US Offers Little Refuge for Persecuted Christians Say World Relief, Open Doors

Faith McDonnell on July 17, 2020

On Friday, July 10, Christian humanitarian aid groups World Relief and Open Doors released a report revealing the ever-decreasing ability for persecuted Christians to seek asylum and resettlement in the United States. The report, entitled “Closed Doors: Persecuted Christians and the U.S. Refugee Resettlement and Asylum Processes,” focuses on the Trump administration’s cuts to the refugee resettlement program and how those cuts affect persecuted Christians around the world.

Persecution of Christians around the world continues to be the most wide scale human rights atrocity today, with at least 300 million Christians worldwide facing severe persecution, according to Aid to the Church in Need. And while a third of the world’s believers of any faith are persecuted, 80% of that number are Christians, the extensive and scholarly report for the British government’s Foreign Secretary by the Rt. Rev. Philip Mounstephen, Bishop of Truro, revealed.

It is indeed a serious situation when Christians such as these, with a credible fear of persecution, cannot find asylum. The Trump Administration has made defending persecuted Christians overseas a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy because of this drastic situation. But the report tells the story of those Christians that feel as if they have no other choice but to leave their homes and are not able to find refuge in the United States.

According to World Relief’s own news release, there has been “a surprising 90% reduction since 2015 in the number of Christians resettled from countries where the church faces persecution.” They add that “resettlement for other religious minorities — Jewish refugees from Iran, Yezidi refugees from Iraq, Muslim refugees from Burma and others — are all also on track to end 2020 down more than 90% from 2015.”

Major Changes to America’s Historical Approach to Refugee Resettlement

They go on to say that these “saddening numbers are the consequence of major changes to our nation’s historical approach to refugee resettlement.” Last November, they report, the refugee cap was reduced to 18,000, which “was the lowest level in U.S. history.” Of the 18,000 slots, 5,000 are reserved for those whose designation as a refugee is based on their religious tradition.

The official, legal definition of a refugee is someone who faces a “credible and well-founded fear of persecution,” so apparently 13,000 people were facing a well-founded fear of persecution from something other than their faith. Maybe they were “climate refugees,” which is part of the new definition for refugee proposed by then UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, (now UN Secretary General) and supported by the VOLAGs, the Voluntary Agencies paid by the U.S. government to resettle refugees.

In Religion News Service’s coverage of the virtual release of the report, Jack Jenkins, previously Senior Religion Reporter with ThinkProgress, reported World Relief CEO Tim Breene and Open Doors USA’s leader, David Curry’s data comparing refugee admittance under the Obama Administration with the Trump Administration. The leaders said that in 2015 “the U.S. admitted more than 18,000 Christians from the 50 countries on the Open Doors USA 2020 World Watch List for the persecution of Christians.” But midway through 2020, “we have admitted fewer than 950.”

Jenkins continues that “According to the report, the U.S. resettled 18,462 Christians in 2015 from countries on Open Doors’ persecution watchlist. That number slipped to just 4,112 in 2018 before bumping up slightly to 5,787 in 2019. The report says, “the administration has resettled just 946 persecuted Christians so far in 2020, due in part to complications from the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic.” Perhaps not resettling refugees or other immigrants in 2020 during the global pandemic and other domestic upheaval that has taken place since the report’s writing makes sense?

Other Factors

Apart from this being the most bizarre and troubling year that America has endured for many decades, there are some other factors that may enter into the equation regarding the reduction of the number of persecuted Christians admitted into the United States for resettlement.

Immigration policy is, to say the least, in flux. Much of the process of legal immigration has been pre-empted by the demands of migrants at America’s southern border. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) “In Fiscal Year 2019, the Border Patrol apprehended a near-record 860,000 illegal aliens nationwide, of which 852,000 (99 percent) were caught while attempting to cross the Southwestern border.”

In addition, in some regions of the most severe persecution, especially the Middle East, church leaders urge Christians to stay. We have seen this in Iraq and Syria, lands of the Old and New Testaments. There is a real danger that Christianity could vanish in these areas in the Middle East, so in spite of horrific threats from Islamic jihadists like al Qaeda, ISIS, and al Nusra, many Christians have stayed. These church leaders appeal to the United States for help to stop the eradication of Christianity in the what is the “cradle of Christianity,” but they are concerned by the diminishing Christian presence. In the end, however, desperate Christians have the right to flee. They have certainly had to flee internally — to become Internally Displaced People (IDPs), or to go to Jordan or some to Europe.

Finally, the process for Christians to seek asylum is often made more difficult, if not impossible, by the hostility of the United Nations and by a system so eager to show that it does not favor Christians that it actually disfavors them. In fact, the year 2015, touted by the report to contrast with the current year’s refugee admissions, was not such a great year for Iraqi and Syrian Christians. That year, the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) admitted outright to officials at The Barnabas Fund, a Christian relief agency, “There is no way that Christians will be supported because of their religious affiliation.”

Writing, in 2015, about this issue of closed doors on Christians singled out for genocide by ISIS, I said:

According to official data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center for Fiscal Year 2015, resettled Syrian refugees were 97% Muslim. The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea, in a November 2 article in National Review, showed that in the past five years only 53 of 2003 Syrian refugees accepted by the United States have been Christians (only about 2.5% of the total). But about 10% of Syrians are Christians, so why are so few of these refugees Christians, particularly given that they are among the most persecuted of groups in Syria?

Their plight involves a nightmarish catch-22. When Christians flee as refugees they cannot go to UN-run refugee camps because there they face the same persecution and terror from which they fled. If they are not in the refugee camps they are not included in the application process for asylum. The U.S. State Department knows this, but continues to allow the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to select refugees for asylum with no regard to the endangered Christians and other religious minorities. According to statements in the Sunday Express from an ISIS defector and aid workers in the UN camps, ISIS is sending teams of trained assassins disguised as refugees to kidnap and kill Christians.

When some members of Congress tried to rectify this situation, with legislation that would focus on Christians and Yazidis who were being left out of the immigration process, for whom doors were closed, the voluntary resettlement agencies, VOLAGs, including World Relief and other Christian groups, mounted a campaign to stop the legislation. The bill, the Refugee Resettlement Oversight and Security Act of 2015 (H.R. 3573), prioritized religious minorities — those who actually do have a “well-founded fear of persecution” for refugee status.

President Obama followed this campaign with finger-wagging accusation of religious bias, accusing Republican presidential candidates in that election season of wanting a “religion test” in which “only Christians — proven Christians should be admitted.” A little later Obama accused his opponents of being “scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America … scared of three-year-old orphans.”

In this election season, the report from World Relief and Open Doors is an eye-opening reminder of how many of our brothers and sisters, and other vulnerable religious minority peoples are in desperate situations and need America’s help. It is good and admirable that the Trump Administration has given such priority throughout all facets of the U.S. government to aid persecuted Christians and other believers overseas. But as Closed Doors has made clear, that is sometimes not the answer. Only flight to a safe place is the answer.

As America works towards the eradicating the “new normal” caused by the virus and gets more control over our borders and the problem of illegal immigration that is not connected to the plight of refugees, it is time for the Administration to open the doors to persecuted Christians and other persecuted believers seeking asylum.

The VOLAGs, like World Relief, can help with that. In addition to scrutinizing and critiquing this nation’s resettlement and asylum processes, they should demand of their colleagues at the United Nations equal treatment for persecuted Christians in the application process. Because that is the first closed door that Christians face.

  1. Comment by Elizabeth J. Roby on July 17, 2020 at 9:42 pm

    This year is a strange year indeed. Travel for anyone is difficult with a global pandemic. But it is true that Christians are among the most persecuted and certainly we should not be discriminatory against Christians. That is happening more and more in this country.

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