Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Executive Order of the President suspending refugee admissions to the United States

Here's the Executive Order of the President suspending refugee admissions to the United States.

REALIGNING THE UNITED STATES REFUGEE ADMISSIONS PROGRAM: EXECUTIVE ORDER January 20, 2025
"The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees. This order suspends the USRAP until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States."

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And here's an email I received yesterday from the HIAS, the refugee resettlement agency with which my wife and I have had a long relationship.

"Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. government decided to abruptly suspend life-saving assistance to vulnerable people around the world. HIAS, along with many partner organizations who provide humanitarian and development assistance, was issued a Stop-Work Order for many of our programs that receive State Department funding.

"The magnitude of the Stop-Work Orders is unprecedented and breathtakingly cruel. All around the world, programs, including ours, that provide clean water, shelter, medical care, food, and other critical services will end, leaving millions of people abandoned to face exploitation, violence, and hunger.

"The grave impacts also extend into the United States. HIAS and our resettlement partners are prevented from providing critical services to refugees who were welcomed here through the resettlement program and have already legally begun their new lives. Coupled with the executive order halting all new refugee admissions, this is a total shutdown of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

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"As Jews and humanitarians, HIAS will never turn our backs on refugees, even if the U.S. government has. We have a responsibility to always stand up for newcomers, who came to the U.S. with the understanding that we would help them adjust to life in a new country. We will always stand up for the rights and safety of forcibly displaced people around the world.
HIAS has always been an organization that stands for welcome — and we will continue to do all we can.

In solidarity,

— HIAS

Sunday, February 4, 2024

How is immigration policy working on the US-Mexico border?

Yesterday's post linked to a paper about immigration policy, and today let's look at a report on the results of existing policy:

After a Decade of Decline, the US Undocumented Population Increased by 650,000 in 2022 by Robert Warren, Journal on Migration and Human Security, OnlineFirst https://doi.org/10.1177/23315024241226624

Executive Summary: This report describes estimates of the undocumented population residing in the United States in 2022 compiled by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS). The estimates are based on data collected in the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the US Census Bureau (Ruggles et al. 2023). The report finds that the undocumented population grew from 10.3 million in 2021 to 10.9 million in 2022, an increase of 650,000. The increase reverses more than a decade of gradual decline. The undocumented populations from 10 countries increased by a total of 525,000: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and India; El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in Central America; and Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in South America. The undocumented population in Florida increased by about 125,000 in 2022, Texas increased by 60,000, New York by 50,000, and Maryland by 45,000.

"Kerwin and Warren (2023) summarized the reasons why apprehensions by DHS do not translate directly into undocumented population growth: “[S]ome migrants are apprehended multiple times, some are trying to return to a permanent residence in the United States after a visit to their communities of origin, some are seasonal workers, and some are coming temporarily to visit family. None of these cases would add a new resident to the undocumented population . . .The fact that the Border Patrol prevents most attempted entries has not received wide media coverage. In 2017, DHS estimated that it interdicted 80 percent of attempted entries in the 2014 to 2016 period” (citation omitted).

"The numbers arriving illegally across the border and the numbers overstaying temporary visas each year are offset by the numbers leaving the undocumented population. From 2011 to 2021, an annual average of more than 500,000 left the undocumented population through voluntary emigration, removal by DHS, adjustment to legal status, or death (Warren 2023, Table 2)."

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Report card on Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration

Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration sounds like a good goal for border control in the U.S. It isn't what is happening, but there's been some progress. The Center for Migration Studies brings us up to date with a report and a report card.

US Compliance with the Global Compact on Migration: A Mixed Record. Center for Migration Studies of New York, February 2, 2024

"When the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM)[1] was agreed to in December 2018, the United States (US) was not a party to the agreement, as the Trump administration did not formally participate in its formation. In 2021, however, the Biden administration retroactively supported[2] the nonbinding GCM and began participating in its implementation.

"Since that time, the US has achieved a mixed record of adhering to the provisions of the GCM, a document which creates a multilateral framework for the international community to humanely manage migration flows. Moreover, proposed changes to US border policy threaten to further sully the US record on migration. The following is an examination of US immigration policies and how they measure up to the provisions of the GCM.

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"III. Conclusion

"Since it signaled support for the GCM in 2021, the United States has deployed several policies which are consistent with its goals. However, the use of restrictive enforcement policies, particularly at the US-Mexico border, has tainted its record. Should Congress adopt several additional restrictive enforcement policies in the near future, it would severely undermine, if not eviscerate, the progress the US has made in implementing humane and lawful immigration policies over the past few years. It also would send a message to the world that such restrictive policies are acceptable and appropriate, leading to a global retrenchment from the goals of the GCM in the years ahead.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Refugees in the middle east, since 1949

Al Jazeera provides some interesting statistics and graphics in a story about UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which was founded in 1949 to provide aid to Palestinian refugees from the war that followed Israel's independence. While Palestinians who left the middle east are of course no longer refugees (just as Jews who were refugees from Arab countries at that time are now citizens of the countries in which they settled) that's not the case for the Palestinians who fled to neighboring Arab countries, nor for their children or grandchildren. See the map below.

Here's the Al Jazeera story:

Which countries have cut funding to UNRWA, and why?. The UN urges continued funding to UNRWA’s ‘lifesaving’ aid in Gaza, after several Western countries cut aid to the agency. 28 Jan 2024

"The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), considered a lifeline for two million people in the besieged enclave, has suffered funding cuts after several of its staff were accused by Israel of involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack."

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And here are all my posts on the successes and failures of refugee resettlement.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Refugee resettlement and the top trading cycles algorithm, by Farajzadeh, Killea, Teytelboym, and Trapp

Here's a recent paper that (among other things) considers using the top trading cycles algorithm for matching refugees to sponsors (under a special program for Ukraine), to satisfy the location preferences of refugees.

Optimizing Sponsored Humanitarian Parole by Fatemeh Farajzadeh, Ryan B. Killea, Alexander Teytelboym, Andrew C. Trapp, working paper, 2023

Abstract: The United States has introduced a special humanitarian parole process for Ukrainian citizens in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. To qualify for parole, Ukrainian applicants must have a sponsor in the United States. In collaboration with HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency involved in the parole process, we deployed RUTH (Refugees Uniting Through HIAS), a novel algorithmic matching system that is driven by the relocation preferences of refugees and the priorities of US sponsors. RUTH adapts Thakral [2016] Multiple-Waitlist Procedure (MWP) that combines the main First-In/First-Out (FIFO) queue with location specific FIFO queues in order to effectively manage the preferences of refugees and the supply of community sponsors. In addition to refugee preferences and sponsor priorities, RUTH incorporates various feasibility considerations such as community capacity, religious, and medical needs. The adapted mechanism is envy-free, efficient and strategy-proof for refugees. Our analysis reveals that refugee preferences over locations are diverse, even controlling for observables, by demonstrating the difficulty of solving a much simpler problem than modeling preferences directly from observables. We use our data for two counterfactual simulations. First, we consider the effects of increased waiting times for refugees on the quality of their matches. We find that with a periodic Top Trading Cycles algorithm, increasing period length from 24 days to 80 days, improves average rank of a refugee’s match from 3.20 to 2.44. On the other hand, using the available preference data RUTH achieved an average rank of 4.07 with a waiting time of 20 days. Second, we estimate the arrival rates of sponsors in each location that would be consistent with a long-run steady state. We find that more desirable locations (in terms of refugee preferences) require the highest arrival rates suggesting that preferences might be a useful indicator for investments in sponsorship capacity. Our study highlights the potential for preference-based algorithms such as RUTH to improve the efficiency and fairness of other rapidly-deployed humanitarian parole processes.

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Earlier:

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Resettling refugees using preferences of refugees and hosts

Monday, October 2, 2023

Immigration, immigration law, and illegal immigrants in legal limbo. Should we have a statute of limitations after which immigrants become legal?

We're seeing so much illegal immigration, maybe we should change some of our laws, at least to regularize the status of immigrants who have successfully built productive lives here. One suggestion is to have a statute of limitation on the crime of illegal immigration, That could work like common law marriage, after a long enough time, the status quo becomes legal.

The NY Times has the story:

Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works. Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants — and U.S. employers. By Marcela Valdes

"The three most recent presidents have tried and failed to fix the problem of mass unauthorized migration into the United States. President Obama tried to balance empathy with enforcement, deferring the deportation of those who arrived as minors and instructing immigration officers to prioritize the arrest of serious criminals, even as he connected every jail in the nation to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). President Trump emphasized enforcement at all costs: revoking deferred action for minors, declaring the arrest of every undocumented person a priority, separating migrant families and trying to terminate temporary protected status for about 400,000 people — though Trump also extended deferred action to about 200,000 Venezuelans during his last full day in office.

"So far, President Biden has revived the empathy-and-enforcement strategy: resuming deferred action for minors and helping Venezuelans while also making it more difficult to qualify for asylum.

"But these variations in policy have had almost no effect on the number of migrants trying to enter the United States through the Southern border. Obama and Trump chose mostly opposing strategies, but each prioritized the arrest of unauthorized migrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Yet in 2019, before the pandemic gave Trump legal standing to force asylum seekers back into Mexico, Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) arrested about 82,000 more migrants there than they had at the peak of migrations in the Obama years.

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"Until the 1920s, America received migrants with an almost open border. Our policies emphasized regulation, not restriction. A few general categories were barred from entry — polygamists and convicted criminals, for example — but almost everyone else was permitted to enter the United States and reside indefinitely. The move toward restriction began in 1882 with laws that targeted the Chinese then evolved to exclude almost every other national group as well.

"Legal immigration today is close to impossible for most people. David J. Bier of the Cato Institute recently estimated that around 3 percent of the people who tried to move permanently to the United States were able to do so legally. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case,” he wrote in a comprehensive review of the current regulations. He concludes that “trying the legal immigration system as an alternative to immigrating illegally is like playing Powerball as an alternative to saving for retirement.”

"In other words, illegal immigration is the natural consequence of the conflict between America’s thirst for foreign labor and its strict immigration laws. The world’s increasing connectedness and fluidity have just supercharged this dynamic. There are now more than 11 million undocumented immigrants inside the United States, three times the number that lived here in 1990. And during the last fiscal year, the number of C.B.P. arrests in the Rio Grande Valley hit a record: more than half a million.

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"Among academics, another idea keeps resurfacing: a deadline for deportations. Most crimes in America have a statute of limitations, Mae Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University, noted in an opinion column for The Washington Post. The statute of limitations for noncapital terrorism offenses, for example, is eight years. Before the 1924 Immigration Act, Ngai wrote in her book about the history of immigration policy, the statute of limitations for deportations was at most five years. Returning to this general principle, at least for migrants who have no significant criminal record, would allow ICE officers and immigration judges to focus on the recent influx of unauthorized migrants. A deadline could also improve labor conditions for all Americans because, as Ngai wrote, “it would go a long way toward stemming the accretion of a caste population that is easily exploitable and lives forever outside the polity.”

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement By Delacrétaz, Kominers, and Teytelboym

Learning how better to resettle refugees is not going to go out of style anytime soon. Here's a recent AER paper:

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement By David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym, American Economic Review 2023, 113(10): 2689–2717 https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20210096

Abstract: "Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of refugee families and the capacities of communities. We propose four refugee resettlement mechanisms and two solution concepts that can be used in refugee resettlement matching under various institutional and informational constraints. Our theoretical results and simulations using refugee resettlement data suggest that preference-based matching mechanisms can improve match efficiency, respect priorities of communities, and incentivize refugees to report where they would prefer to settle."

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Resettling refugees using preferences of refugees and hosts

Here's the latest report from HIAS on matching Ukrainian refugees to hosts in the U.S.

How an Innovative Algorithm Helps Ukrainian Refugees Find New Homes By Brian Zumhagen

"Odessa residents Max and Yuna* fled Ukraine on the day the Russian invasion began, February 24, 2022. It took them 7 days to reach the Polish border.

"The couple, both in their early 20s, spent the next several months in Poland. In September, they started applying for relocation to the United States with the help of HIAS. But unlike most refugees, Max and Yuna were among the first to use a new system that allowed them to list their preferences about where to be resettled, and any special needs they might have — thanks to a matching algorithm known as RUTH, which stands for Refugees Uniting Through HIAS. (The name was also inspired by the biblical Book of Ruth, which tells the story of how Ruth is herself welcomed as a foreigner).

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"Back in Poland, HIAS Relocation Officer Denis Ruksha said some of the refugees from Ukraine he works with are relocated through European Welcome Circles, while others are resettled through circles in the United States. For those heading to the U.S., Ruksha has been using the RUTH platform for the last 3 months, entering beneficiaries’ preferences about where they would like to be relocated, along with other information. “It allows people to mention almost everything they think is relevant,” he said. In the U.S., volunteers in HIAS Welcome Circles can, in turn, enter their own preferences, such as the number of people they can host.

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"RUTH isn’t the first computer system with a human name that HIAS has used to make its resettlement work easier and more effective. In 2018, the organization worked with partners to create matching software named after the first immigrant registered at Ellis Island in 1892. “Annie MOORE” (Matching and Outcome Optimization for Refugee Empowerment) used past employment data to direct refugees to locations where they would have the greatest chance of finding work.

"But where Annie focused on optimizing estimated employment outcomes, RUTH makes the relocation process faster and more transparent, according to the new platform’s developers. “This is the first time ever that preferences of refugees and priorities of hosts have been systematically used in the resettlement process,” said Andrew Trapp, associate professor of operations and industrial engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

"His colleague, Alexander Teytelboym, associate professor of economics at the University of Oxford, put it this way: “We think people are more likely to thrive in places where they prefer to live. Citizens are given a choice about almost anything of such consequence — so why shouldn’t refugees?”

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Here are my previous posts on HIAS and refugee resettlement

Saturday, September 24, 2022

Improving refugee resettlement: insights from market design by Justin Hadad and Alexander Teytelboym

The Autumn 2022 issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy is about forced migration. Here's a paper directly related to market design.

Improving refugee resettlement: insights from market design by Justin Hadad and Alexander Teytelboym, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 38, Issue 3, Autumn 2022, Pages 434–448, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grac013, 15 September 2022

Abstract: The current refugee resettlement system is inefficient because there are too few resettlement places and because refugees are resettled to locations where they might not thrive. We outline how ideas from market design can lead to better resettlement practices. In particular, we discuss how market design can incentivize participation of countries in resettlement and improve the matching of refugees at international and local levels; some of these insights have already put into practice. Finally, we highlight several further applications of market design in refugee resettlement, including cardinal preference submission and matching with transfers.

"There is an acute shortage of resettlement. Resettlement is a public good from the point of view of countries (i.e. if one country contributes by resettling a refugee, all other countries benefit), so it is not surprising that it is underprovided (Moraga and Rapoport, 2014). The UNHCR predicts that 1.47 million refugees will need resettlement in 2022––the highest ever number (UNHCR, 2021e). Numbers of resettled refugees fluctuate—in part driven by need, and in part driven by the willingness of the largest hosting countries, such as the United States, to resettle (see Figure 1). The refugees in need of resettlement are the most vulnerable kinds of refugees (see Figure 2); they have often suffered persecution and violence above and beyond the terrible experiences of most refugees.

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"The UNHCR is responsible for sending the applications of refugees to resettling countries. The process works as follows: the UNHCR identifies a refugee family in need of resettlement, and submits an application on their behalf to a country that may resettle them. If the application is accepted, the country becomes responsible for resettling the refugee according to its own rules; if the application is rejected, the UNHCR can submit an application to another country. The process can take months, if not years. Given the shortage of resettlement places, the UNHCR has a strong incentive to maximize the expected number of successful applications rather than to try to find the best matches between refugees and countries. In 2020, the UNHCR submitted the applications of over 39,500 refugees to resettling countries, which led to just 22,800 individuals departing to these countries (UNHCR, 2021d). This suggests that there is potential to improve the allocation of international resettlement submissions."

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Here's the rest of the issue: