On a recent trip to economically torn Argentina, a desperate older woman approached Leonard Glickman.
“HIAS helped me get to Buenos Aires from Europe,” she told the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s president and CEO. “Now I need you to get my grandson to America.”
If only it were that easy.
The reaction to Sept. 11 has crippled HIAS’ ability to fulfill its mission. The 120-year old organization, which deals largely with resettling at-risk refugees, is still reeling from the Bush administration’s moratorium on refugee immigration, which is ever so slowly being lifted in several parts of the world.
Glickman, in San Francisco recently for the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Emigre Family Reunion fund-raiser, can only shake his head when he thinks of the ramifications of the moratorium, which he characterizes as “an overreaction,” and “unwarranted.”
About 22,000 at-risk refugees, already cleared for entrance into the United States, have been stranded overseas. And because of perceived security risks, the Immigration and Naturalization Service isn’t bothering to send anyone to process East Asian or West African refugees, who are among the world’s neediest.
Meanwhile, the new processing center in Moscow, which opened Feb. 14, is based in a building one-third the size of the previous structure.
“Even if we’re going full-blast again by the end of February, the capacity is only one-third of what it was before. Here we have an administration that promised to reach 70,000 refugees and increase that number by 5,000 a year over the next five years,” said Glickman, whose rapid speech reveals his obvious passion for immigration issues — and his frustration with the current situation.
“Even for the refugees they can get to now in Moscow, they chose a place that allows only one-third of the number from before. And forget dangerous places like Pakistan or war-torn West Africa. Forget that.”
The West African situation is particularly frustrating for Glickman, who visited refugee camps there last year and describes them as “the worst place I’ve ever seen in the world.”
Many of the refugees have lived for decades in squalid camps with no running water and inadequate food. After much lobbying, the State Department had begun processing refugees from the region in August and Jewish organizations around the nation had been expressing interest in helping to resettle the African refugees. But not now.
The fact that no suspects in the Sept. 11 terrorism were refugees seeking asylum only compounds the U.S. government’s mistake in cutting off the program, according to Glickman. Meanwhile, he said, the number of student visas — which many of the suspected terrorists did take advantage of — has not dropped.
“I don’t mean to knock the student visa program, but it has powerful lobbyists behind it, universities and trade schools. It was attacked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, but she backed off,” he pointed out. However, the refugee program has been frozen because “it’s the only program that’s 100 percent federally owned. The president makes the decision about the number of refugees, and when they come and who they are. They believe, since they have total ownership, that if even one refugee did something bad, they’d be totally at fault.”
Factoring in the refugee program’s scrupulous security and background checks, Glickman contends the moratorium is “outrageous.”
Even for the few refugees who do trickle into the country, life is no picnic. Glickman strongly objects to the “draconian detention” conditions most are subjected to.
“They’re in prison uniforms living on top of each other for who knows how long? Six months, sometimes a year. Most are not dangerous to the community. In many cases, people are willing to put them up.”
Glickman said that, following a report on “60 Minutes” that one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had been an asylum seeker, a 1996 law was quickly passed resulting in “virtual automatic, mandatory detention” for refugees.