The November arrivals were the lowest for the month since 2001, when in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on America just four refugees were resettled in the U.S.
| There’s a cute little bar graph of November arrivals for the oast decade at the link. |
President Trump has signed off on a ceiling of 18,000 refugee admissions for fiscal year 2020, the lowest annual cap set by a president since the modern refugee admission program was established in 1980.
Of the 1,488 refugees to have arrived during November, the countries of origin of the largest numbers were the Democratic Republic of the Congo
...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
(509 refugees) and Burma (337 refugees). Other sizeable groups included 91 Afghans, 78 Ukrainians, 50 Iraqis, and 37 Syrians.
A total of 1,143 of the refugees admitted in November (77 percent) self-identified as Christians, with larger contingents including 254 Christians (no denomination specified) from Burma, 153 Pentecostalists from DRC, 102 Seventh-Day Adventists from DRC, 74 Catholics from DRC, and 62 Baptists from Moldova.
Two hundred and ninety-nine of the November arrivals (20 percent) were Moslems, including 55 Shi’ites from Afghanistan, and 32 Sunnis from Syria.
Other refugees included 13 Buddhists from Burma, five Yazidis from Iraq, one Hindu from Sri Lanka, and one Zoroastrian from Iran. Twenty-one refugees, mostly from Afghanistan, El Salvador and Guatemala, self-identified as having "no religion."
October was the first month since the 1980 Refugee Act was enacted that not a single refugee was resettled in the United States.
The first refugees to be admitted in FY 2020 were recorded as having been resettled in the U.S. on November 5. One hundred and ninety-nine refugees arrived that day, among them 63 Christians from DRC, 38 Christians from Ukraine, 25 Syrian Sunnis, and 16 Afghan Sunnis.
One hundred and ninety refugees arrived on November 6, including 82 Christians from DRC, and 13 Iraqis ‐ seven Moslems, three Christians and three Yazidis.
Sixteen Somali Moslems were among the 174 refugees who were admitted on November 7.