Impact of refugee resettlement in US

• Tazreena Sajjad

Refugees haven’t been welcome in the United States since the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term when he signed an executive order suspending the US Refugee Admissions Program for 90 days. Despite a February 2025 federal court order to resume refugee resettlement, the administration has said that won’t be happening any time soon because the country’s refugee system has been so thoroughly dismantled.

Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, executive order discontinued regular refugee processing and halted all federal funding for refugee resettlement. It ended the State Department’s 2023 Welcome Corps program, which allowed US citizens to privately sponsor refugees, as well as a program that resettled children from Central America and certain family members. Trump also suspended the follow-to-join visas that reunited refugee families.

Together, these programs make up the US Refugee Admissions Program. Created in 1980, the program resettles refugees nationwide through partnerships between the government and US-based resettlement agencies. It had made the US the global leader in refugee resettlement.

As a scholar of refugees and displacement, I expect refugee admissions to remain close to zero for the rest of Trump’s term. Thousands of refugees, both at home and abroad, will suffer as a result. So will the many Americans who work within the country’s sprawling refugee resettlement network.

US refugee policies

Under US and international law, refugees are people fleeing “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion or national origin.

While refugees have come to the US since its founding, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was the country’s first official “refugee” law. The act, which expired in 1952, allowed more than 350,000 European refugees displaced by World War II to enter the US within the constraints of an existing quota system that defined how many refugees the country would admit each year, and from which countries.

In 1980, Congress passed the Refugee Act, which amended existing law to raise the annual ceiling for refugees and created a formal process for refugee resettlement.

Critics of resettlement, including Trump, have argued that refugees threaten US national security, are unvetted and do not assimilate into the US economy and society.

However, research show that refugees contribute both economically and socially through taxes and entrepreneurship. They also revitalize towns with declining populations.

Between 2005 and 2019, refugees yielded a net positive fiscal impact of $123.8 billion, at both federal and state levels, and generated an estimated $581 billion for governments at all levels.

There is no link between refugees and crime, nor is there any notable link to terrorism.

Although the 9/11 attacks were not committed by refugees, President George W. Bush in 2001 suspended refugee admissions for several months, leaving 23,000 refugees already approved for resettlement in limbo, mainly in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

In 2017, Trump in his first term suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days and barred entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – for 90 days. It also indefinitely banned Syrian refugees.

When resettlement pauses

The second suspension of the US Refugee Admissions Program drastically affected refugees waiting abroad for resettlement and those already in the US.

Arabic-speaking refugees struggled with discrimination and psychosocial challenges such as stress and other medical issues, leading to poorer social integration.

The US economy suffered, too. One researcher estimated that Trump’s 2017 suspension of refugee resettlement deprived the country of $9.1 billion in economic activity per year and sapped public coffers at all levels of government of over $2 billion a year. More than 300 Americans who worked in refugee resettlement were laid off in 2017 alone.

Trump’s Muslim ban created an enormous backlog of immigration cases. In 2021, for instance, the incoming Biden administration inherited petitions for 25,994 unprocessed refugee family reunification cases.

Many other vetted refugees were not allowed entry, including US-affiliated Iraqis and Afghans who remained trapped in violent contexts.

Impact of Trump’s order

As of Jan. 22, 2025, the Trump administration had cancelled the flights of 10,000 vetted refugees into the US. Most came from the 10 countries from which the US had accepted refugees in recent years.

These refugees are now at acute risk of persecution and violence.

Three refugee resettlement agencies have sued the federal government for withholding congressionally appropriated funding for refugee processing and services. The legal battle over America’s refugee system has just begun. History suggests everyone involved with the program and the US economy will suffer for years to come.

(The author is a Senior Professorial Lecturer of Global Governance, Politics and Security, American University School of International Service)