Restricted Access to Refugee Statistics: Data Protection or Data Concealment?
By Nayla Rush on December 3, 2021
In a previous post, I gave a roundup of FY 2021 refugee resettlement admissions and noted the absence of specific data on resettled refugees, such as religion, gender, education, etc. This type of information used to be publicly available on the Refugee Processing Center (RPC) website, operated by the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM); it no longer is.
Furthermore, the “interactive reporting” tool on that same platform that allowed access to different variables (day and month of admission, city and state of initial placement, religion and nationality of refugees resettled in a particular state on a particular day/month etc.) was rendered inactive at the beginning of FY 2021 before being removed altogether recently. The only data publicly available now is via monthly “Admissions and Arrivals” reports released by the U.S. government on the RPC site. These reports only cover monthly admissions, nationality, and placement states of resettled refugees.
The Biden’s administration official justification for this data restriction is the setup of a new IT system at RPC, but other concerns are also at play here, namely "data protection" and "right to privacy". Those themes are central to the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) mission, and could also be those of the current U.S. administration.
