Photo: World Relief
OPINION
This Good Friday, remember the Christians who aren't allowed to take refuge in the US
This Good Friday and through the year, we must be advocate for those who are powerless in the face of torture and persecution because of their faith.
Today, as Christians remember the torturous crucifixion of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Roman empire, we should also be mindful of the many around the world persecuted for their Christian faith.
As someone who grew up in Belfast in the ’60s and early ’70s, violence motivated by religion is something I am all too familiar with. And it’s one of the reasons why, as CEO of World Relief, I advocate for the persecuted on a daily basis.
Last year, the Trump Administration held the first Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, which convened a broad range of stakeholders, including foreign ministers, international organization representatives and religious leaders, to identify concrete ways to combat religious persecution. Secretary of State Pompeo, who hosted the event, called the protection and promotion of international religious freedom “a top foreign policy priority.”
It’s inexplicable, then, that the State Department’s Refugee Resettlement Program has all but shut the door on persecuted Christians and other religious minorities from several of the countries where they face the most severe restrictions on religious freedom.
Last year, the administration set the refugee ceiling for FY 2019 for an all-time low of only 30,000 refugees. This is less than half the cap of 70,000 set by President George W. Bush following the September 11 attacks. And it is significantly less than the admission rate under President George H.W. Bush, who set the ceiling between 125,000 and 142,000 each year of his administration.
The cuts come at a time when the number of refugees around the world is at an all-time high of 25.4 million.
Our proud history means nothing now
At the mid-point of the current federal fiscal year, just 12,151 total refugees have been admitted into the U.S. for resettlement. This includes only five self-identified Christian refugees from Syria and only 41 from Iraq – countries where Christians are at risk of genocide. From the fifty countries on Open Doors’ World Watch List for persecution of Christians, just 2,263 Christian refugees were allowed to arrive in the first six months of the fiscal year, on pace for a decline of 73 percent compared to just three years ago. In FY 2009, the last year George W. Bush established the refugee ceiling, more than 30,000 Christian refugees came from the fifty countries on that year’s Open Doors World Watch List; this year, if nothing changes, the number of Christian refugees from countries on the current list for countries where Christians face persecution is unlikely to reach 5,000.
And while the State Department’s Refugee Admission page continues to boast that “The United States is proud of its history of welcoming immigrants and refugees” and will “continue to prioritize the admission of the most vulnerable refugees while upholding the safety and security of the American people,” other wills seem to be prevailing. In particular, the administration’s policies seem to be largely influenced by the views of Stephen Miller, whose reported response to concerns from others within the administration about the decline in the resettlement of persecuted Christians was that he “would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.”
We need to advocate for the powerless
Surely there are more than 12,151 vulnerable refugees whose admission to the U.S. would not put Americans’ safety in jeopardy. You have to go all the way back to the 1970s, in fact, to the era when I was still in Belfast, to come up with a single case of an American citizen who was killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by someone who came to the country as a refugee.
It’s not just Christians who are being shut out, of course: Just nine Yezidis had been allowed in at the midpoint of the year, and no Jewish and Zoroastrian refugees fleeing the brutal government of Iran had been allowed to the U.S. It’s hard to be sure if these dramatic shifts are the intentional result of a policy to limit all refugees, or collateral damage in an equally troubling effort to particularly restrict Muslim refugees.
What is clear is that, on this Good Friday and throughout the year, we should be advocating for those who are powerless in the face of torture and persecution because of their faith. We must insist that the U.S. once again offer safety and religious freedom to some of the globe’s most persecuted religious minorities.
Tim Breene is CEO of World Relief.
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