Office Of Refugee Resettlement: Data

Annual ORR Reports to Congress - 2003

Executive Summary

The Refugee Act of 1980 (section 413(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act) requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to submit an annual report to Congress on the Refugee Resettlement Program. This report covers refugee program developments in FY 2003, from October 1, 2002 through September 30, 2003. It is the thirty-seventh in a series of reports to Congress on refugee resettlement in the U.S. since FY 1975 and the twenty-third to cover an entire year of activities carried out under the comprehensive authority of the Refugee Act of 1980.

Key Federal Activities

Congressional Consultations: Following consultations with Congress, the President set a worldwide refugee admission ceiling at 70,000 for FY 2003.

Admissions

The U.S. admitted 28,117 refugees, including 67 Amerasian immigrants, in FY 2003. An additional 10,129 Cuban and 931 Haitian nationals were admitted as entrants, for a total of 39,177 arrivals.
Refugees and entrants from Cuba (10,430) comprised the largest admission group, followed by arrivals from the successor republics of the Soviet Union (8,728), Liberia (2,915), the successor republics of Yugoslavia (2,500), and Iran (2,428).
Florida received the largest number of arrivals (10,227), followed by California (4,205), Washington (2,751), New York (2,503), and Texas (1,811).

Reception and Placement Activities

In FY 2003, ten non-profit organizations were responsible for the reception and initial placement of refugees through cooperative agreements with the Department of State.

Domestic Resettlement Program

Refugee Appropriations: In FY 2003, $443.8 million was appropriated for the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program.
Cash and Medical Assistance for refugees was provided from grants totaling $149 million awarded to States for maintenance during the first eight months after arrival. Included in this sum was $17 million to assist refugee unaccompanied children.
Social Services: In FY 2003, ORR provided $73.1 million in formula grants to States and non-profit organizations for a broad range of services for refugees, such as English language and employment-related training.
Targeted Assistance: In FY 2003, ORR provided $49.2 million in targeted assistance funds to supplement available services in areas with large concentrations of refugees and entrants.
Voluntary Agency Matching Grant Program: ORR awarded grants totaling $46 million during FY 2003. Under this program, ORR awards Federal funds on a matching basis to national voluntary resettlement agencies to provide assistance and services to refugees, Cuban/Haitian entrants, asylees, and victims of trafficking.
Refugee Health: ORR provided funds to State and local health departments for refugee health assessments. Obligations for these activities and technical assistance support amounted to approximately $4.8 million in FY 2003.
Wilson/Fish Alternative Projects: In FY 2003, ORR provided $18.3 million for Wilson/Fish projects in Alaska, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nevada, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alabama, Vermont, Idaho, Colorado and San Diego County, CA.
Cuban/Haitian Initiative: ORR provided $19 million in funds to increase services to Cuban/Haitian refugees and entrants in the areas of access to health, mental health, improved education for youth, crime prevention and employment.
Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program: An additional $37.1 million was appropriated for the UAC program which was transferred to ORR from the Department of Homeland Security in March of 2003.

Refugee Population Profile

Southeast Asians remain the largest group admitted since ORR established its arrival database in 1983, with 650,412 refugees, including 75,809 Amerasian immigrant arrivals. Nearly 486,866 refugees from the former Soviet Union arrived in the U.S. between 1983 and 2003.
Other refugees who have arrived in substantial numbers since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980 include Afghans, Cubans, Ethiopians, Iranians, Iraqis, Poles, Romanians, Somalis, and citizens of the republics of the former Yugoslavia.

Economic Adjustment

The following data are based on the Fall 2003 annual survey of refugees who have been in the U.S. less than five years.

About 55 percent of refugees age 16 or over were employed as of September 2003, as compared with about 62 percent for the U.S. population.
The labor force participation rate fell six percentage points from FY 2002 to FY 2003 to about 61 percent for the sampled refugee population, five points lower than the 66 percent for the U.S. population. The refugee unemployment rate retreated to 5.7 percent, compared with 6.0 percent for the U.S. population.
Approximately 62 percent of all sampled refugee households were entirely self-sufficient, compared with about nine percent that received only public assistance.
Approximately 30 percent of refugees in the five-year sample population received medical coverage through an employer, while 36 percent received benefits from Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance. About 16 percent of the sample population had no medical coverage in any of the previous 12 months.
The average number of years of education was the highest for the refugees from Latin America (12.3 years), while the lowest was for refugees from Africa (8.7 years). About 19 percent of refugees reported they spoke English well or fluently upon arrival, but 42 percent spoke no English at all.
The most common form of cash assistance was Supplemental Security Income, received by about 14 percent of refugee households. About 46 percent of refugee households received food stamps, and 15 percent lived in public housing.

The Director's Message

Although refugee arrivals increased only slightly during FY 2003 (28,117 compared with 27,070 the previous year) in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) moved vigorously to make important progress in several program areas in the fiscal year that began October 1, 2002.

Major accomplishments included:

Maintaining a refugee program in virtually every State;
Incorporating major new programs for Unaccompanied Alien Children and Victims of Trafficking into ORR's activities;
Undertaking major new initiatives to provide refugees with peer-oriented health information and rural opportunities; and
Continuing successful strategies adopted the previous year to adjust to the reduced flow of refugees.

As a component agency of the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, ORR has been given the responsibility for the domestic resettlement of refugees, Amerasians, Cuban and Haitian entrants, and asylees. As in past years, ORR worked in close cooperation with our Federal, State and local partners and with the national voluntary resettlement agencies (Volags) and refugee Mutual Assistance Associations (MAAs) to assure that assistance and services were available for incoming refugees to help them attain economic self-sufficiency.

We were able to maintain our programs of cash and medical assistance at full funding, with benefits provided for the first eight months after arrival. We provided full funding for social services and targeted assistance programs as well.

ORR began implementation of the Unaccompanied Alien Children program, which was transferred in 2003 from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. ORR created a new organizational unit called the Division of Unaccompanied Children's Services (DUCS). This Division, with 10 federal employees, maintains a national child care network that served approximately 5,000 children during the fiscal year, with some 500 in care at any one time. During 2003, ORR increased the capacity of its network by 70 beds at three locations in Texas and one in Seattle.

A new unit within ORR initiated a broad information effort seeking to make the public aware of the widespread problem of trafficking in humans. An estimated 14,500 to 17,500 victims are trafficked into the U.S. each year, but through FY 2003 only 448 persons had been identified and certified under the ORR program. The information effort targets police, social workers, and others likely to have contact with victims.

In recognition that linguistic and cultural barriers keep many refugees from healthy lifestyles and appropriate health services, ORR launched a major effort to strengthen disease prevention by increasing the health literacy of the refugee population. This will be effected through the provision of peer counseling by trained ethnic information specialists.

ORR believes that rural America offers significant opportunities to refugees, especially the Hmong and Somali Bantu who practiced agriculture in their homelands. Accordingly, ORR entered into discussions with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and private entities such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation about development of a rural initiative for refugees.

At the end of the fiscal year, ORR convened a national consultation with its network of partners, attracting more than 500 Federal, State, local, Volag, and MAA practitioners from throughout the U.S. The agenda included a broad discussion of current program information and issues to help ORR and its partners coordinate their activities.

The anticipated arrival of some 14,000 Somali Bantu refugees, delayed for more than a year following the 2001 terrorist attack, led to creation of an ORR Task Force to assess problems the Bantu might encounter and ways to promote effective resettlement. This Task Force created a detailed report dealing with orientation, health, language facility, employment, and integration of the Bantu, and presented the report at the national consultation.

ORR grantees succeeded in placing 43,211 refugees in employment in FY 2003. Of special interest was ORR's work in strengthening refugee economic enterprise through its programs of Individual Development Accounts (IDA), which promote development of refugee assets, and Microenterprise, which enables refugees to access business training and micro-credit. ORR awarded 49 IDA grants and 28 Microenterprise grants to organizations.

ORR continued its activities strengthening ethnic organizations. In all, grants were awarded to five national and 37 local ethnic groups to enable them to help their peers with long-term integration into American society.

For the second year in a row through a grant to the Ethiopian Community Development Council, ORR supported a special five-day Southern Sudanese Youth Reunion at Camp Letts in Maryland for more than 200 Sudanese boys and girls from communities across the country. The camp, besides providing for periods of recreation, offered educational workshops to enhance future study and job opportunities for the young people.

For the coming year, our challenges include the following:

Meeting the emergent needs of increasingly diverse ethnic populations;
Improving refugee health through disease prevention and enhanced health literacy;
Identifying and serving additional victims of human trafficking;
Focusing our Unaccompanied Alien Children program on the best interests of the minors; and
Developing agricultural opportunities for refugees.

ORR is grateful for the cooperation of our many partners in this great humanitarian effort. We look forward to a resumption of higher levels of refugee arrivals in the future.

Nguyen Van Hanh, Ph.D.
Director
Office of Refugee Resettlement