A Few Thoughts on Refugees

Last Friday, the Star Tribune ran a helpful article (gift link) by reporter Maya Rao that defined the terms refugee, asylum seeker, and humanitarian parole and gave examples of people who have come to Minnesota in each circumstance.

Minnesota has long prided itself as the recipient of refugees, most numerously Hmong and Somali people, but more recently the Karen people from Myanmar.

I knew that Donald Trump had derailed refugee resettlement during his administration, and that it had taken a while for it to get back on track after Biden took office, due to staff capacity cutbacks. Here's what those numbers looked like over recent years, from a chart in the Strib article:

It's important to note that even the highest annual numbers on that chart are not very high for a country the size of the U.S. There are much smaller countries in the world that take in much larger numbers of refugees. At our best, we are doing the minimum. 

Some people have pointed out that Trump's claims that other countries are sending people from asylums to cross into the U.S. is because he misunderstands (or is trying to mislead about) what political asylum is. I've also recently heard it said that, similarly, his decree that people who are here under humanitarian parole are criminals comes from the same lack of understanding of this use of the term parole, confusing it with parole from prison, as if they were released and sent across the border.

It's notable that the years with the lowest number of refugees were the years when crime in the U.S. surged — during the peak years of the pandemic. Correlation, or causation? Or is Trump too addled to understand the question?