instance, is to get a TB test. So the sponsor would be really helping the beneficiary by helping them navigate that process. But I want to take a time out here and celebrate something that happened over the weekend, and the thing that happened over the weekend is President Biden signed a(n) additional law that allows people who are coming in underneath Uniting Ukraine expanded access to some really, really key benefits that everyone on this call is excited about. Those include, like, federal public benefits—Medicaid, SNAP, childcare assistance, TANF—all of those things that people might need to lean upon for a short amount of time before they’re able to have earned income in their families and to be able to provide that support. So really exciting, more than likely in your states. And I know in Colorado, for instance, people are figuring out, like, do they need to run emergency rules, what updates to their eligibility systems might they need to be doing. So note that that work is probably ongoing in your city to make sure that people when they apply with their humanitarian paperwork underneath Uniting for Ukraine that it is moving through that process. But, again, one of my favorite things about Medicaid, in particular, is the ability to backdate Medicaid for ninety days. So I know that health insurance is a big concern for beneficiaries and for sponsors alike so just, really, always like to call that out that that’s a function of most states’ federal Medicaid eligibility rules. The other thing that people became eligible for is services funded under the Office of Refugee Resettlement. So really exciting because that is the tool that works alongside other refugee populations to really make sure that people have connections to case management, employment, mental health services, legal services, all sorts of things. It’s important for you guys to recognize that as federal funding flows from the Office of Refugee Resettlement it flows in two distinct ways, if I can oversimplify things. One is it might flow directly to refugee resettlement agencies in your local community to offer some of those case management or employment supports. But there’s other money that comes straight to states, and so we do expect for money to come in to state refugee coordinator offices, which could be within state government or outside state government, depending on where you are, that allows the state sort of from a state perspective to figure out where the gaps that this money needs to fill, based on what they’re seeing in local communities that Ukrainian beneficiaries need. You know, I think the mantra of me and my counterparts that come out of states is, really, that immigration policy is federal. Immigration integration is local. So a lot of the work that’s going to happen over the next couple of days, weeks, and months is really going to be a lot of that integration work that is more than likely already happening in many of the communities that you represent and happening in a good portion, in part, by community organizations. One thing, Irina, that we’re really tracking is that refugee resettlement agencies are going to be able to avail themselves of some federal dollars. But there’s some other really key organizations over the past couple of weeks and months that have leaned into this space, most especially our organizations that are Ukrainian-American led, and it’s been really, really great to see them pivot from being primarily, you know, like, cultural or education institutions. Maybe they held Ukrainian classes after school or celebrated big holidays. But they have really stepped up and stepped in. So one of my recommendations to state and local partners is to really make sure that you’re pulling in that Ukrainian-American community and, potentially, the community that serves different types of immigrant populations to help wrap their arms around the refugee resettlement infrastructure, knowing that the refugee resettlement infrastructure just went through an overwhelming number of Afghans coming into your cities and to your locations. And so if I were them I would be exhausted. I would be appreciative of the help. So just noting that as you go forth and plan for Ukrainians coming in that I would really invite you to figure out, like, who else in the community can make—has the skills and the expertise that might be able to help a state out or a local community out or a nonprofit ecosystem out with a lot of that work. And, again, Irina, we’ve been super grateful and excited to see the number of Americans, American institutions, American agencies, really standing up and wanting to be part of it, you know, as sort of an historic event on top of, you know, another historic event and really allows us to showcase as Americans what we mean by welcoming and knowing that, again, you know, we’re a nation of immigrants. We were, you know, always meant to be a place where people could find refuge, and these two opportunities—the arrival of Afghans and the arrivals of Ukrainians underneath Uniting for Ukraine—really allow us to step in in ways that, I think, are key. We’ve got a lot of stuff on our website that I want to sort of forecast, but I want to note that the team of the Council for Foreign Relations is going to send this out for you. So don’t feel like you need to scribble it down. We’ve got a Ukraine hub. A couple of really great things on the Ukraine hub right now are links to resources for sponsors. So, for instance, if a sponsor is thinking, huh, I wonder how much money I need to make sure that I have three or four months of support for this Ukrainian family that I want to bring into my community we have a budget template. It’s super simple but it does help you thinking about how you do that. We really encourage that people use that template to work with friends. It can be a lot to sponsor a newcomer and so do it in community. Do it with the church. Do it with your bridge group. Do it alongside an organization. Do it alongside an employer. There are lots of great—different great opportunities where you don’t have to do it alone. Other things that we’ve got on our website, hot off the presses an hour ago is, like, a guide for filling out the I-134 United for Ukraine humanitarian parole application. So kind of like the tips and tricks that we’re seeing, you know, about that, common questions that have been coming up, and, really, wanting to drill down on more specificity to folks. We’ve got an explainer on our website that will be updated tomorrow—so just forecasting that for you guys as well—with a little bit more detail. For instance, one of the questions that we’re getting is, can I bring a pet if I’m coming in underneath Uniting for Ukraine as a beneficiary. So those types of questions will be answered there. Next week we’ll have a little bit kind of more in depth of a(n) engagement module. That’ll be—a Sponsorship 101 is up there now but I’m calling it, like, a Sponsorship 401. I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s a 201. It’s really a 401. Takes you all the way through making sure that sponsors understand power dynamics that might exist in relationships between sponsor and beneficiaries, all the way to how do I find out who a federally qualified health care center in my area might be that I need to connect to—my beneficiary to. So a lot of really great resources. We’re so excited to partner with USCIS at the Department of Homeland Security to do this. We’ve also been partnering with the Office of Refugee Resettlement at Health and Human Services and also partnering with Offices of New Americans and state refugee offices across the United States. So a lot of good work. I hope that this saves everybody time, to tell you the truth, that we put all the information up there, and you can just point folks to our website as you get interest, whether someone wants to be a sponsor or just wants to understand a little bit more about Uniting for Ukraine. So thanks, Irina. FASKIANOS: That was great. Thank you both for the international view and the local view, and, as Kit said, we will send out links to the URLs through the websites and other links that were mentioned so, again, you don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to take—we are now going to your questions so you can either raise your hands. We would love to hear your voice—(laughs)—and we already have two raised hands. Great. Or you can put your question—write it in the Q&A box and I will try to get to those as well. So the first raised hand comes from Matt Joseph. Please unmute yourself and identify yourself so we know what state you’re coming from and what your—give us the context. Q: Hello. This is Matt Joseph. I’m a Dayton city commissioner here in Dayton, Ohio. We are proud to be a welcoming city, and the question I have is actually a practical one. We have a very large concentration of Ahiska Turks here and they have many relatives in Ukraine. So they’re—a number of the groups have asked me about how to get the relatives here. So we were thrilled when this program came out. But the difficulty we’re having is a practical one and that is how do we get them here. Have you seen any models of how it works? Are sponsors paying individually for folks to come? I assume that’s probably the overriding one. In our case, a lot of people who would be sponsors that would be a pretty big burden on them. So I’m actually trying to organize now and trying to figure out how to get folks here and any suggestions you have would be welcome. Thank you. GAUGER: Kit, I’m going to defer to you to start that answer, at least. I think you might have a better, more fulsome answer than I might. TAINTOR: Yeah. I think—so I think one of the things is, is that this is—this is an issue—so I want to recognize that this is an issue in Dayton and it’s an issue for other communities, as well, that that we recognize. Right now, after that travel authorization is granted, the onus is on the sponsor or the beneficiary to find flights. We are trying to work with partners, such as Miles for Migrants or other groups like that, to make sure that some of the things that have been set up for other populations seeking refuge are also available to other folks. I just want to sort of note that with all of Kelly’s great—the numbers we are still about six weeks—five or six weeks into a relatively new program. So thanks for kind of compassion and patience there while we also understand the urgency. So I’ll note on that particular piece there’s also a lot of conversations around how we make sure that we backstop families with funds for sponsors and things like that. So I would really invite an offline conversation, Matt, that we can have to make sure that your community is sort of tied in as those things become more available. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Ryann Woods, who is, I think, from—it’s a written question of—policy analyst from—in the Housing Community Development and Veterans Office about what is the difference between refugee and parolee status, and I think it would be good just to give that definition so that people are clear on that. GAUGER: Sure. Sorry that we didn’t do that at the beginning. Refugee status—if you arrive via the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program you arrive immediately work authorized, although, I guess, you’d still have to complete a form for an EAD. But you’re work authorized. You are eligible to apply for lawful permanent residence in one year and citizenship in five. So it is a path to citizenship. Parole is a—it’s a status or a route of—that DHS allows someone to travel to the United States for people who don’t have another pathway to the United States. So people are actually not supposed to be paroled in if they have a refugee pathway to the United States. Various administrations have used it in different ways. The Trump administration severely, severely restricted the use of parole. The Biden administration is using it very expansively. So it’s, basically, a status that allows you to be lawfully present in the United States and to apply for work authorization but it does not lead to any permanent status. For the most part, if someone comes here on parole and wants to stay, they most likely will have to apply for asylum with the Department of Homeland Security. TAINTOR: I’ll note that that’s also a high bar. Asylum is a pretty high bar, Kelly, as you note, and so just noting that people can apply but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s something that’s going to be approved. And a lot of folks coming in through the Uniting for Ukraine program might not actually have kind of viable asylum applications, so just noting that while we’re so excited about the urgency—we were able to get here people so quickly and that is such a win—there is sort of the flipside of that is this is a temporary status and it doesn’t confer a path to permanency, and it can be a pretty high bar to move for permanency for a lot of these folks. GAUGER: Yeah, that is very true. We actually were just speaking with USCIS this afternoon about that, that although Lautenberg Ukrainians don’t have to show a well-founded fear of persecution, other Ukrainians would. And it is unclear right now how strong many persecution claims or many asylum claims from Ukrainians might be. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Montana Senator Shannon O’Brien., who has raised her hand. Q: There we go. Hi there. Thanks so much. Really appreciate you being here or sharing. I just wanted to, I guess, invite or ask if—the National Conference of State Legislatures has a summit that’s in Denver—Kit, I see you’re in Colorado—the 1st of August, and I’ll put that in the chat. But I’m in Missoula. We have soft landing, which has been great. Folks are coming. And I think increased awareness would be really helpful. Our legislature has not been really excited to invite people to Montana, and so I think just some increased awareness would be real helpful. So it would be great to have you there. Thank you. TAINTOR: I would love it. As you said, I mean, I think that there’s a lot of opportunities for communication and making sure everyone’s on the same page. I think, you know, I feel very overwhelmed with everything that’s happening in the news. I’m sure everybody feels overwhelmed with all of what’s happening. And so we would definitely invite in additional opportunities to make sure people feel informed about this opportunity and also kind of the opportunity that it presents to everyday Americans to welcome folks. FASKIANOS: Great. That’s a great suggestion, Senator, and we’re in touch with NCSL. So we’ll make that connection, too. All right. So let’s go to the next question. I’m going to take a written question from Julia Spiegel, who’s in the office of the California governor, deputy legal affairs secretary: Do you have recommendations for what kinds of immigration relief may be available for Ukrainians who are already here, for example those who are on J-1 visas? TAINTOR: So, Kelly, I can take a stab at this if you’d like. So I want to remind folks about the temporary protected status that happened. And, Kelly, please correct me if my data’s wrong, but I believe that you had to be in the United States on April 11th. Does that feel right? GAUGER: So I know that there was an initial date established and then another date was established later. Was April 11th the second date? TAINTOR: I think so. It’s either April 1st or April 11th, but maybe I’ll google it, Irina, and we can send it out as a follow up. FASKIANOS: Great. TAINTOR: But just noting that if you were in the United States on that day, you now have the opportunity to apply for temporary protected status. And so note temporary protected status is temporary, but then I’d also like to reflect that we’ve had Salvadorans on temporary protected status since the 1990s. And so there are all—you know, all sorts of different, you know, ways that that has been implemented, and temporary protected status, like the J-1 visa, allows for employment and allows for a certain set of benefits—not as robust as a status like refugee status would allow you to, but some really great benefits, especially of course in California with your very robust and inclusive public policies. So just noting that I think a lot of it is individualized. And in these cases, you know, we are also hearing about Ukrainians who arrived on B-1/B-2 sort of tourist visas as well, so just noting that each case is going to be slightly different. I know immigration lawyers and law firms and legal services providers are overwhelmed, but I think it is a—is an opportunity to check in with them and figure out what those available pathways might be kind of if that’s—if that’s the situation that you’re seeing. GAUGER: And I might just add I’m looking at a DHS dashboard that as of yesterday they had received 10,489 TPS applications from Ukrainians since April 19th, so a pretty significant number of Ukrainians. I don’t know how that compares to the number of Ukrainians who are present in the United States, but a pretty significant number have applied for TPS. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Idaho Representative Lance Clow. And if you can unmute yourself. There you go. Q: OK. Yeah, I am a representative. My question kind of comes—our extended family, my daughter and my son-in-law who’s sitting with me right now, are sponsoring a Ukrainian gal that’s coming to the United States. She arrives in June. We already got tickets and all that. So a couple of questions. You’ve answered about work, but she’s actually a student at one of the universities in Ukraine, so—and she’s been living—she got out of the country. She went to Spain and she’s on her way to the United States. Will she be able to enroll in universities and colleges in Idaho? Because that may be a requirement for her to continue her online education with her Ukrainian university. Is there some kind of rule like that? And then I have another question, quickly. TAINTOR: I’ll answer that quickly. Yeah, she should be able to enroll, Representative. I think one of the questions is whether or not she would be eligible for in-state tuition. There have been a couple of states, Colorado included, that have passed laws that allow in-state tuition upon arrival for refugees and other folks, but I don’t think that that’s common. I anticipate that probably in-state tuition is reserved for people who have resided in Idaho for, let’s say, a year. So just sort of flagging that it’s a yes, but then also she’s probably going to be classified for out-of-state tuition. Q: OK. My other question. You referenced asylum—you know, this parole visa is two years, and then after that they can apply for asylum. What is the significance of eventually applying for asylum? I’ve got the impression you can’t return to the country. GAUGER: Well, if you—yeah. If you apply for asylum, it provides permanent status in the United States. And, yes, a DHS asylum officer would probably look critically at somebody who had since returned—you know, if they had come to the United States and then returned to Ukraine and then came home or came back to the United States. Getting asylum in the United States does not mean that you can never return home. Actually, many people who get asylum or refugee status in the United States at some point return home. Maybe I shouldn’t say many, but a lot. I know a lot of people that have arrived through the Lautenberg program over the years have eventually gone home. And also, I just wanted to say I have heard—and Kit, you can correct me if you’ve heard differently—I have heard from DHS that at the end of the two years you can also apply for an additional two years. I don’t know what the likelihood is that an additional two years will be granted, but there is—the DHS has held up the possibility that at the end of two years someone could apply for another two years. TAINTOR: Yeah. Representative, one thing I would point out is that I think people have different comfort levels in traveling when they’re on sort of a legal permanent residence or a green-card status and when they travel once they’re a citizen. So just noting Kelly mentioned before that the distance between getting legal permanent residence, which is a pathway for asylum, and then getting citizenship is about—you know, about five years total if not a little bit more. And so what we find with a lot of folks is they find more comfort in leaving once they’re a citizen because they’re a naturalized citizen and so, you know, returning home isn’t as big of a deal as might be if your asylum case is still continuous or if your situation is a green card. So just want to throw that out that, you know, once you become a citizen, then you have the same rights as every other citizen in the United States and people feel a lot more comfortable traveling at that time. Q: Thank you very much. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Steve Bloess—I’m probably not pronouncing that correctly—who’s written a question but also raised his hand. So if you could identify yourself—unmute and identify yourself. And I this is probably for you, Kelly. Q: I’m Steve Bloess. I’m just a poor, poor councilman in Sedalia, Missouri. We’ve got a lot of Ukrainian residents in Pettis County, about five thousand, which is the surrounding county. We’re the county seat. We’ve done a lot with them raising funds, but some of the funds have been—have gone to—and thank you guys for everything you’ve done. I know you’ve been catching them faster than you can string them for months. But they have a lot of relatives or did have a lot of relatives in the last couple weeks, last time I talked to them, they are—that they’re taking things to at the Mexican border, and they want to get them in as quickly as they can. So can—would this—would you guys point me in the right direction? Will the Lautenberg situation help them? Would someone contact me maybe later with my email address and help me untangle the process for them so that they can help their family members south of us? GAUGER: Sure. Kit, I’m going to start and then I’ll have—ask you to come in behind me. So a large number of Ukrainians successfully approached the southern border and were paroled into the United States. However, once Uniting for Ukraine was announced on that day in April, which I think was April 21st, the Department of Homeland Security, it’s my understanding, stopped paroling people in at the southern border and instead have directed people to Uniting for Ukraine. And so anyone—any Ukrainian who is present in Mexico right now needs to go through the Uniting for Ukraine process that Kit and I have spoken about. The online application that Kit describes as being relatively user-friendly and—I don’t want to say simple, but you know, especially if you go to Welcome.US and look at their Ukraine information. So people are not being—from my understanding, people are not being paroled in at the southern border. So they need to get online, do the application, have someone in the United States do the I-134 affidavit of support, and then get approved, and then request the permission for travel, and then travel to the United States and request humanitarian parole with CBP when they arrive. FASKIANOS: OK. We’ll go on. I’m going to go next to Mayor Jennifer Talley, if you can unmute yourself. Q: Hi. Jennifer Talley, mayor of Graham, North Carolina. I have hosted thirteen exchange students through the years, and all of my exchange students when they left and went through this process always went back to their wonderful families. But I have a daughter that was in Venezuela, and everyone knows what’s happened kind of in Venezuela, but eventually, basically, like fifteen of her family members came here to America and sought asylum. And I know like for the first six months they can’t work. They have to basically have someone to kind of sponsor them, give them a place to live, all of that sort of thing. And now they’re just thriving. I mean, they’re just doing so well. My question is, is under this program are they—like, is our goal really to be trying to find families that will support them for a period of time until they can work? Or what is that time period? Like, what do we—what do we need to be asking people to do? Because, obviously, I have a lot of connections in the—in the exchange student program, people with extra rooms in their houses and that sort of thing that would be most likely very willing to help. So I’m not really sure from this program what we’re supposed to be looking for in our communities to be able to assist. So that’s what I’m looking for, some direction today. GAUGER: Kit, I’m going to turn that to you. TAINTOR: Thanks, Kelly. And, Mayor, so happy to hear about the folks from Venezuela. That’s often what we see, is that given an opportunity, given a door to walk through, people do thrive in the United States. So really great to hear about that story. You know, folks coming in is going to be really dependent on their individual situation. I want to, you know, remark that we have seen a fair number of Ukrainian beneficiaries who already worked remote, let’s say, and will be able to work remote here. Those folks might not need a ton of support. Other folks might be starting from scratch. Their assets might have been wiped out, they might not have any income, and that they’ll need sort of that path forward. So before I sort of answer the question specifically, I just want to acknowledge the fact that every single person is going to be different and sort of have different pathways to stability and economic security here in the United States. What we recommend are two things. One is to encourage sponsors or sponsor groups or, you know, sponsors alongside organizations or businesses or other folks that can help them raise the money. Would be about $3,000 per newcomer, and that’s just sort of based on what lived experience looks like, adding into account, you know, sort of the path forward for folks. But we also do have that budget template I talked about, Mayor, that also lines out sort of what cost might somebody need to cover, and I really recommend going through that. That can help you visualize, you know, if you are—you know, for instance, if the beneficiary is staying in your basement apartment, you don’t need to think about housing, and so that might change the amount of money that you need to raise for that particular family. If you’re sponsoring a family of seven and they’ve got, you know, kids and dogs and all that sort of stuff, maybe they’re not going to fit into your basement apartment and you are going to need to help them find an apartment in North Carolina to make sure that they feel safe and secure. So just note we recommend about $3,000 per beneficiary, but that is just an average and, you know, might be different dependent on the case of the beneficiary, the cost of living where you live, whether or not you’re going be able to offer them housing, and the other things that you might be able to either fundraise or fund and support. The other thing we do have on our website, to just make note of this, Mayor, is a fundraising tool. So, for instance, if people are really concerned about raising that money, we do really recommend that people ask neighbors to lean in. We’ve heard a lot from people who say I can’t sponsor but I want to help. I think you’ll find that in Graham, North Carolina, too. So, you know, that’s also sort of a recommended tool that we’ve got there to help people visualize, A, what they’re going to need, and then work towards being able to plan for it. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Cody Allen, who’s with the Southern Legislative Conference in Georgia: What resources are there for states looking to ease access to occupational licenses for refugees? In Georgia, we have a lot of refugees who are underemployed. TAINTOR: Well, I personally love this question because it’s one that we get a lot. And it’s not, you know, just refugees, but it’s immigrants, it’s humanitarian parolees, it is all folks. And one of the things I want to make clear is that most of occupational licensing is at the state level, not the federal level. So noting that there’s a lot of that, what folks can do on the ground, I know NCSL has had a lot of work in this space as well as other—as other local partners. It’s a known issue. It’s a challenging issue. But really, the power to change this is at the state and local level, and so I encourage folks to get in contact with their department of—regulatory agencies or whatever wherever occupational license is overseen to see what they’re working on in this particular space. FASKIANOS: Great. Go next to Frederick Sneesby, who has his hand raised. Q: Yeah, hi. FASKIANOS: There you go. Q: In Rhode—I’m in Rhode Island. And when the Afghans came, most everyone came as humanitarian parolees and they came through the resettlement agencies. And so when I’m looking at the Ukrainians coming as parolees, and you had mentioned either through Uniting for Ukraine or Lautenberg, but will there be another portal, if you will, established through the resettlement agencies? And the reason I ask is that thinking ahead that—of numerous sponsors bringing people into the state sort of invites chaos in terms of finding housing, accessing medical care, getting into schools, employment, education, and so forth—meeting basic needs. When people are flowing through the resettlement agencies, there’s a better chance of coordination and collaboration among a bunch of social-service agencies. So I’m just wondering—two questions, I guess. Is there going to be another portal, for lack of a better word, flowing through the resettlement agency system? And is there a way to find out who the sponsors are in Rhode Island if people are coming through Uniting for Ukraine just so we can begin to organize a little bit better? GAUGER: I’m going to start and say I’m really glad that you asked this question because I asked my colleague Holly Herrera, who is in charge of our domestic resettlement team, the very same question this morning. I said, this is great that we—that Ukrainians are now eligible because of recent legislation that the president signed over the weekend, but how do they know? Because these Ukrainians are not coming through our traditional program. And she—Kit, her answer was that she thought that the Office of Refugee Resettlement was going to use their Preferred Communities funding to kind of spread the word about this. But I wonder if you—oh, there’s Holly. I wonder if either of you have any further information about that, because I agree it would be great to make sure that Ukrainians coming through United for—Uniting for Ukraine are aware that they can access these programs through resettlement agencies. TAINTOR: Yeah, one thing that I’ll just sort of dive in in—and Frederick, I know—I know that you know this well—is that there are other populations that are eligible—other immigrant populations that are eligible for Office of Refugee Resettlement services that do not come through the United States Refugee Admissions Program. So good examples of this would be people that have been granted asylum, so asylees become eligible for our benefits. You know, Cuban/Haitian entrants are often eligible for benefits. So it’s not something that we haven’t faced before, but does necessarily—does, to your point, need a different toolkit, if you will. And so one of the reasons that I’d really bring up working with United—Ukrainian-American organizations or other organizations that have stepped forward in this space to provide support for sponsors, as those are natural nexuses to get this sort of information out. That is really different than what we rely on. I am always reminded about the fact that refugee resettlement agencies don’t necessarily have to go out and find their clients; their clients come to them as part of the USRAP program, and this is a little bit different. And so I think that ORR is thinking about this through the Preferred Communities and also invite in state and local governments to also think about, as money begins to flow from the federal government, how might infrastructures need to look a little bit different to make sure that the word gets out. Simply because, you know, for instance, we know that people aren’t going to just, you know, kind of be assigned a case manager at a resettlement agency; that they’re really going to have to learn about that resettlement agency, find that resettlement agency, and ultimately advocate for their services at that particular agency. So, Holly, I don’t know if you want to add anything. Yeah. GAUGER: Holly, do you want to add? HERRERA: Yes. I think you—I think you both covered it very well. The only thing I wanted to mention, too, is that with this population, you know, they do have supporters that they are going to be helping them in the United States. So when you talk about services that the resettlement agencies typically provide for refugees and for the Afghan parolees such as enrolling in school and so on and getting connected to services, those same resettlement agencies and partners will also likely be receiving funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement to serve Ukrainians. And so they will help when needed to do some of the things like connecting them to schools and other services, and then certainly providing a lot of the funded services that ORR is going to be providing. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to go next to Christina Bruce-Bennion. Christina, do you want to just ask your question? Or I can read it. Let me give you the opportunity to—putting her on the spot. OK. I do not see her coming on, so I will just ask is. So Christina is with the Idaho Office for Refugees. And— Q: I’m sorry. I think it might have just let me unmute. Can you hear me? FASKIANOS: Oh, there we go. Yes. Great. Thank you. Q: I didn’t see the way to unmute for a minute. Thanks for taking my question and thanks for the information. This is a little bit of a follow-on, I guess, to the previous question. But in our office we’ve been thinking a lot about sort of the equity as people are landing, in some cases where there is resettlement and some cases where there is not. And in a state like Idaho where they are—you know, it’s really big distances between certain communities, and if they’re eligible for things like RCA—which is great; we’re super happy to see that addition to the landscape. You know, there are just a lot of things on the—like, the implementation level, right, that are really—I mean, you know, Kit could probably roll her eyes when she thinks about data or, you know, things like that. But you know, there’s—there is just a lot of stuff on the—you know, just thinking, again, about this, like, access. And so I guess I’m curious, maybe Kelly, one from PRM’s perspective—even though I know a lot of this is running through DHS and not PRM—but, like, what are the—sort the equity questions or the equity—you know, in terms of, like, what if someone doesn’t access services and doesn’t get them and that? You know, like, you know, who’s—I guess the onus is on whom for that? You know, like, is it really up to the client to, like, seek out, are the agencies really trying to track down? And then, from a data perspective and just kind of, again, sort of this equity piece, like, if we don’t know that people are coming in or a sponsorship circle, like, never reaches out or isn’t in a resettlement community, I don’t know, I guess it’s—yeah. So we’re all still learning and I think the infrastructure thing definitely has to improve on our end for sure. But just those are a lot of the questions we’ve been thinking about because they’re—from our perspective, the immigration status doesn’t change what they’ve been through and the kind of support that they will need. And so, yeah, I guess that’s—if you have any thoughts on that. Thank you. GAUGER: Christina, good to hear from you. It’s been a long time. Holly, I’m going to turn that over to you if you have thoughts about that. It’s, frankly, not—it’s not an issue that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. Maybe I should, now that you’ve answered—asked the question. But—and maybe the following assumption is incorrect, but I actually have been operating under the assumption that there are going to be quite a number of Ukrainians who will be coming here to join family members who won’t seek benefits out at all and won’t need them, and that their family members are applying for them to come for a certain amount of time knowing that, you know, they’ll be providing a place for them to stay and so on. I, frankly, don’t even know how many Ukrainians will be seeking work here. So it’s not—it’s admittedly not an issue that I have thought a lot about. But, Holly or Kit, I wonder, maybe starting with Holly, is this something that you’ve thought about? HERRERA: Yes. What I would say is that—so it is the Office of Refugee Resettlement and Health and Human Services who has received the supplemental appropriation to serve Ukrainians, and they are currently working on just this question: What is the best way to ensure access given, as Kelly says, that the need for services may not be the same as with other populations? But in terms of ensuring that those who do need services and assistance—whether it’s medical assistance or, you know, enrollment in particular programs, employment, so on—whether that’s available to them. And so while nothing has been finalized yet—and I’m sitting here in a room with my partners right now and conversing with them about just this topic—is that they are considering, first of all, two things, at least to this point that I know of, are working with the states, the state refugee coordinators. Some may be on this call. So the state refugee coordinators will have that overview of the entire state and the programs and systems that they need to stand up in order to ensure that services are accessible. And then, secondly, working with remote services. So Preferred Communities was mentioned earlier. I don’t think that’s set in stone yet. But the idea being that you could perhaps have a remote program like Preferred Communities be that access point for services for the Ukrainians. And perhaps Kit has more to add. FASKIANOS: Kit, over to you. TAINTOR: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s so great, Christina, that you’re thinking about this, because I actually think that you have the most power—(laughs)—of this about—of any of us, because a lot of the money will be coming to you. And the Idaho Office of Refugees, you know, obviously, has large statutory authority to determine how to solve the very question that you’re asking. So just noting that I’m super excited that you’re thinking about it. Some of Welcome.US’s recommendations that we’ve put in to our friends over at HHS really follow along some of these things. How do we make sure that, you know, states are given the sort of flexibility and adaptability that they need within the regulations to make sure that these sorts of new programs or innovations can be rolled out, especially as, you know—you know, we saw private sponsorship, let’s say, in the Afghans that you talked about, we’ll see it more of a program coming forward? And so how can this opportunity be used to sort of begin to change a little bit about the way that states structure their programs? So I think that’s one of our recommendations. And then one of our other recommendations is to really think about how ORR in particular might be able to support some of the organizations that are already doing this work, noting that they’re already connected to beneficiaries, they’re already connected to sponsors. And so sort of we won’t be putting the pressure on resettlement agencies or the resettlement agency infrastructure that exists to do all of the outreach and engagement, but instead really partnering with organizations, again, that are already doing this work to allow them to provide equity through their lanes of services to make sure that we’re not necessarily reliant on a very narrow kind of path for people to get involved but we’re opening the door for more Americans, American institutions, and American agencies to be involved. But super excited that you’re thinking about it. I’m always happy to brainstorm offline on what I think other states are looking at that potentially, you know, might be of relevance to your community. GAUGER: Maybe, Irina, one last word from me. And I see it’s almost or it is 3:30, so we probably need to wrap up. But something that has occurred to me during this call, most particularly during Kit and Holly’s recent comments, but also a question that a gentleman asked—I’m sorry; I don’t remember he was from—asked about whether states can find out where sponsors are located. And, Kit, I wonder if you might be the most familiar with this. It would be interesting to know if anyone has asked the Department of Homeland Security if they could provide some more granular information to—I don’t know whom—to ORR, to the states about where exactly people are. I mean, I’m looking at, I think—I’m looking at the DHS dashboard that shows, you know, the top area—New York; Newark, New Jersey; Jersey City, 5,806 people—but that’s a—that’s a big territory, right? So would they be willing to provide like a state-by-state, maybe even a city-by-city report? Has that—do you know if anyone has asked DHS about that? TAINTOR: Every Friday. (Laughs.) GAUGER: You do? TAINTOR: Yeah. So I think—I think you mentioned before that there are only, you know, three thousand or so people that arrived, so I just don’t think we’ve tipped into the place where that information can be both protective and public. So I do understand from our USCIS and DHS friends that they are working on what to display and how to display it for the very reasons, but I want to be, you know, really kind of clear that what USCIS has is they have where a sponsor applied. GAUGER: Right, right. TAINTOR: It’s not necessarily where the beneficiary is. And the, secondarily there’s probably not a world in which the sponsor is identified, but there is a world in which information is shared with states and local communities to allow you to know where to do outreach and engagement to make sure that sponsors step forward and identify themselves. GAUGER: Yeah, true. That number I just gave, yes, I didn’t clarify. That was the number of supporters, not the number of Ukrainians in that area. So, yeah, no, point taken. TAINTOR: Yeah. FASKIANOS: Great. Well, I’m sorry that this hour’s just disappeared, vanished. It was such— TAINTOR: This was a great discussion. FASKIANOS: Great discussion, great engagement from all of you, and thank you for the work you’re doing in your communities. There are so many more questions. Just to say it again, we will be sending out a link to the video and the transcript, as well as, you know, going through all the resources that were mentioned. But I will just leave you with the Ukrainian hub is Ukrainian.Welcome.US, right, Kit? That’s the correct URL? But again, we will put that in an email to all of you. Thank you for all that you’re doing and thank you, Kit Taintor and Kelly Gauger. We really appreciate all the work that you’re doing in your respective areas on this issue, which is so important to us and to humanity. So thank you very much. So, again, you can follow us, CFR’s State and Local Officials Initiative, on Twitter at @CFR_local. And of course, always please come to CFR.org and ForeignAffairs.com for information on foreign policy, different expertise and analysis. So, again, thank you, Kelly and Kit. GAUGER: Thanks for all the great— TAINTOR: Thank you. GAUGER: Thanks for all the great questions, everybody. Take care. (END)

Anne C. Richard, distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House, will lead a conversation on refugees and global migration. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the final session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Anne Richard with us today to talk about refugees and global migration. Ms. Richard is a distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House. She has taught at several universities including Georgetown, University of Virginia, Hamilton College, and the University of Pennsylvania. From 2012 to 2017, Ms. Richard served as an assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, and before joining the Obama administration she served as vice president of government relations and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. She has also worked at the Peace Corps headquarters and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and is a member of CFR. So, Anne, thank you very much for being with us today. With your background and experience, it would be great if you could talk from your vantage point—give us an overview of the current refugee trends you are—we are seeing around the world, especially vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, et cetera. RICHARD: Thank you so much, Irina, for inviting me today and for always welcoming me back to the Council. And thank you to your team for putting this together. I’m very happy to speak about the global refugee situation, which, unfortunately, has, once again, grown yet larger in a way that is sort of stumping the international community in terms of what can well-meaning governments do, what can foundations and charitable efforts and the United Nations (UN) do to help displaced people. I thought we could start off talking a little bit about definitions and data, and the idea is that I only speak about ten minutes at this beginning part so that we can get to your questions all the more quickly. But for all of us to be on the same wavelength, let’s recall that refugees, as a group, have an organization that is supposed to look out for them. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is the title of the number-one person in the organization, but the entire organization is known by that name, UNHCR, or the UN Refugee Agency. It also has a convention—the 1951 Refugee Convention—that came about after World War II and was very focused on not allowing to happen again what had happened during World War II where victims of the Nazis and, as time went on, people fleeing fascism, people fleeing communism, couldn’t get out of their countries and were persecuted because of this. And there’s a legal definition that comes out of the convention that different countries have, and the U.S. legal definition matches very much the convention’s, which is that refugees have crossed an international border—they’re not in their home country anymore—and once they’ve crossed an international border the sense is that they are depending on the international community to help them and that they’re fleeing for specific purposes—their race, their religion, their ethnicity, their membership in a particular social group such as being LGBTQ, or political thought. And if you think back to the Cold War, these were some of the refugees coming out of the former Soviet Union, coming out of Eastern Europe, were people who had spoken out and were in trouble and so had to flee their home countries. So what are the numbers then? And I’m going to refer you to a very useful page on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees website, which is their “Figures at a Glance” presentation, and we’re going to reference some of the numbers that are up there now. But those numbers change every year. They change on June 20, which is World Refugee Day. And so every year it hits the headlines that the numbers have gone up, unfortunately, and you can anticipate this if you think in terms of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It’s usually June 20, 21, 22. So June 20, that first possible day, is every year World Refugee Day. So if you’re working on behalf of refugees it’s good sometimes to schedule events or anticipate newspaper articles and conversations about refugees ticking up in—at the end of June. So if you were paying attention last June for World Refugee Day, UNHCR would have unveiled a number of 82.4 million refugees around the world, and so this upcoming June what do we anticipate? Well, we anticipate the numbers will go up again and, in fact, yesterday the high commissioner was in Washington, met with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and they met the press and Filippo Grandi, the current high commissioner, said that he thinks the number is closer to ninety-five to ninety-six million refugees. So, clearly, a couple things have happened since last June. One is that so many people are trying to flee Afghanistan and another is so many people have fled Ukraine. So if we went back to that $82.4 million figure that we know we have details on, we would find that this is the figure of people who are displaced because of conflict or persecution around the world. The ones that count as refugees who have actually crossed an international border is a smaller number. It’s 20.7 million people that UNHCR is concerned about and then another close to six million people who are Palestinians in the Middle East whose displacement goes back to 1948, the creation of the statehood of Israel, and upheaval in the Middle East region as Palestinians were shifted to live elsewhere. And so—and they are provided assistance by a different UN agency, UNRWA—UN Relief Works Administration in the Near East—and so if you see a number or you see two sets of numbers for refugees and they’re off by about five or six million people, the difference is the Palestinian, that number—whether it’s being counted in, which is for worldwide numbers, or out because UNHCR cares for most refugees on Earth but did not have the responsibility for the Palestinians since UNRWA was set up with that specific responsibility. So what’s the big difference then between the eighty-two million, now growing to ninety-five million, and this smaller number of refugees? It’s internally displaced persons (IDPs). These are people who are displaced by conflict or are displaced by persecution, are running for their lives, but they haven’t left their own countries yet. So think of Syrians who, perhaps, are displaced by war and they have crossed their own countries and gone to a safer place within their own country but they haven’t crossed that border yet. Others who have crossed into Lebanon or Turkey or Jordan or Iraq or have gone further afield to Egypt, those would be considered refugees. Who’s responsible for the IDPs then? Well, legally, their own countries are supposed to take care of them. But in my Syria example, the problem is Syria was bombing its own people in certain areas of the country, and so they were not protecting their own people as they should be. People can be displaced by things other than war and conflict and persecution, of course. More and more we talk about climate displacement, and this is a hot issue that we can talk about later. But who’s responsible then when people are displaced by changing climactic conditions and it’s their own governments who are supposed to help them? But more and more questions have been raised about, well, should the international community come together and do more for this group of people—for internally displaced persons—especially when their own governments are unwilling or unable to do so? What about migrants? Who are the migrants? Migrants is a much broader term. Everyone I’ve talked about so far who’s crossed a border counts as a migrant. Migrants are just people on the go, and the International Organization for Migration estimates there’s about 281 million migrants on Earth today—about 3.6 percent of the world population—and one of the big issues I’ve pushed is to not see migrants as a dirty word. Unfortunately, it often is described that way—that migratory flows are bad, when, in fact, lots of people are migrants. Students who travel to the U.S. to take classes are migrants to our country. The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, who was himself for eleven years the high commissioner for refugees, he says, I am a migrant, because he’s a Portuguese person working in New York City. People hired by Silicon Valley from around the world to work in high-paid jobs, legally in the United States, they are migrants. More concerning are vulnerable migrants, people who are displaced and don’t have the wherewithal to, necessarily, protect themselves, take care of themselves, on the march or where they end up, or also if they’re seen as traveling without papers, not welcome in the places where they’re going, that can be a very, very dangerous situation for them. So be aware that migrants is a really broad all-encompassing term that can include travelers, businesspeople, as well as vulnerable and very poor people who are economic migrants. Finally, immigrants are people who set out and migrate because they intend to live somewhere else, and when we were talking about the Trump administration’s policies to reduce the number of refugees coming to the U.S. we also see that immigration to the U.S. also was decreased during that administration as well. So both the refugee program and a lot of the immigration pathways to the U.S. are now being examined and trying to be not just fixed, because a lot of them have needed care for quite some time, but also put back on a growth trajectory. And then asylum seekers are people who get to a country on their own, either they have traveled to a border or they pop up inside a country because they have gotten in legally through some other means such as a visitor visa or business visa, and then they say, I can’t go home again. It’s too dangerous for me to go home again. Please, may I have asylum? May I be allowed to stay here and be protected in your country? So that’s a lot of different terminology. But the more you work on it, the more these terms—you get more familiar using them and understand the differences between them that experts or legal experts use. So ninety-five to ninety-six million people, as we see another eleven million people fleeing Ukraine and of that four million, at least, have crossed the borders into neighboring countries and another seven million are internally displaced, still inside Ukraine but they’ve gone someplace that they feel is safer than where they were before. When we looked at the eighty million refugees and displaced people, we knew that two-thirds of that number came from just five countries, and one of the important points about that is it shows you what could happen, the good that could be done, if we were able to push through peace negotiations or resolutions of conflict and persecution, if we could just convince good governance and protection of people—minorities, people with different political thought, different religious backgrounds—inside countries. So the number-one country still remains Syria that has lost 6.7 million people to neighboring countries, primarily. Secondly was Venezuela, four million. Third was Afghanistan. The old number from before last August was 2.6 million and some hundreds of thousands have fled since. And the only reason there aren’t more fleeing is that they have a really hard time getting out of their country, and we can talk more about that in a moment. The fourth are Rohingya refugees fleeing from Burma, or Myanmar. That’s 1.1 million, and the fifth was Southern Sudanese, 2.2 million, who have fled unrest and violence in that country. So we know that we have not enough peace, not enough solutions, and we have too much poverty, too, and dangers. In addition to the Venezuelans, another group that has approached the U.S. from the southern border that were in the paper, especially around election times, is from the Northern Triangle of Central America, so El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These are people who could be fleeing because of economic situations and could also be fleeing from criminal violence, gangs, warfare, narcotraffickers. And so if they are fleeing for their lives and approaching our southern border, we are supposed to give them a hearing and consider whether they have a case for asylum, and the—unfortunately, that is not well understood, especially not by folks working at our borders. The Customs and Border Protection folks are more and more focused on, since 9/11, ensuring that bad guys don’t come across, that terrorists don’t come across, that criminals don’t come across. And we heard in the Trump administration conversations about Mexicans as rapists, gang warfare being imported into the U.S. from Central America when, in fact, some of it had been originally exported, and this sense that people from the Middle East were terrorists. And so really harsh language about the types of people who were trying to make it to the U.S. and to get in. Some final thoughts so that we can get to the question and answer. The U.S. government has traditionally been the top donor to refugee and humanitarian efforts around the world. The bureau at the State Department I used to run, the Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau, was a major donor to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees—UNRWA—the International Committee of the Red Cross, and also the International Organization for Migration, which used to be an independent organization and is now part of the UN since 2016. We were also the number-one resettlement location, the formal program for bringing refugees to the United States, and when I was assistant secretary we brought seventy thousand refugees per year to the United States, invited them to come through a program that took eighteen months to twenty-four months, on average, to get them in because they had to be vetted for security reasons. They had to pass medical tests. Their backgrounds had to be investigated to see that they were who they said they were. And that number went higher in the last year of the Obama administration to eighty-five thousand refugees and, in fact, the Obama administration proposed some very strong additional measures to help refugees. But the Trump administration threw that all into reverse with a completely different set of policies. So the numbers then became reduced every year—fifty-three thousand in the first year of the Trump administration, 22,500 the next year, thirty thousand in 2019, 11,814 in 2020, a similar number in 2021, and slow numbers coming today, this despite bringing so many Afghans through an evacuation exercise last summer. Many of the people who were evacuated were American citizens or green card holders. Afghans who had worked for the U.S. but did not have their formal paperwork yet were brought in under what’s called humanitarian parole, and the problem with that program is that it’s no guarantee for a longer-term stay in the United States. So there’s a bill in Congress right now to address that. A lot of the people who worked on that, especially within the U.S. government, are proud that they’ve scrambled and brought so many people so quickly—120,000 people brought from Afghanistan. At the same time, those of us who are advocates for refugees would say too many people were left behind and the evacuation should continue, and that’s a real concern. In terms of resettlement in the U.S., it’s a program run—public-private partnership—and we’ve never seen so many volunteers and people helping as there are right now, and initiatives to help welcome people to the United States, which is fantastic. I would say the program should be one of humanity, efficiency, and generosity, and that generosity part has been tough to achieve because the government piece of it is kind of stingy. It’s kind of a tough love welcome to the United States where the refugees are expected to get jobs and the kids to go to school and the families to support themselves. So let me stop there because I’ve been just talking too long, I know, and take questions. FASKIANOS: It’s fantastic, and thank you for really clarifying the definitions and the numbers. Just a quick question. You said the U.S. government is the top donor. What is the percentage of DVP? I mean, it’s pretty— RICHARD: Tiny. Yeah. FASKIANOS: —tiny, right? I think there’s this lack of understanding that it may seem like a big number but in our overall budget it’s minuscule. So if you could just give us a— RICHARD: Yeah. It’s grown in the last few years because of all these crises around the world to ten to twelve million—I mean, ten billion dollars to twelve billion (dollars) between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, which was bigger. It was around seven or eight billion (dollars) when I was the assistant secretary five, six years ago. But the important part of it was it provided the whole backbone to the international humanitarian system. Governments, some of them, saw Americans sometimes as headaches in terms of we, Americans, telling them what to do or we, Americans, having our own ideas of how to do things or we, Americans, demanding always budget cuts and efficiencies. But the fact is the whole humanitarian enterprise around the world is based on American generosity, especially the big operating agencies like World Food Programme, UNHCR, UNICEF, UN Development Program. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So now we’re going to go to all you for your questions. Hands are already up and Q&A written questions. So I’ll try to get to everybody as much as I can. I’m going to go—the first question from Rey Koslowski, and if you can unmute yourself and give us your institution that would be fantastic. RICHARD: Hi, Rey. Q: All right. Rey Koslowski, University at Albany. Hi, Anne. Good to see you. I’d like to pick up on the use of humanitarian parole. So, as I understand it, it’s being utilized for Afghan evacuees, Afghans, who you mentioned, who didn’t—weren’t able to get on the flights and were left behind, but also for Ukrainians. You know, President Biden announced a hundred thousand Ukrainians. I mean, a very—we’re using other channels but we’ve had, I believe, three thousand at the U.S.-Mexican border and, I believe, they’re being paroled for the most part, right. As I understand it, we’re—one DHS letter that I saw said that there were forty-one thousand requests for humanitarian parole for Afghan nationals. But I’m wondering about capacity of the USCIS to handle this, to process this, because, you know, normally, I think, maybe two thousand or so, a couple thousand, are processed, maybe a couple of people who do this, and also in conjunction with the challenges for processing all of the asylum applications. So, as I understand it, back in the fall there was some discussion of hiring a thousand asylum officers—additional asylum officers. I was wondering, what are your thoughts about our capacity to process all of the—the U.S. government’s capacity to process the humanitarian parole applications and the asylum applications, and if you have any insights on new hires and how many— RICHARD: Well, you know, Rey, at Freedom House now I’m working on a project to help Afghan human rights defenders and— Q: Right. RICHARD: —the idea is that they can restart their work if we can find a way for them to be safe inside Afghanistan, which is very hard with the Taliban in charge right now, or if in exile they can restart their work. And so we’re watching to see where Afghans are allowed to go in the world as they seek sanctuary and the answer is they don’t get very far. It’s very hard to get out of the country. If they get to Pakistan or Iran, they don’t feel safe. They have short-term visas to stay there, and the programs that might bring them further along like resettlement of refugees are—take a much longer time to qualify for and then to spring into action, and so they’re stuck. You know, they’re afraid of being pushed back into Afghanistan. They’re afraid of becoming undocumented and running out of money wherever they are, and so they’re in great need of help. The humanitarian parole program sort of—for bringing Afghans into the U.S. sort of understood that our eighteen- to twenty-four-month refugee resettlement program was a life-saving program but it wasn’t an emergency program. It didn’t work on an urgent basis. It didn’t scoop people up and move them overnight, and that’s, really, what was called for last August was getting people—large numbers of people—out of harm’s way. And so when I was assistant secretary, if we knew someone was in imminent danger we might work with another government. I remember that the Scandinavians were seen as people who were more—who were less risk averse and would take people who hadn’t had this vast vetting done but would take small numbers and bring them to safety, whereas the U.S. did things in very large numbers but very slowly. And so this lack of emergency program has really been what’s held us back in providing the kind of assistance, I think, people were looking for the Afghans. I was surprised we even brought them into the United States. I thought after 9/11 we’d never see that kind of program of bringing people in with so little time spent on checking. But what they did was they moved up them to the front of the line and checked them very quickly while they were on the move. So it was safe to do but it was unusual, and I think part of that was because the military—the U.S. military—was so supportive of it and U.S. veterans were so supportive of it and we had, for the first time in a while, both the right and the left of the political spectrum supporting this. So the problem with humanitarian parole is I remember it being used, for example, for Haitians who had been injured in the Haitian earthquake and they needed specialized health care—let’s say, all their bones were crushed in their legs or something. They could be paroled into the U.S., get that health care that they needed, and then sent home again. So we’ve not used it for large numbers of people coming in at once. So what refugee advocates are seeking right now from Congress is the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would give people a more permanent legal status. They would be treated as if they were—had come through the refugee resettlement program and they’d get to stay. So you’re right that the numbers being granted humanitarian parole at one time is just not the normal way of doing things. You’re also right that the—this is a lot of extra work on people who weren’t anticipating it, and more can continue with the hundred thousand Ukrainians who the president has said we will take in. And so the thing is when we have these kind of challenges in the United States one way to deal with it is to spend more money and do a better job, and that seems to be an option for certain challenges we face but not for all challenges we face. With these more humanitarian things, we tend to have tried to do it on the cheap and to also use the charity and partner with charities and churches more than if this were sort of a more business-oriented program. So we need all of the above. We need more government funding for the people who are working the borders and are welcoming people in or are reviewing their backgrounds. We need more assistance from the public, from the private sector, from foundations, because the times demand it. And it’s very interesting to me to see Welcome US created last year with three former U.S. presidents—President Bush, President Clinton, President Obama—speaking up about it, saying, please support this, and people from across the political aisle supporting it. I wish that had existed in 2015 when we were grappling with these issues at the time of candidate Trump. So the needs are greater. Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean we have to just suffer through and struggle through and have long backups like we do right now. We could be trying to put more resources behind it. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next written question from Haley Manigold, who’s an IR undergrad student at University of North Florida. We know that the war in Ukraine is going to affect grain and food supplies for the MENA countries. Is there any way you would recommend for Europe and other neighboring regions to manage the refugee flows? RICHARD: The first part of that was about the food issue but then you said— FASKIANOS: Correct, and then this is a pivot to manage the refugee flows. So— RICHARD: Well, the Europeans are treating the Ukrainians unlike any other flow of people that we’ve seen lately. It goes a little bit back and reminiscent to people fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s. But we saw that with a million people in 2015 walking into Europe from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan—mix of economic migrants and real refugees—that Europe, at first, under Angela Merkel’s leadership were welcoming to these folks showing up, and then there was a backlash and the walls came up on that route from the Balkans to Germany and to Sweden. And so in the last few years, Europeans have not been seen as champions in allowing—rescuing people who are trying to get to Europe on their own. You know, especially the Mediterranean has been a pretty dismal place where we see Africans from sub-Saharan Africa working their way up to North Africa and trying to get from Libya across the Mediterranean to Europe. These are mostly economic migrants but not solely economic migrants, and they deserve to have a hearing and, instead, they have been terribly mistreated. They get stopped by the Libyan coast guard, the Europeans push boats back, and they are offloaded back into Libya and they are practically imprisoned and mistreated in North Africa. So that’s a terribly inhumane way to treat people who are trying to rescue themselves, their families, and find a better life. And another point to the Europeans has been, couldn’t you use these young people taking initiative trying to have a better life and work hard and get on with their lives, and the answer is yes. Europe has this sort of aging demographic and could definitely use an infusion of younger workers and talented people coming in. But, instead, they have really pushed to keep people out. So what’s happened with Ukrainians? They’re seen as a different category. They’re seen as neighbors. There’s a part of it that is positive, which is a sense that the countries right next door have to help them. Poland, Moldova, other countries, are taking in the Ukrainians. The borders are open. If they get to Poland they can get free train fare to Germany. Germany will take them in, and that’s a beautiful thing. And the upsetting thing is the sense that there is undertones of racism, also anti-Islam, where darker-skinned people were not at all welcome and people who are not Christian were not welcome. And so it’s probably a mix of all the above, the good and the bad, and it’s potentially an opportunity to teach more people about “refugeehood” and why we care and why it affects all of us and what we should do about it and that we should do more. FASKIANOS: Thank you. All right, I’m going to take the next question from Kazi Sazid, who has also raised their hand, so if you could just ask your question yourself and identify yourself. Q: Hello. So I’m Kazi. I’m a student at CUNY Hunter College and I happen to be writing a research paper on Central American and Iraq war refugee crises and how international law hasn’t changed the behavior of a state helping them. So my question is, how does confusion and ignorance of migration and refugee terminology by state leaders and the general populace impact the legally ordained rights of refugees such as having identity documents, having the right to education, refoulement, which is not being sent back to a country where they are danger? One example is like Central Americans are termed as illegal immigrants by the right wing but the reality is they are asylum seekers who are worthy of refugee status because gang violence and corruption has destabilized their country and the judicial systems. I think femicide in El Salvador and Honduras is among the highest and—so yeah. RICHARD: Yeah. Thank you for asking the question, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Hunter College. Only one of my grandparents went to college and it was my mother’s mother who went to Hunter College and graduated in the late 1920s, and as we know, it’s right down the street from the Harold Pratt House, the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. So I think a lot of what you—I agree with a lot of what you’ve said about—for me it’s describing these people who offer so much potential as threats, just because they are trying to help themselves. And instead of feeling that we should support these folks, there’s a sense of—even if we don’t allow them in our country we could still do things to ease their way and help them find better solutions, but they’re described as these waves of people coming this way, headed this way, scary, scary. And if you follow the debates in the United States, I was very alarmed before and during the Trump administration that journalists did not establish that they had a right to make a claim for asylum at the border. Instead, they talked about it as if it were two political policies duking it out, where some people felt we should take more and some people felt we should take less. Well, the issue that was missed, I felt, in a lot of the coverage of the Southern border was the right to asylum, that they had a right to make a claim, that we had signed onto this as the United States and that there was a very good reason that we had signed onto that and it was to make sure people fleeing for their lives get an opportunity to be saved if they’re innocent people and not criminals, but innocent people who are threatened, that we’d give them a place of safety. So I agree with you that the lack of understanding about these basic principles, agreements, conventions is something that is not well understood by our society, and certainly the society was not being informed of that by a lot of the messengers describing the situation over the past few years. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I’m going to take the next question from Lindsey McCormack who is an undergrad at Baruch—oh, sorry, a graduate student at Baruch College. My apologies. Do you see any possibility of the U.S. adopting a protocol for vetting and accepting climate refugees? Have other countries moved in that direction? And maybe you can give us the definition of a climate refugee and what we will in fact be seeing as we see climate change affecting all of us. RICHARD: I don’t have a lot to say on this, so I hate to disappoint you, but I will say a couple things because, one, I was on a task force at Refugees International, which is a very good NGO that writes about and reports on refugee situations around the world and shines a light on them. I was part of a task force that came out with a report for the Biden administration on the need to do more for climate migrants, and so that report is available at the Refugees International site and it was being submitted to the Biden administration because the Biden administration had put out an executive order on refugees that included a piece that said we want to do a better job, we want to come up with new, fresh ideas on climate migrants. So I don’t know where that stands right now, but I think the other piece of information that I often give out while doing public speaking, especially to students, about this issue is that I feel not enough work has been done on it, and so if a student is very interested in staying in academia and studying deeper into some of these issues, I think climate migration is a field that is ripe for further work. It’s timely, it’s urgent, and it hasn’t been over-covered in the past. I admire several people, several friends who are working on these issues; one is Professor Beth Ferris at Georgetown University who was, in fact, on the secretary general’s High Level Panel on Internal Displacement and she made sure that some of these climate issues are raised in very high-level meetings. She was also part of this task force from Refugees International. Another smart person working on this is Amali Tower, a former International Rescue Committee colleague who started a group called Climate Refugees and she’s also trying to bring more attention to this; she’s kind of very entrepreneurial in trying to do more on that. Not everybody would agree that the term should be climate refugees since “refugees” has so much legal definitions attached to it and the people displaced by climate don’t have those kind of protections or understandings built around them yet. But I think it’s an area that there definitely needs to be more work done. So I think the basic question was, did I think something good was going to happen anytime soon related to this, and I can’t tell because these crazy situations around the world, the war in Ukraine and Taliban in charge in Afghanistan—I mean, that just completely derails the types of exercises that the world needs of thinking through very logically good governance, people coming together making decisions, building something constructive instead of reacting to bad things. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from raised hand Ali Tarokh. And unmute your—thank you. Q: Yes. OK, I am Ali Tarokh from Northeastern University. I came here in the United States ten years ago as a refugee. And I was in Turkey—I flew Iran to Turkey. I stayed there fourteen, sixteen months. So this is part of—my question is part of my lived experience in Turkey. So one part is humanitarian services, helping refugees move into the third country, OK? The one issue I—it’s my personal experience is the UNHCR system, there is many corruptions. This corruption makes lines, OK, produce refugees—because some countries such as Iran and Turkey, they are producing refugees and there is no solution for it, or sometimes they use it as—they use refugees as a weapon. They say, OK, if you don’t work with me—Turkey sent a message to EU: If you don’t work with me, I open the borders. I open the borders and send the flow of refugees to EU. Even some—even Iran’s government. So my question is, how can we in the very base on the ground—the level of the ground—how can we prevent all these corruption or how can we work out with this kind of government, countries that are—I named them the refugee producers. And by the time there is two sides of the refugees—one is just humanitarian services, which is our responsibility, United States playing globally there; and other side it seems refugees issue became like industry. In Turkey, the UNHCR staff, some lawyers/attorneys, they take money from people, they make fake cases for them. Even they ask them: Hey, what country—which country would you like to go, United States, Canada, Scandinavian countries? So what is our strategy? What is our solution to help real refugees or prevent produce refugees? RICHARD: Well, there’s several things that are raised by your question. Turkey and, now we see, Russia have both been countries where we have seen instances where they can turn on the flow of refugees and turn it off. And Turkey was watching people walk through Turkey, cross the Mediterranean is very scary, dangerous trip between Turkey and Greece in these rubber boats in 2015, 2016, and then they would make their way onward, and then, because of this big EU-Turkey deal that involved 3 billion euros at the time, all of a sudden, the flow stopped. And then in further negotiations going on and on, Turkey would say things that seemed like it came right from a Godfather movie, like, gee, I’d hate to see that flow start up again; that would be a real shame. And so it was clear it was sort of a threat that if you didn’t cooperate it could play this very disruptive role on the edges of Europe and deploying people, as you said, which is so cruel not just to the people who are receiving them but to the individuals themselves that they’re not being seen as people who need care but instead as a problem to be deployed in different directions. And we saw that also with Belarus and Poland and now also it may have been part of the thinking of Vladimir Putin that by attacking Ukraine, by going to war with Ukraine that there would be exactly what is happening now, people scattering from Ukraine into Europe and that that would be a way to drive a wedge between European countries and cause a lot of not just heartache but also animosity between these countries. So what the Russians didn’t seem to appreciate this time was that there would be so much solidarity to help the Ukrainians, and that has been a bit of a surprise. So you’ve also talked about corruption, though, and corruption is a problem all over the world for lots of different reasons, in business and it’s embedded in some societies in a way that sometimes people make cultural excuses for, but in reality we know it doesn’t have to be that way. But it is very hard to uproot and get rid of. So I find this work, the anti-corruption work going on around the world, really interesting and groups like Transparency International are just sort of fascinating as they try to really change the standards and the expectations from—the degree to which corruption is part of societies around the world. So UNHCR has to take great care to not hire people who are going to shake down and victimize refugees, and it’s not—there’s never a perfect situation, but I know that a lot of work is done to keep an eye on these kinds of programs so that the aid goes to the people who need it and it’s not sidetracked to go to bad guys. And the way I’ve seen it is, for example, if I travel overseas and I go to someplace where refugees are being resettled to the U.S. or they’re being interviewed for that, or I go to UNHCR office, there will be big signs up that will say the resettlement program does not cost money. If someone asks you for money, don’t pay it; you know, report this. And from time to time, there are mini scandals, but overall, it’s remarkable how much corruption is kept out of some of these programs. But it’s a never-ending fight. I agree with you in your analysis that this is a problem and in some countries more than others. FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take the next question from Pamela Waldron-Moore, who’s the chair of the political science department at Xavier University in New Orleans. There are reports in some news feeds that African refugees from Ukraine are being disallowed entry to some states accepting refugees. I think you did allude to this. Is there evidence of this, and if so, can the UN stop it or alleviate that situation? RICHARD: We saw before the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that some European countries were saying it was time for Afghans to go home again, and the idea that during this war it was safe for Afghans to go back—and especially for Afghans who are discriminated against even in the best of times in Afghanistan, like the Hazara minority. It’s just—I found that sort of unbelievable that some countries thought this was the right time to send people back to Afghanistan. And so at the moment there’s a weird situation in Afghanistan because it’s safer in some ways for the bulk of the people because the active fighting has—in large parts of the country—stopped. But it’s deadly dangerous for human rights defenders, women leaders, LBGTQ folks—anyone who tries to stand up to the Taliban—you know, scholars, thinkers, journalists. And so those are the folks that, in smaller numbers, we need to find some kind of way to rescue them and get them to safety while they are still inside Afghanistan or if that’s outside Afghanistan and in the region. The borders—the border situations change from time to time. For a while they were saying only people with passports could come out, and for most Afghan families, nobody had a passport or, if they did, it was a head of household had a passport for business or trade. But you wouldn’t have had passports for the spouse and the children. And so this has been a real dilemma. We also see a whole series of barriers to people getting out; so first you need a passport, then you need a visa to where you’re going, and then you might need a transit visa for a country that you are crossing. And what has come to pass is that people who are trying to help evacuate people from Afghanistan—a smaller and smaller number as the months go on; people are trying to make this happen because it’s so hard—that they will only take people out of the country if they feel that their onward travel is already figured out and that they have their visas for their final-destination country. So the actual number that’s getting out are tiny. And the people who have gotten out who are in either Pakistan or Iraq are very worried. And they’re afraid to be pushed back. They’re afraid they will run out of money. They are afraid—I think said this during my talk before—they’re afraid that there are people in Pakistan who will turn them in to the Taliban. And so it’s always hard to be a refugee, but right now it’s really frightening for people who are just trying to get to a safe place. FASKIANOS: And in terms of the discrimination that you referenced for refugees leaving the Ukraine, I mean, there have been some reports of EU—discrimination in European countries not accepting— RICHARD: Well, like African students who are studying in Ukraine— FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: —who were not treated as if they were fleeing a country at war— FASKIANOS: Correct. RICHARD: —but instead were put in a different category and said, you know, go back, go home. FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: Yeah, that’s—that is quite blatant— FASKIANOS: And there’s— RICHARD: And that was happening at the borders. FASKIANOS: Is there anything the UN can do about that, or is that really at the discretion of the countries—the accepting countries? RICHARD: Well, the—yeah, the UNHCR has these reception centers that they’ve set up, including between the border of Poland and Ukraine, and I think the other neighboring countries. And so if one can get to the reception center, one could potentially get additional help or be screened into—for special attention for needing some help that maybe a white Christian Ukrainian who spoke more than one language of the region would not need. FASKIANOS: Great. So let’s go to Susan Knott, who also wrote her question, but has raised her hand. So Susan, why don’t you just ask your question? And please unmute and identify yourself. KNOTT: OK, am I unmuted? FASKIANOS: Yes. KNOTT: OK. I am Susan Knott, University of Utah, Educational Policy and Leadership doctoral program. I am also a practicum intern at ASU, and I’m also a refugee services collaborator. And I’m engaged in a research project creating college and university pathways for refugees to resettle. I’m just wondering what your feel is about the current administration efforts in seeking to establish the pathway model similar to ASU’s Education for Humanity Initiative with Bard, and is there helping lead the Refugee Higher Education Access program that serves learners who require additional university-level preparation in order to transition into certificate and degree programs. And I just—I’m not just—and all of this buzz that’s going on since all of terrible crises are occurring, I’m not seeing a whole lot that—based on my own experience working with refugee education and training centers at colleges—on the college level, and learning about the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Ed and Immigration. I’m just wondering—and they’re saying let’s have this be more of a privately funded or partnerships with the university scholarships and private entities. What about a federally-funded university sponsorship program for refugee students given that the numbers or the data is showing that that age group is the largest number of just about every refugee population? RICHARD: That’s a really fascinating set of issues. I’m not the expert on them, so I’m going to disappoint you. but I appreciate that you took a little extra time in how you stated your intervention to add a lot of information for this group, which should very much care about this. I get a lot of questions every week about university programs that Afghan students could take advantage of. I don’t have a good handle on it, and I’m trying to do that with—I’m overdue for a conversation with Scholars at Risk in New York. Robert Quinn is the executive director of that, I believe. And so I’m glad you raised this and I’m not going to have a lot of extra to say about it. FASKIANOS: Anne, are there—is there—there’s a question in the chat in the Q&A about sources for data on U.S. initiatives toward refugees. Where would you direct people to go to get updates on the latest programs, et cetera? RICHARD: Sometimes I’m embarrassed to say the best summaries are done by not-for-profits outside the government than by the government. The best source for data on resettlement of refugees to the U.S. is a website that is funded by the U.S. government called WRAPSNET.org—WRAPS spelled W-R-A-P-S-N-E-T dot-O-R-G. And in double-checking some of the things last summer, I felt that DHS had better descriptions of some of the programs than the State Department did, and that’s my bureau that I used to—run, so—but they are responsible for determining who is in and who is out of these different programs, so maybe that’s why they do. So there’s a lot on the DHS website that’s interesting if you are looking for more information. And one of the things the Council does, it has done a number of these special web presentations: one on refugees that I got to help on a couple of years ago, and I think there’s one up now on Ukrainians. And this is the type of public education function that the Council does so well I think because they fact-check everything, and so it’s very reliable. FASKIANOS: Thank you for that plug. You can find it all on CFR.org—lots of backgrounders, and timelines, and things like that. So we don’t have that much time left, so I’m going to roll up two questions—one in the Q&A box and one because of your vast experience. So what role do NGOs play in refugee crises and migration initiatives, particularly in resettlement? And just from your perspective, Anne, you have been in academia, you’ve worked in the government, you worked at IRC, and now are at Freedom House. And so just—again, what would you share with the group about pursuing a career in this—government, non-government perspectives and, what students should be thinking about as they launch to their next phase in life. RICHARD: Yeah, that we could have a whole ‘nother hour on, right? That’s—(laughs)— FASKIANOS: I know, I know. It’s unfair to, right, do this at the very end, but— RICHARD: NGOs play really important roles in both the delivery of humanitarian assistance overseas and the help for resettlement in the United States. In the U.S. there are nine national networks of different groups; six are faith-based, three are not. They are non-sectarian, and they do amazing work on shoe-string budgets to—everything from meeting refugees at the airport, taking them to an apartment, showing them how the lights work and the toilet flushes, and coming back the next day, making sure they have an appropriate meal to have, and that the kids get in school, that people who need health care get it, and that adults who are able-bodied get jobs so they can support themselves. The other type of NGO are the human rights NGOs that now I’m doing more with, and I guess if you are thinking about careers in these, you have to ask yourself, you know, are you more of a pragmatic person where the most important thing is to save a life, or are you an idealist where you want to put out standards that are very high and push people to live up to them. Both types of organizations definitely help, but they just have very different ways of working. Another question for students is do you want high job security of a career in the U.S. government—say, as a Foreign Service Officer or as a civil servant where maybe you won’t move up very quickly, but you might have great sense of satisfaction that the things you were working on were making a difference because they were being decisively carried out by the U.S. or another government. Or do you prefer the relatively lean, flatter organizations of the NGO world where, as a young person, you can still have a lot of authority, and your views can be seen—can be heard by top layers because you’re not that far away from them. And so, NGOs are seen as more nimble, more fast moving, less job security. Having done both I think it really depends on your personality. Working in the government, you have to figure out a way to keep going even when people tell you no. You have figure out—or that it’s hard, or that it’s too complicated. You have to figure out ways to find the people who are creative, and can make thing happen, and can open doors, and can cut through red tape. In NGOs you can have a lot of influence. I was so surprised first time I was out of the State Department working for the International Rescue Committee one of my colleagues was telling me she just picks up the phone and calls the key guy on Capitol Hill and tells him what the law should be. That would never happen with a junior person in the U.S. government. You have to go through so many layers of bureaucracy, and approvals, and clearances. So, really, it depends on the type of person you are, and how you like to work, and the atmosphere in which you like to work. I can tell you you won’t get rich doing this type of work, unfortunately. But you might be able to make a decent living. I certainly have, and so I encourage students to either do this as a career or find ways to volunteer part-time, even if it’s tutoring a refugee kid down the block and not in some glamorous overseas location. I think you can get real sense of purpose out of doing this type of work. Thank you, Irina. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And I have to say that your careful definitions of the different categories—and really, I think we all need to be more intentional about how we explain, talk about these issues because they are so complex, and there are so many dimensions, and it’s easy to make gross generalizations. But the way you laid this out was really, really important for deepening the understanding of this really—the challenge and the—what we’re seeing today. So thank you very much. RICHARD: Thank you. Thanks, everybody. FASKIANOS: So thanks to all—yeah, thanks to everybody for your great questions. Again, I apologize; we’re three minutes over. I couldn’t get to all your questions, so we will just have to continue looking at this issue. We will be announcing the fall Academic Webinar lineup in a month or so in our Academic Bulletin, so you can look for it there. Good luck with your end of the year, closing out your semester. And again, I encourage you to go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research analysis on global issues. And you can follow us on Twitter at @CFR_Academic. So again, thank you, Anne Richard. Good luck to you all with finals, and have a good summer. (END)

Our panelists discuss the growing Ukrainian refugee crisis, the situation on the ground in Poland and other neighboring countries where over three million Ukrainians have fled, and what is to be expected in the weeks ahead.

Kelly A. Gauger, deputy director of refugee admissions at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and Rick Santos, president and CEO of Church World Service, discuss U.S. responses to refugee resettlement and the role faith communities play in refugee assistance. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record, and the audio, video, and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Kelly Gauger and Rick Santos with us today. Kelly just learned that she needed to do this, to step in for Nancy Izzo Jackson, who has gone overseas, given the events that are unfolding over there. So, Kelly Gauger, thank you for being with us. She is the deputy director in the Office of Refugee Admissions at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Her work includes oversight of the administration’s annual report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions, development of the bureau’s budget for the Refugee Admissions Program, and managing oversight of its seven resettlement support centers worldwide. She also helps manage the bureau’s relationship with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, and refugee resettlement colleagues in governments around the world. And she joined the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration in 1999 and has served in a variety of positions, obviously, before becoming deputy in 2011. Rick Santos is the president and CEO of Church World Service. He previously served Church World Service as a program officer in Vietnam, then as a coordinator of strategic planning and evaluation. He has held positions as director of communication and advocacy at International Relief and Development, and as the president and CEO of IMA World Health. He has more than two decades of experience working for and with faith-based organizations, including more than a decade of living and working in Asia. So thank you both for being with us to talk about refugee resettlement and faith communities. And, Kelly, let’s begin with you to talk about—give us some global contexts for resettlement work, the trends that you’ve seen over the course of your time at the bureau, and the role that the United States is playing and can play. GAUGER: Sure. Thank you. Can you hear me OK? FASKIANOS: Yes. GAUGER: Great. OK. All right. Thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations for the invitation to join today, and my apologies that Nancy Izzo Jackson can’t be here nor that Sarah Cross, who was supposed to fill in for her, couldn’t be here, who fell ill in the last twenty-four hours. So it’s my privilege to be able to speak with this group, along with Rick Santos from Church World Service, and to have this opportunity to talk about recent trends in refugee resettlement, and reflect a bit on the long-standing and unique role of the faith-based community in advancing refugee resettlement in the U.S. This conversation is, of course, a timely one amidst the historic effort that’s been underway to resettle the tens of thousands—actually, seventy-four thousand people, to be exact—who were evacuated here last August and who have been sheltering in domestic military installations for the last six months, awaiting final resettlement to their destinations. As Rick will discuss, the engagement of the faith-based community has long been the foundational hallmark of refugee resettlement in the United States, prior even to the Refugee Act of 1980, which formally established the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which we refer to as the USRAP. As we know it today, diverse, wide-ranging, and grassroots coalitions of local faith groups across the country were some of the most active and prominent actors engaged in refugee resettlement. The Refugee Act of 1980 formalized the State Department’s partnership with the nine national nonprofit organizations, which lead on providing initial reception and placement to newly-arrived refugees resettled in the United States through the USRAP. The faith-based communities’ lasting role in resettlement is evidenced by the fact that six of our nine resettlement agencies, including Church World Service, are faith-based organizations, as well as additional organizations, reflecting the diversity of America’s faith traditions. Since the creation of the USRAP in 1980, our resettlement agency partners have enabled the United States to resettle over 3 million refugees from more than a hundred countries, who have made a tremendous economic and social contribution to communities across the country. You all probably know that each year the president sets an annual ceiling for refugee admissions, which we work diligently to meet, sometimes under very challenging circumstances. Although the annual ceiling for refugee admissions to the U.S. historically has fluctuated with highs well over a hundred thousand during parts of the 1980s and early ’90s, and then a fairly consistent ceiling in the range of seventy (thousand) to eighty-five thousand during most of the 2000s, the ceiling hit historic lows in the last four years, in the last administration, including just eighteen thousand in 2020. And as arrivals plummeted in those recent years, so did our international and domestic capacity to resettle refugees, which we’re now working intently to build. With our new admissions target of 125 thousand for this fiscal year, we are setting an ambitious goal for ourselves, recognizing the difficulty we face in reaching it due both to the diminished capacity and the operational challenges that COVID continues to pose. Knowing these challenges, we established an initial operating level of sixty-five thousand for fiscal year 2022 when funding our overseas and domestic partners. At a month shy of halfway into the fiscal year—so as of today, we’re at the five-month mark in the fiscal year—we have, unfortunately, admitted just north of eight thousand refugees so far this year, largely, due to the continued impact of COVID overseas where, for the last two years, our operations at both—at all of our resettlement support centers have been challenged, and USCIS went about eighteen months of not conducting any overseas interviews at all, which has seriously impacted our overseas pipeline. USCIS—we are now back into the field. Most of our resettlement support centers are operating on a nearly full in-person basis except for Ukraine, which I’ll talk about in a little bit, and USCIS is heading back out into the field doing interviews, but just not at the levels that we would like them to, given the number of cases we have queued up for interview. USCIS lost a lot of staff, mostly through attrition, during the last administration, and they are assiduously hiring new staff to beef up their refugee corps to be able to resettle—to be able to interview more people. Over the last several months, in particular, our resettlement partners have stepped up in extraordinary ways to support the historic effort to resettle newly-arriving Afghans who relocated to the United States. As I said, to date, more than seventy-two thousand Afghans have been resettled into local communities across the country through Operation Allies Welcome, which is the largest influx of arrivals at one time in such a short period in over fifty years, not seen since the Vietnam War. Resettling this many people in such a short period of time is unprecedented and involves significant efforts from local faith groups and other community partners to welcome refugees at a historic scale and pace. Over the course of OAW, we have welcomed the engagement of additional faith-based organizations who have helped to expand our capacity to resettle Afghan(s) by entering into new institutional partnerships at a national level with our existing resettlement agency partners. We’re particularly excited about the new partnership, that I’m sure Rick will speak about, between Islamic Relief USA and Church World Service, marking a significant engagement by the USRAP with an organization grounded in the Muslim faith. The work of OAW has been taking place against the backdrop of this administration’s efforts to rebuild and expand our domestic resettlement infrastructure, which was significantly decimated in the previous four years. We have made good progress over the last year of this administration with 272 resettlement affiliates currently in operation and supporting the resettlement of refugees through the USRAP—an increase from 199 affiliates just a year ago. Factoring in the capacity that was rapidly stood up to welcome Afghan newcomers, there are around a hundred additional community partners supporting the resettlement of Afghans. This expansion of our affiliate network is a true testament to the commitment and dedication of faith-based groups alongside our broader range of community and resettlement agency partners to grow resettlement capacity to meet the challenge of resettling tens of thousands of Afghans in a few months while also welcoming refugees from some seventy to eighty different nationalities globally. And before I turn it over, let me just say a few words about Ukraine because I know that’s of intense interest to a lot of people. The U.S. government is working closely with European allies and partners who will be at the forefront of any response, as well as international organizations and NGOs, to support those displaced internally within Ukraine and those who may seek safety in the neighboring countries. We commend our European allies and partners for keeping their borders open to Ukrainians who need to seek international protection and for implementing a three-year EU temporary protection directive for Ukrainians. Our cooperation with our European allies and partners allows us to provide immediate assistance on the ground for those who are fleeing Ukraine. The United States is and will continue to be a global leader in international humanitarian response and including in refugee resettlement. The Department of State—my bureau—will work with UNHCR in our overseas post to determine whether Ukrainians who have fled to another country require resettlement to a third country because they are not safe in their current location. I will say that we have been—as I think I’ve hinted, we have been incredibly impressed and humbled by the welcome that the neighboring countries to Ukraine have welcomed Ukrainians fleeing to their countries. So we do not anticipate at this time that we will be doing any large-scale refugee resettlement at this stage. We rarely turn to refugee resettlement in the early stages of a conflict. But we will remain open to particularly vulnerable cases who either may be a target of the Russian regime and others who cannot find safety in Poland or Romania or Moldova or any of the neighboring countries. Let me just—finally, I’ll just finish by saying unrelated to the current conflict, the United States has a long history of resettling Ukrainian and other FSU religious minorities processed under the Lautenberg Amendment, which was first passed in October 1989. As such, we have the capacity both overseas and domestically to process Ukrainian refugees who meet requirements of the eligibility. Lautenberg cases are processed by our regional resettlement support center based in Kyiv, which we refer to as RSC Eurasia. A lot of their international staff have been evacuated. A lot of the Ukrainian staff, which are an incredible group of young people that I met when I was in Ukraine about two and a half years ago—a lot of them are still in Ukraine and are continuing to work from home, believe it or not, to continue their work on our program. At this time, we’re not currently departing individuals from Ukraine due to the closure of Ukrainian airspace. We had to cancel about 170 people’s flights this week and we’re looking at another, I believe, 84 next week. The office that we have enlarged in Chișinău, Moldova, can arrange departures for approved Ukrainian Lautenberg applicants who are USCIS approved and who have completed all USRAP processing requirements. So we have tried to widely publicize the fact both on our website—the RSC website—and all email communications, that those Lautenberg cases which were being processed in Ukraine, and who have changed location are instructed to write to the RSC in Eurasia at [email protected] to update their location and contact details, and if the cases are ready for departure and in a location where we can organize their departure, they’ll be informed of next steps. So why don’t I stop there? And I’ll save anything else for the Q&A. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Kelly. That was a great context for us in what’s happening today. So, Rick, let’s go to you to talk about the role that faith communities have and continue to play in refugee assistance and what you’re doing at CWS. SANTOS: Great. So thank you, Irina, and I appreciate the Council inviting me today to talk about faith communities and resettlement. Maybe I’ll start by going backwards a little bit, creating a little bit of context for this conversation and, frankly, my experiences over the last twenty-five years of doing not just humanitarian work, but relief and development work over—across the globe with faith-based communities and partners. I think one of the first things I just want to say—I think it gets lost in so much of our conversations today—is, actually, the faith community historically has been, actually, a very innovative group. We’ve been on the forefront and cutting edge of a lot of different things, including refugee resettlement. One of the experiences I had very early on in my career, I was based in Thailand from 1987 to 1990. I was there when the first Burmese—Myanmarese refugees came over the border after Aung San Suu Kyi won and was imprisoned the first time, and, actually, a colleague of mine, a friend, somebody I knew named Jack Dunford, organized a group of about a dozen faith leaders, church leaders, to go to the border. These are European, American, and, actually, a local Thai church. So we always—I think one of the things I like about the way the faith community responds is we almost always have some type of local component or local relationship there as well. So Jack led a group to the border, essentially, with private dollars. The faith community began, essentially, the first response to those refugees. UNHCR, of course, and then other multilateral and bilateral groups came in after that. But we were—the faith community was, really, one of the first to respond to that situation. If we go back—I’m going to go back seventy-five years to World War II. In fact, the faith community was probably one of the largest groups of people supporting refugees as they came out post-World War II. Church World Service itself, we had what we called freedom trains where we would send grain over to Europe in terms of the response feeding post-war—the situation there, and then those trains would, literally, bring back folks—refugees—back into the country and to the communities where that grain came from. So the faith community has, really, been, I think, at the forefront of refugee resettlement since the very beginning. And one of the things that, for me that’s, really, I think, important to realize is that for us—for example, for Church World Service, we started with seventeen-member denomination. So Church World Service is an organization that has the Mainline—what we would call the Mainline Protestant churches as our founding members. Today, it includes historic Black churches, the Anglican, and Orthodox communities as well. But in those first few years after World War II, refugee resettlement was very—it wasdifferent than it is today, as Kelly mentioned. Before the Refugee Act of 1980, it was, essentially, a private enterprise and people would—it was faith communities and other private groups that would bring refugees into the country and then resettle them. And so for Church World Service, in our first ten years we resettled over a hundred thousand refugees in the U.S., so during that 1946 to 1956 time period. I think that’s really, frankly, stunning. I mean, I think, when you think about what was behind this, and I think, at least, I know for Mainline Protestant communities it was the service impulse of these communities, that they wanted to reach out. They wanted to support—it’s considered part of—if you read the Bible and you interpret it in a certain way, the theology of welcoming the stranger, welcoming someone who is not from where you are, is a really big part of some of the stories and some of the scripture passages. And so our core group—our core constituency—was really motivated to do refugee resettlement. And, frankly, in that—in, I think, that early period it was predominantly faith-based organizations who were doing this work. I’m just going to speed up a little bit and talk about  the period, I think, from—really, from 1955 through, let’s just say, 1980, especially the ’60s and ’70s. If you take refugee resettlement aside, if you look at some of the other sectors—the international humanitarian sector and development sector—with the advent of the U.N., there’s, actually, increased secularization of, essentially, the work that faith communities had done kind of initially post-World War II. And I think in fact, many—I always find it interesting because I think in the refugee world it’s very different. The faith communities have been part and parcel of this work for—since the very beginning, and I find, for example, in the public health space where I spent a decade, that you find that people look at the faith communities, and faith organizations, and faith-based approaches sometimes as—with a little bit more suspect, though, not understanding that, in fact, actually, faith communities and faith-based organizations have been doing this work ever since the beginning. So, as I would say, the work became more secularized, I think, as I look back, and I look at the Refugee Act of 1980 and the involvement of—really, the much bigger involvement of the U.S. government in terms of refugee resettlement, looking at basically aligning to UNHCR’s definitions, creating more controls and systems around who comes in, how people come in. Of course, it’s the presidential determination each year, adding that piece to it; so organizations like Church World Service had to adjust and I would say that’s probably another feature of what we did as an organization, and as I know many of our other colleague organizations have done, how we’ve addressed and resettled refugees has changed over time as well. Kelly mentioned six of the nine resettlement agencies either being faith based or faith founded. I think all of us have gone through some—different types of evolution of how we’ve addressed refugees and resettlement. And so for Church World Service for a period in the ’80s and early ’90s and maybe even early 2000s, it was really dependent upon our main institutional denomination. So the larger denominations we had a refugee committee and we would resettle through, essentially, those networks. So there was denominational representatives. They were in contact with their array and networks of local churches, and refugees would be apportioned to whichever church and community could best support them. I would like to say, also during this time, I think, for me, and one of the things I always find, really, I think, important about Church World Service and our work is we’ve always been—we’ve always tried to do what’s in the best interests of the refugee and the refugee family. So we went through a period where now—we went through this period where it was really dominated by, essentially, national bodies, and then over time that’s changed. And so, in fact, Church World Service, through our twenty-three affiliates and our nine national offices, that we actually resettle folks through more of a community sponsorship model today and that includes individual churches. That includes also national bodies. But, frankly, it really looks at the community as a whole. So not just the faith-based part of the community but how can we bring different elements and different players in the community itself to help support refugee and refugee families. And I think maybe another feature kind of post-1980 that I think it’s really important to say is that Church World Service has always looked at the work, especially post-1980, as a public-private partnership, that we, as the nonprofit community, as, essentially, NGOs, are really the private side and that we bring a lot of value—that the faith communities and our relationship to the whole refugee process has created a lot of value, whether that be through support of individual churches, co-sponsorship with churches. We have many different ways for the community to be involved in the co-sponsorship of refugees and, really, bringing refugees into the community. And I would say probably another piece of that that’s really important to me is that as a faith-based community it’s not just the looking—specific service issue for us. We, of course, are part of the resettlement grouping and we try to do the best we can and we bring in different, like I said, community sponsorship. But, really, a part of it for us, too, is also the—essentially, the advocacy side of refugee resettlement. We believe in welcome. We believe in welcoming your neighbor, and we believe that there’s been a lot of misinformation about refugees and what they add to our communities and to our country. Even though we’ve had these huge waves of refugees coming in post-World War II, post-Vietnam War, of course, Cubans, so we’ve had a different—different waves, this—now, of course, Afghans coming in most recently. But, really, the idea that we want to—as we build community support for refugees, we also feel it’s really important to build within the mind space of American people that this is a really important thing. It’s important for us as a country. It adds value to us as a country. But it also is, really, part of who we are. And so the ability to go out and do community organizing around refugee admissions, to be able to do advocacy on Capitol Hill, to do state-level advocacy. I think you saw, coming off the previous administration, a tremendous amount of faith-based actors going into their State Houses and actually having them make really clear pronouncements and give funding support. I know, for example, our affiliate in Portland, the Ecumenical Ministries—their group, SOAR—actually lobbied their—the Oregon House and actually got funding directly from the State of Oregon. So, really, the ability for us to do advocacy alongside the service is really critical, and the faith community has been doing that for many years and I think that’s one of the, really, truly, added values that we have as a community and we, as Church World Services, have done. As we look at the current crisis—I think Kelly mentioned the new types of partnerships—I think the reality of what we faced over six months ago when the fall of Kabul—when Afghans were coming in great numbers in a very compressed period of time was the ability to look at the way that we resettle refugees and try to innovate what that might look like. So for Church World Service, one of our historical strengths has always been working in coalition or working in partnership, and so when we started something called an Institutional Partners Program, we invited groups that we felt really strongly about who could really be helpful to this situation and one of them was Islamic Relief. I’ve known and been in partnership with Islamic Relief in different ways over the last decade. I know some of the leadership, and when we started talking to them they were really just more than willing to get involved and they were just looking for the opportunity to get involved. So the Institutional Partnership Program allowed for them to really to begin to be part of the solution. We also have partners like Lions Club, so we have secular partners, and also Samaritan’s Purse, and Samaritan’s Purse has been a really good partner in this program. And I think on a couple of levels, I’ve appreciated, one, their absolute ability to reach out and to resettle people in their communities, but also their ability to really speak forcefully for the need for refugees in this country. So I feel some of the programs that we’ve done recently have, really, actually strengthened the entire refugee resettlement network. We also started a program—a Community Partner Program. It’s similar to our Community Sponsorship Program. But we really were looking at—because some of the rules changed when Afghans were coming in—the ability to resettle someone within a hundred miles of either a—one of our offices or one of our affiliate offices was loosened, and that we were able to really partner with things like individual congregations, businesses, sports teams, people who were really interested. I got a call from a guy I’ve known for twenty years who was actually a refugee from Vietnam and he’s, like, how do I—how do I help resettle an Afghan refugee? So, really, the ability to reach out to a larger group of community players was—is, really, I think, frankly, just one of the real benefits of this moment of crisis that we responded to. So, finally, I’m just going to end. I know we’ve covered a lot of ground, a lot of time—period of time. But I just want to say that, for me, there’s—we, as a faith—we are a Protestant Christian organization but I know our fellow agencies, whatever their religious leaning, we have a consistent—we have a consistency across faith traditions about how we live that faith and how we’re inspired by it, how we—how welcome is a part of these different traditions. And I’m just, really, just grateful that we have such—kind of a similar approach and, really, a similar set of beliefs and that we’re all rowing in the same direction on this issue. And just, finally, I want to end by saying that  Don Kerwin wrote an article in 2018 where he really outlines just what do refugees mean to this country, and in that article he really goes into depth about  essentially the benefit that refugees have brought us as a country. So not just economic benefit but, I think, cultural benefit, bringing a fresh perspective, keeping us connected to the rest of the world. Church World Services has resettled refugees from over eighty-six countries. Just the richness that comes from that enriches all of us. And so I’m just really grateful for the work that we do, and our ability to be involved in this, and to be innovative in different ways in refugee resettlement. So, thank you, Irina. FASKIANOS: Thank you so much, Rick. And now we’re going to go to all of you for questions and comments. You can either raise your hand or you can type your questions in the Q&A box and I’ll read it, and we already have questions lining up. I’m going to, first, go to Simran Jeet Singh, who’s with the Aspen Institute Religion & Society Program. “We’re seeing so much racist and religious bigotry in the unfolding refugee crisis in Ukraine. There’s a strong and explicit preference for white and Christian refugees. What can we do to ensure equal treatment for refugees of all backgrounds?” GAUGER: Rick, do you want to start? SANTOS: Yeah. Maybe I’ll start with that one. I would say, this is really, clearly, unfortunate and there has, clearly, been a trend. I think one of the most important things  in this—for example, in the most recent situation with Afghanistan that, really, we’ve had such a broad-based support. We’ve had U.S. military. We’ve had, as I mentioned, Samaritan’s Purse, Islamic Relief. We’ve been able to create a coalition across many different organizations that will—that, basically, say that people who come here are people of worth and value and they can help the United States, and I think part of this is a message in terms of advocacy. We have to continue to reinforce that message and we have to make sure that people see all refugees, all people in need, as equal and of equal worth. Thanks. GAUGER: I think I would just add that for—in many of the years where we have had a robust refugee resettlement program and, actually, even during the last administration the majority or, at least, the plurality of our refugees have been from Africa. So I think that the U.S. does a very good job of having an extremely diverse Refugee Admissions Program, even more so in recent years. I mean, in Africa alone, I think, we admit twenty-five nationalities per year. This year, African arrivals are not as high as they have been in recent years, partially because COVID has really impacted even more so our operations in Africa than elsewhere. But I think that the welcome that African refugees and also the seventy-two thousand Afghans who have arrived in the United States, the welcome that they’ve received in our communities around the country, I think, is really a hallmark that, yes, we are all aware that there is racism in the way that refugees are treated in many locations. I would argue that it’s a bit different here in the United States. And I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna here, but I think that our communities have done an exceptional job in welcoming refugees of all faiths, and colors, and ethnicities to the United States. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go—next raised hand from Azza Karam. KARAM: Thank you very much, indeed, for this opportunity, and a very quick note of appreciation for what Ms. Gauger was speaking about and the work that they’re doing, but a very special note of appreciation for Church World Service. Rick, I know that you’re one of the institutions that has delivered so much and you have garnered plenty of wonderful attention but, honestly, not half as much as you deserve. So hats off and shout out to the work that you do that, I think, is exemplar to many other faith-based organizations. I was delighted to hear of the different partnerships that you spoke about, including with Islamic Relief and others. I just wondered at something that—I just want you to give your own read on something that we’re encountering in Religions for Peace when we set up our multi-religious humanitarian fund, how difficult it was—it still is—to get different religious institutions and organizations to commit even a nominal amount to this kind of a(n) effort that is intentionally geared at multi-religious service, multi-religious collaboration, pooling together the resources at the national level not only here in the United States but actually in the developing context where you know that that’s—faith-based organizations can often be the first responders to all of these spaces of refugees and internally-displaced and forced displacement. Why do you think it still remains so challenging for faith-based organizations to contribute to a multi-faith mechanism that is, ultimately, aimed at actually ensuring that the response is exactly along the lines of what you’ve been describing—that it’s not just one organization but several representing different religious traditions coming together to serve in exactly the same space, exactly the same communities, at exactly the same time? What do you think their—where do you think their reticence comes from, and what would you suggest to help get over that particular reticence so that we’re actually doing social cohesion as we are delivering our respective services from our respective institutional religious spaces? Thank you. SANTOS: Yeah. So, thank you, Azza. So just, really, thank you for all you’ve done. I mean, you—I know, you’ve been a leader in interfaith space and bringing different groups together. I think it’s a great question. I think a lot of groups, especially historically, have a certain way of working and, I think, maybe it might just be this historical inertia that sometimes it’s hard to overcome. Church World Service is part of something called the ACT Alliance. We’ve been part of the World Council of Churches for a very long time. And so the ACT Alliance is an ecumenical group that, basically, I would say, sister agencies across Europe belong to—for example, Christian Aid in the UK would be an example, or Bread for the World in Germany. And so, I think, one of the historical problems is that people have a historical relationship with these other groups and then just trying to open those up and making them a wider forum, I think, is sometimes difficult. I’ve known Anwar from Islamic Relief for years and, really, I feel one of the reasons why we were able to work well together with Islamic Relief is that we knew each other and we were able to kind of break down some barriers very quickly with that. And so I think maybe that’s another way, just the ability to maybe bring a table together—a multi-faith table together to have this conversation. I know there are different versions of that out there. But very specifically that we are talking about I don’t know if there’s one, and I would say that Church World Service would be willing to be a part of that if someone was to try to call that together. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to pull together two written questions from Shannon McAlister and Eleanor Ellsworth, respectively, from Fordham and the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego. And just for clarification from you, Rick, notice that the list of collaboratives named for resettling refugees did not include the Catholic Church. Has the Catholic Church been involved in refugee resettlement as well or have you reached out to the Vatican and/or National Catholic Bishops Conferences about collaboration? And then from Eleanor, if you could also talk about the Orthodox, how they’re engaged with CWS. Does this reflect American Orthodoxy only or are they international—Eastern Orthodox bodies—are they involved? SANTOS: Great. Yeah. So on the first question, the Catholic(s) have their own resettlement agency and they’re one of the nine. And so we all collaborate, in a sense, together as those nine agencies to do resettlement. I mean, off the top of my head, I know in terms of the faith based includes LIRS—Lutherans. It includes the Episcopal Migration Services. So they’re definitely including—and also the Catholics as well. World Relief, of course, is more representative of the Evangelical family. So there are—the Catholics do participate and are very active. I would say—I’m sorry, Irina. The second question that you asked? FASKIANOS: About the Orthodox. SANTOS: Yeah. So we have two levels—I would say, two layers of relationship with the Orthodox Church. One is, Orthodox Churches are, of course, a member of Church World Service as well as we partner with the Orthodox Churches globally through this ACT Alliance that I was mentioning. And then, finally, just individually. I’ve known Dean Triantafilou for twenty-five years. Dean is the CEO of International Orthodox Christian Charities—IOCC—and we don’t specifically work with them on these types of resettlement issues but we actually have been in collaboration over the years in terms of humanitarian response overseas. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. And, Kelly, I don’t know if you also want to take that on. But I’m going to throw another question to you. You can answer that as well as this one from Hamelmal Kahsay. GAUGER: The— FASKIANOS: Go ahead. GAUGER: Oh. Sorry. I was just going to add, if I could, that for many years the Catholics actually had the largest—they resettled more refugees than any other of our domestic partners for many years. I think the International Rescue Committee has overtaken them recently. But, yes, for sure, the Catholics are a very strong partner on refugee resettlement. FASKIANOS: Right. And people should just pay attention to the chat where there’s some interesting commentary. Donna Markham—Sister Donna Markham—talks about Catholic Charities is resettling thirteen thousand Afghan refugees this year and they’ve resettled refugees and migrants for a hundred and ten years. There is a written note from Hamelmal Kahsay from the Ethiopian Development Council specifically about the Tigrayan refugees in Sudan. There are a lot of stats there in the chat about 70 thousand refugees in Sudan, 2 million internally-displaced people, 5.2 million people facing famine. How do we—how would you open the siege that was imposed on the 7 million people of Tigray and save lives? I mean, what policy can happen in terms of resettling as well? GAUGER: I’m going to say that some of that question is above my pay grade and out of my expertise. So I’m the deputy director in the Refugee Admissions Office so my mandate is refugee resettlement, and I will just say that, yes, we have been tracking the plight of Tigrayan refugees for some time now. Sudan is one of those countries in which it has long been extremely difficult to operate. We have tried over the years to launch larger resettlement programs of Ethiopians, of Eritreans. I guess those would be the top two nationalities in Sudan. But it’s just been extremely difficult to operate there. And I will just say that in terms of resettling refugees out of Ethiopia, so not Ethiopians but other refugees in Ethiopia, has long been one of our larger areas of work in Africa. But we have had to halt most resettlement operations in Ethiopia because of the current conflict. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Steven Paulikas, who has a raised hand. PAULIKAS: Hi, there, Rick and Kelly. Thank you so much for your presentations. I’m the rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Brooklyn. I really appreciate all the work you’re doing. We are in the process of resettling an Afghan refugee family here in New York City, and just at a sort of  ground level perspective, I have to say that the system looks incredibly broken. Basically, we are working with a faith-based partner who is a refugee resettlement agency. They received the one-time payment of—I think it’s 2,275 dollars per refugee—and then, basically, the onus is on us to take care of everything else and to deal with all of the other—sort of navigating everything from housing discrimination, which is real, against refugees, especially in many different parts of the country but even in New York City, to finding adequate health care providers. Benefits don’t really kick in from the government until after a certain period of time. And we’ve been—it’s a true blessing to work with them and they’re wonderful. The agency is wonderful. The family is wonderful. But I’m just wondering, just if we zoom out a little bit, do you really think that the system as it is now is tenable to continue this way? And, Rick, you used the term public-private partnership, which is a great way of describing it. But I’m just sort of wondering if  an issue that is as important, the humanitarian and national security issue, if a public-private—PPP model is really appropriate for it, going forward? Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. GAUGER: Thank you, Steven, for that question. I’ll start and then I’ll ask Rick to chime in afterwards. I’m sorry to hear that your perspective from the ground has been that the system—I think you used the term broken—I’m sorry to hear that that has been your experience. I would, I guess, just urge you to consider that the just incredibly huge number of Afghans who have had to be resettled in such a short period of time, immediately coming upon a very difficult period for the resettlement program, both between the last administration—the policies of the last administration, which were, really, to shrink and diminish the program, and COVID, which has really—as I said, really impacted our ability to operate overseas but also domestically. Although things are getting better domestically COVID wise, it’s still not the case overseas. And so I guess I would just—while taking your criticism, I’d urge you to consider that this is—this was an extraordinary kind of confluence of events, kind of a perfect storm that, I think, really taxed the domestic refugee resettlement program. We— FASKIANOS: Kelly, you just muted yourself. There you go. GAUGER: I’m sorry. My screen keeps going black and then—OK. So it’s just been an unprecedented effort, and I think Rick and I both spoke about some of the new partnerships that we’ve brought online. We recognize that we still have a lot of work to do. In terms of your last question, I mean, I think I know how Rick will answer but I’ll answer for myself to say I don’t think that these challenges would lead me to say that this program is too important to leave to a public-private partnership. I would say that that aspect, that public-private partnership, is one of the things that sets the U.S. resettlement program apart from a lot of other programs in the world—a lot of other resettlement countries in the world—and I think it’s been one of our strengths. It comes with challenges and, yes, it comes with less funding than, I think, any of us would like. But I think—I would not say that I would want to jettison the public-private partnership, despite the challenges that we’ve faced. SANTOS: Yeah. So thanks, Steven. I mean, I’m sorry that you’ve had that experience. I think we use a community sponsorship model where we try to get as many actors involved in the resettlement process, local actors to help with different parts. As you’ve realized, resettling a person and a family is actually really hard and it’s complicated, and there are things that we have to make sure we do for them. So it’s in their best interests getting them settled, getting them homed, getting the furniture, health checks, enrollment in school—all these different things that take a lot of time. And so, I think  the best way to do it is, of course, working, I think, from my perspective, as many community actors as possible to help out with that to lighten the burden. I really think, actually—I would say, for me, and I’m going to echo what Kelly said—I think the advantages of the public-private partnership that we have just are—far outweigh maybe some of the limitations that we have in them. And I think one of the biggest pieces is just getting a larger set of stakeholders who really see that actually resettling a refugee in their community is a good thing. And so by getting as many touches on it from different community members as possible allows that to expand. We faced in this country—it’s just shocking to me. My mother is an immigrant—not a refugee, but an immigrant—and so I know—I’ve seen how immigrants—a lot of my cousins, and aunts, and uncles were also immigrants, so I saw how they were not always treated with, I would say, the best of intentions. And so, for me, just making sure that this is really, really such an important part of who we are as a country. We’re not going to achieve that if it’s just solely, I would say, a government program. And so, for me, I would argue very strongly that not only do we need to continue this public-private partnership, but actually try to include more people from the private side. Thanks. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Alan Bentz-Letts, who also wrote his question. But I think if you could just ask it and identify yourself, that would be great. (Technical difficulties.) FASKIANOS: Oh. Alan? There you go. (Technical difficulties.) FASKIANOS: OK. (Laughs.) We’re getting some distortion so we don’t understand. So I’ll read it. Alan Bentz-Letts is from the Riverside Church in New York City and—oh, let’s see. Hold on a minute. I’m looking for the question, which was in the chat, actually, about climate change. Sorry. I have a lot of inputs. OK. We haven’t talked about climate refugees. The IPCC report just released on Monday warns the climate crisis is accelerating and societies may be collapsing in the future. Questions are what do you anticipate in terms of climate refugees in the future, and what is the government and CWS doing to prepare for these refugees? GAUGER: I will start and say that this is, obviously, a monumental question for the United States and other resettlement countries. I don’t profess to be someone who has a great deal of knowledge about this topic. Other than that, I will say the United States this year is the co-chair of a process called the Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement, which is a forum for all of the—so the thirty or so resettlement countries around the world to get together and share best practices or strategies—that sort of thing. The ATCR has been, largely, virtual for the last couple of years because of COVID. But, normally, it results in one meeting in the hosting country. So we’re hoping to host a meeting here in Denver later this month, COVID permitting, and we have a large meeting that we’re hosting in Geneva with UNHCR in June, and this topic will be on the table for discussion. I am told that we need to proceed carefully with this discussion because there are many countries in the world who fear that there may be interest in kind of reopening the refugee definition that’s been in place since 1951 to include climate refugees, which could just absolutely overwhelm the system, which is already overwhelmed by the number of refugees in the world facing one of the five protected grounds of persecution. So, I think, I’ll just say we acknowledge it’s a looming and huge challenge and it’s something that we’re all—all of us are going to have to work together to address. Rick, I don’t know if you have something you’d like to add to that. SANTOS: Yeah. There are a few things. There’s a lot of conversation going on now about this issue, migration and climate change. The Biden administration invited a Blue Ribbon Panel that included RCUSA members. Mark Hetfield from HIAS was on that with me along with others, and we gave a set of recommendation(s) to the administration on how to begin to address these issues. I don’t have a link with me right now but at Church World Service we’ve done some preliminary research on, basically, adaptability and climate change and migration and what are coping strategies that people are using right now, and, actually, if you go to the website you’ll be able to find that piece of information. But I think there’s a couple of steps before we, really, talk about the number of climate-affected refugees and possibilities. I think what we found in our initial research is that communities want to stay close to where they are from—that they don’t actually want to move to other countries if they don’t have to—that they want to do—they want actually to be supported with adaptive strategies to be able to stay in place. And so this includes agriculture, new agricultural techniques or seeds that can deal with climate change or more arid conditions. It includes strategies on WASH. It includes a lot of different strategies. And the final strategy would be either kind of internal migration or a refugee status. So I think, I know the issue of climate change is really high in people’s minds, and I know that there’s a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out other strategies, including adaptability—how do we become more adaptive, where we are, and how do we do that first. So I would just suggest that if you look at some of the stuff that’s out there, look at the Blue Ribbon Panel report, the Biden administration actually adopted a lot of what we had put forward, including this idea of disaster risk reduction as kind of a key strategy for climate migration adaptation. So that’s all I’ll say for now. But I think there’s going to be a lot more work on this and a lot more conversation. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And Ali Khan with the American Muslim Council asks if there’s an update on resettling Syrian refugees. GAUGER: Yes. Syrians were a population that we, of course, resettled a fairly good number of toward the end of the Obama administration. Their numbers fell off significantly during the last administration. We do have a good number of Syrian refugees in the resettlement queue, largely, located in Jordan and Turkey. I will say that what we have found, since many of these cases had very little movement on them for a number of years, a lot of them are very difficult to try and contact, especially those who had been living in Turkey. We assume that many of them have moved to Europe. So I don’t have any specific figures to give you other than that for cases that were in our pipeline and in the process during the Obama administration, they’re—if they can be contacted they’re still in the queue and they—their cases can be reactivated. But, again, some of them have been very hard to contact. But we are contacting them. I don’t believe that we’re getting new referrals of Syrians from UNHCR. But we are working with an existing caseload. And I’m sorry, I don’t have the figures in front of me. FASKIANOS: And, just quickly, there’s a question from Tsehaye Teferra from the Ethiopian Development Council, and also had their hand raised, but I want to just get to it. Do you think the influx of Afghan refugees and now Ukrainian refugees will have an impact on African refugees—on the numbers? GAUGER: On African refugees. Hi, Tsehaye. Good to hear from you. I don’t believe so because I believe there is room for all three. First of all, I don’t expect, at least in the near term, an influx of Ukrainian refugees, given, again, what we’ve seen in terms of countries in Europe showing them hospitality. Of course, most of the Afghans who have been resettled came in through humanitarian parole so they don’t count against the refugee ceiling at all. I think there’s room for all three. Of course, one challenge is, as I noted earlier, there is a limited number of USCIS refugee officers who can conduct interviews overseas. And so right now we work on a quarterly basis and we submit kind of a request to USCIS every quarter and we have to—sometimes we’re told we have to pick and choose which are our priorities. And, for instance, when they came—when USCIS came back to us and said, we can actually probably do a second set of interviews in the second quarter, so coming up soon, we did ask for circuit rides not entirely in Africa but we—I think we kind of increased the African circuit rides the most. And then the number will go down in the third quarter. So it’s kind of a constantly shifting scene. But I guess my answer to your question is no, I do not. I believe that we will continue to resettle a good number of African refugees and I know that for some in the administration it’s a priority. FASKIANOS: Great. I just want to give you, Kelly, thirty seconds for closing, and then I’ll go to Rick just to make any last point. GAUGER: Thank you. So my screen has gone black so I don’t know if you can see me. I can’t see any of you. But so I’ll— FASKIANOS: We can. We can still see you. (Laughs.) GAUGER: OK. OK. I’m staring at a black screen right now. I’m glad you can hear me. I guess I would just say thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the interesting questions. It was nice to speak and hear from a different cast of characters. We often talk to a lot of the same people in Washington about refugee resettlement so it was a pleasure to get some questions from people that I have not encountered before. Thank you, all of you, for the work that you’re doing to—if you are, to help Afghan and other refugees to resettle and I look forward to more such communications—conversations in the future. FASKIANOS: Rick? SANTOS: Yeah. Irina, I just want to thank you and the Council on Foreign Relations for inviting me to this conversation, and thanks, Kelly, for, really, just a lot of really good information. I’m really—I feel, in some ways, very privileged to be sitting in this spot where any of the other six, at least, of the nine, if not all of the nine, other resettlement agencies easily could have been sitting in my space. I’m so grateful for them. We really work as a collaborative group and the work that all of them do is just as important as everything that we do, and so just really appreciative. I just want to give them a shout out for that. Just finally, just really happy to be able to, really, have a conversation around faith and resettlement. I think sometimes people think of this as a, really, secular approach to things, and I have that in all the other development work that I do. So, really, just grateful for the Council and you for having this session. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you, Rick Santos. You can follow Rick’s work at @ricksantoscws. And Kelly Gauger for stepping in at, really, the eleventh hour. What is the Twitter handle for the bureau? GAUGER: Oh, my gosh. I don’t know. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: OK. GAUGER: I’m sorry. I will send—I will send it to you. FASKIANOS: Great. And we will—I think the office Twitter handle is @stateprm. But we will circulate links and some information to follow up for this conversation. Thank you both, and thanks to everybody on this call for the work that you’re doing in this space. It really does take a lot of hands to tackle this really enormous problem, and as we can see, it’s going to get even bigger as more crises come—are happening and the climate change that’s barreling down on all of us. So thank you again. Please follow us on Twitter at @CFR_religion and you can always email us suggestions, feedback, to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you and to continuing the conversation.

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