Migration and Refugee Assistance

Description

The Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA) account mitigates and resolves conflict-related displacement and supports humanitarian action and diplomacy for displaced populations. It helps stabilize volatile situations and strengthen bilateral relationships with key refugee-hosting countries. Funding helps to meet the basic human needs of displaced people, supports sustainable and dignified solutions to their displacement, and assists the countries hosting them. Durable solutions include returning to the place of origin if the conditions permit, remaining in their location of displacement with greater integration into host communities, or resettlement to a third country.

What does it buy?

Through the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and other partners, MRA investments provide life-sustaining assistance to refugees overseas and include funds related to the admission, reception, and placement of refugees to the U.S.

Why is it important?

• Conflict or persecution forcibly displaces nearly one person every two seconds (both internally displaced people and refugees), amounting to over 71 million people worldwide.
• Crises that force people to leave their homes occur more frequently and last longer. UNHCR estimates that the average length of a major protracted refugee situation is now 26 years. Twenty-three of the 32 protracted refugee situations at the end of 2015 have lasted for more than 20 years.
• Access to livelihoods and educational opportunities is crucial to preventing a generation of children from missing out on the chance for a better future and ensuring that communities can recover from disaster and build stronger, more prosperous communities.
• Over 742,000 Rohingya from Myanmar have been displaced. Natural disasters worsen their flight, making this funding vital to secure a safe future.
• 4.5 million refugees and migrants have fled Venezuela including another 650,000 asylum seekers, with the refugee response meeting only roughly half the needs of those affected.

Why should Americans care?

• Global displacement is at its highest level since the aftermath of World War II. This has resulted in significant human suffering, potential “lost generations” as millions of children miss out on education opportunities and undue pressure on countries—many of which are poor themselves—on hosting large numbers of refugees.
• The purpose of humanitarian action is to protect life and health and ensure respect for human beings. Humanitarian action must be based on need alone, giving priority to the most urgent cases of distress and making no distinctions on the basis of nationality, race, gender, religious belief, class, or political affiliations.

What more could be done?

• Developing countries such as Uganda and Ethiopia host 84% of refugees, with the least developed countries hosting 28% of the global total. These countries are ill-equipped to handle large in-flows of people and struggle to provide for their own citizens. Additional investment would allow the U.S. to assist a historic number of refugees around the world and mitigate the impact of refugee outflows on developing host-country nations.
• The U.S. should increase the number of refugees resettled in line with historic norms of 95,000 annually. Given that security vetting and other operational updates are in place to resume good faith operations of the resettlement program, the U.S. should not turn its back on the worst refugee crisis in global history.