Emergency Refugee & Migration Assistance

Description

Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) is an emergency presidential draw-down account that provides an important safety valve during emergencies, allowing the U.S. to meet rapidly occurring and unforeseen humanitarian needs.

What does it buy?

ERMA investments provide life-sustaining assistance to refugees, including food, shelter, health care, and education.

Why is it important?

• Conflict or persecution forcibly displaces nearly one person every two seconds (both internally displaced persons and refugees), amounting to 71 million people worldwide.
• As a Presidential draw-down account, this funding enables the U.S. to meet rapidly occurring and unforeseen humanitarian needs by Presidential certification and provides an important safety valve during emergencies.
• U.S. funding helps meet the basic human needs of displaced people, supports permanent solutions to their displacement, and assists the countries hosting them. The United States thereby helps to relieve pressures that have the potential to destabilize regions that also threaten global stability and security.
• Recent years have seen unanticipated needs arise in countries such as Bangladesh, Mali, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria. These countries are often ill-equipped to handle massive in-flows of people; therefore, the United States and other global partners buttress political and humanitarian responses.

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?

• Additional investments could allow the U.S. to better respond to the unprecedented scope of the global refugee crisis.