Thursday, December 6, 2007

Accepting refugees protects U.S., official says
Camps help breed terror, group told

By Peter Smith
psmith@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

The United States resettles far more refugees than any nation in the world, not just out of charity but also out of national security concerns, a top State Department official said in Louisville yesterday.

"We do it because it's the right thing to do, but we also do it because it is in our national interest," Assistant Secretary of State Ellen R. Sauerbrey said, telling of how many refugees languish for years in crude camps

"When you have people in these hopeless situations, this is where terrorism breeds, this is where failed states come from," she said.

Sauerbrey spoke to a lunchtime gathering of the World Affairs Council of Kentucky/Southern Indiana at the Marriott Louisville Downtown.

The United States resettled about 50,000 refugees from 67 countries in the past year, and 708 of them have come to Louisville, Sauerbrey said.

The country could receive 70,000 or more in the coming year, she said.

Among the most recent waves of refugees: a growing influx of Iraqi refugees, including a disproportionate number of Iraq's minority Christian population who fear persecution. Sauerbrey said Sunni and Shiite Muslim refugees -- who also are coming to the United States and Louisville -- face similar fears.

"One of the real tragedies of this situation is that Christians living in that region of the world since the beginning of Christianity are looking at the future of Iraq and seeing that there is no future," she said.

She predicted a continued influx of refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma), including members of the Karen refugee group, of whom more than 200 already have settled in Louisville.

Refugees from the African nations of Burundi and Somalia and from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan also are expected in the coming year, both nationally and in Louisville, Sauerbrey said.

She oversees the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration -- an agency that deals with those fleeing their countries because of a "well-founded fear of persecution."

It doesn't handle the much larger influx of immigrants, those coming for jobs or other reasons besides fear of persecution.

In the past two days in Louisville, Sauerbrey visited various educational and child-care programs sponsored by the main refugee resettlement agencies, Catholic Charities and Kentucky Refugee Ministries.

She also met with Mayor Jerry Abramson yesterday.

She said the United States works closely with the United Nations to seek peaceful solutions to conflicts so that refugees can return home and, if that fails, to find a way for refugees to stay in neighboring countries to which they fled.

But when it appears impossible for refugees to return home, they can be resettled to new countries, she said. The United States is by far the leader in such efforts, with Australia and Canada the closest in resettling about 5,000 people each last year.

She said Iraqi and other refugees are screened carefully by the Department of Homeland Security. A top priority, she said, is resettling Iraqis who are threatened with violence because they worked with Americans as interpreters or embassy employees in Iraq.

"A lot of people say the United States is the cause of the refugee crisis in Iraq," she said, "but the United States responds to every refugee crisis."

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071206/NEWS01/712060422