FY 2021 Refugee Resettlement Roundup
One missing category: The religion of refugees
By Nayla Rush on November 18, 2021
Download a PDF of this Backgrounder.
Nayla Rush is a senior researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies.
With the beginning of a new fiscal year (October 1, 2021), we take a look at the prior fiscal year’s refugee resettlement admissions. One difference, though, is that this year’s overview will not include the religion of refugees. This information used to be publicly available through the refugee admissions data reporting on the Refugee Processing Center (RPC) website.1 It has since been removed among other information on resettled refugees such as gender, age, education, etc.
The roundup below gives a detailed account of FY 2021 refugee ceilings, admissions, nationalities, and placement states. Some key points:
In FY 2021 (October 1, 2020, to September 30, 2021), a total of 11,411 refugees (18 percent of Biden’s announced target of 62,500) were resettled in the United States.
FY 2021 admissions are the lowest refugee admissions since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. They are even lower than any year under Trump, including FY 2020, which saw the lowest refugee admissions during the Trump administration. FY 2020’s admissions totaled 11,814 refugees under a ceiling of 18,000 (close to 66 percent of the announced target). This low number was mainly due to travel restrictions and the suspension of the worldwide refugee resettlement program following the Covid-19 pandemic.
The top five countries of origin of resettled refugees in FY 2021 were: Democratic Republic of the Congo (42.9 percent); Syria (10.9 percent); Afghanistan (7.6 percent); Ukraine (7.0 percent); and Burma (6.8 percent).
The top five placement states in FY 2021 were: California (8.6 percent); Texas (8.0 percent); New York (6.2 percent); Kentucky (5.7 percent); and Michigan (4.7 percent).
https://cis.org/Report/FY-2021-Refugee-Resettlement-Roundup
