HOWARD L. BERMAN, California Acting Chairman GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey BRAD SHERMAN, California ROBERT WEXLER, Florida ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York BILL DELAHUNT, Massachusetts GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York DIANE E. WATSON, California ADAM SMITH, Washington RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri JOHN S. TANNER, Tennessee GENE GREEN, Texas LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas RUBÉN HINOJOSA, Texas JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York DAVID WU, Oregon BRAD MILLER, North Carolina LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ, California DAVID SCOTT, Georgia JIM COSTA, California ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey GABRIELLE GIFFORDS, Arizona RON KLEIN, Florida VACANT ROBERT R. KING Staff Director PETER M. YEO Deputy Staff Director DAVID S. ABRAMOWITZ Chief Counsel

One Hundred Tenth Congress Congress of the United States Committee on Foreign Affairs U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 Telephone: (202) 225-5021 http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ March 11, 2008

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida Ranking Republican Member CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey DAN BURTON, Indiana ELTON GALLEGLY, California DANA ROHRABACHER, California DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois EDWARD R. ROYCE, California STEVE CHABOT, Ohio THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado RON PAUL, Texas JEFF FLAKE, Arizona MIKE PENCE, Indiana JOE WILSON, South Carolina JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas J. GRESHAM BARRETT, South Carolina CONNIE MACK, Florida JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas TED POE, Texas BOB INGLIS, South Carolina LUIS G. FORTUÑO, Puerto Rico GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida ROBERT J. WITTMAN, Virginia YLEEM D.S. POBLETE Republican Staff Director Mark C. Gage Republican Senior Policy Advisor Douglas C. Anderson Republican Chief Counsel

“Neglected Responsibilities: The U.S. Response to the Iraqi Refugee Crisis”

Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, Chairman

House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia

The subcommittees will come to order.  Almost a year ago, the Middle East and South Asia subcommittee held a hearing on the Iraqi refugee crisis and we learned several disturbing things.  We learned that the Administration was doing next to nothing to assist those Iraqis who put their lives in jeopardy in order to assist the United States in our efforts in Iraq.  Not only wasn’t the Administration helping them, they didn’t even know how many Iraqis actually worked for us, so they naturally had no idea how many people needed our help.  We learned that the Administration was woefully unprepared to process refugees referred to us by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  We learned that it took up to 5 months to process a refugee referral.  We learned that the United States had the capacity to process merely a few hundred refugees a month but wasn’t working anywhere near even that limited capacity.  We learned that we were telling Iraqis seeking our assistance and protection to flee to a safe place – like Syria – because we weren’t processing at risk populations in Iraq.  And we learned that the need for refugee assistance was so great that Congress ultimately had to take the lead in providing an additional $150 million to address it.

            So we have reconvened today in the hope that the Administration will be able to tell us all sorts of good news:  that it has provided the protection necessary to those Iraqis who risked their lives for us; that the Administration has worked out the bureaucratic kinks between the Departments of State and Homeland Security and that the United States is now efficiently processing refugees referred to us; we hope to hear that it takes far less than 5 months to process a refugee case and as a result the Administration is on target to meet the President’s goal and the Administration’s assurance of resettling 12,000 Iraqi refugees this fiscal year; and that the Administration has established a mechanism to process at risk populations of Iraqis inside of Iraq so that they don’t have to flee to a neighboring country to receive our assistance.  But alas, I don’t believe our hopes will be fulfilled.

            Now, I don’t want to leave the impression that nothing has happened over the past year.  Many things have.  Congress increased to 500 and then to 5000 the number of Special Immigrant Visas available to Iraqis who worked for the United States.  Congress also expanded the types of employment that would be eligible.  Congress provided new authorities to the Administration for processing refugees and required that the Secretary of State establish a mechanism for processing Iraqi refugees in Iraq.  And as I mentioned Congress provided an additional $150 million.  So Congress has been very aggressive in dealing with this crisis.

I wish I could say the same for the Administration.  To its credit the Administration has appointed senior officials from State and Homeland Security to oversee the coordination of U.S. efforts and the Administration has issued the full compliment of 500 Special Immigrant Visas available under the earlier law.  But according to the Washington Post, the Administration has stopped processing those visas, even though Congress raised the ceiling to 5,000.  Now, I understand that we expanded the types of employment eligible for such visas, and that guidelines need to be issued for these newly eligible employees, but it seems to me that if there are still Iraqis who need visas and they qualified under the old law, they would qualify under the new law, so I don’t understand why the Administration isn’t processing them.  Unless that was never their intention and all along they were willing to talk a good game, but leave these people high and dry.

In terms of refugee resettlement, the Administration resettled 1,608 during all of Fiscal Year 2007 about 134 per month, four or five a day.  Not a particularly robust number.  Five months into Fiscal Year 2008, the Administration has resettled 1,876 refugees about 375 per month.  Much better but still well below what would be needed to reach the President’s goal of 12,000 refugees resettled during this Fiscal Year.  In order to reach that goal the Administration would have to triple the number of refugees processed each month.  If you ask me that’s a tall order for an Administration that always comes up short.

Part of the problem is the Department of State is still puzzling over how to process at risk populations inside of Iraq.  This internal debate has been going on for a year now.  The State Department testified last year that they were examining this possibility.  The Iraqi Refugee Crisis Act gives the Secretary 90 days to come up with a plan for such processing inside of Iraq.  The clock is running and I hope our witnesses today can tell us that they will meet the reporting deadline and that such processing will begin promptly thereafter.  Paralysis by analysis is just another name for failure.

All of us understand that 9/11 changed a lot of things and one of those things was that the United States needed to be much more careful about who gets into the country.  The Departments of State and Homeland Security approach the questions of refugee processing and resettlement with differing perspectives and imperatives.  But the idea, as I understand it, of appointing Ambassador Foley and Ms. Scialabba to their respective positions was to remove the bureaucratic impediments that had previously hindered our nation’s ability to respond to the crisis.  Judging from the results over the last year, I don’t think the problem has been solved. 

The only person in the executive branch who can make all the agencies march in the same direction is the President.  Yet I can’t remember President Bush speaking about this refugee crisis or the need for the United States to respond aggressively to it except in passing.  The last refugee crisis he spoke of directly was in New Orleans.  Perhaps he thinks this one is going just as well. It is precisely the lack of Presidential leadership on this issue that led me to propose during the conference on the Iraqi Refugee Crisis Act that Congress create a White House level coordinator with the authority to resolve the disputes between agencies that have decidedly different interests.  I think the results show how unfortunate it is that my proposal was not included in the final agreement.  I’m sure that Ambassador Foley and Ms. Scialabba are doing their best but as long as they report to different cabinet secretaries instead of one official managing the issue for the President I fear our efforts to help Iraqi refugees will continue to stagnate in the Administration’s bureaucratic swamp.  I still think, actually I very strongly assert, that the President needs one official to ride herd on this issue and I will continue to push for that as Congress considers additional legislation to address the crisis.

At the hearing last year, one of our witnesses noted that the U.S. response to the refugee crisis could be the first step towards rehabilitating the image of the United States in the Middle East and indeed globally.  Here we are a year later.  At a minimum, I would say that we have yet to seize that moment.

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