This is a stark change from President Donald Trump's steep cuts to the U.S. refugee program during his presidency.

Biden made the announcement on Nov. 12 to a Catholic group that works with refugees.

"The United States has long stood as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the oppressed, a leader of resettling refugees in our humanitarian response," Biden said. He made the statement during the virtual event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Jesuit Refugee Service.

"I promise, as president, I will reclaim that proud legacy for our country. The Biden-Harris administration will restore America's historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere and raising our annual refugee admission target to 125,000."

Biden praised Jesuit Refugee Service as a "great organization" and framed the country's historic commitment to refugee resettlement in theological terms.

"This organization was founded to serve the needs of some of the most vulnerable among us: refugees and displaced people. JRS believes that, in the stranger, we actually meet our neighbor. And that every society is ultimately judged by how we treat those most in need," he said.

Jesuit Refugee Service is an international Catholic organization committed to serving refugees and other forcibly displaced people.

That work includes advocating for refugees, serving as chaplains to those in detention and supporting other projects and programming around the globe.

Faith-based organizations, like Jesuit Refugee Service, have long played an essential role in refugee resettlement work in the U.S.

Six of the nine agencies tasked with resettlement by the federal government are faith-based.

They include Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and World Relief.

Trump has set the refugee ceiling, to a new historic low every year he has been in office.

Former President Barack Obama increased the quota to 110,000 his last year in office. Trump recently put it at 15,000 for the current fiscal year, which started in October.

The agencies' budgets are based on the number of refugees admitted. Due to the reduction in refugee numbers, government funding has been decimated. This has led to agencies having to shutter or scale back offices and lay off workers.

If Biden does raise the refugee quota, those budgets would increase.

There are now more than 120,000 refugees in the pipeline. They need to pass rigorous security and medical checks, a process taking months and sometimes years.

Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute is concerned Congress may not have the appetite to take on immigration policy amid the coronavirus pandemic and an economic recession.

"For the first 100 days, there will be very little bandwidth for a Biden administration to deal with anything other than COVID. We have never faced a crisis like this before," Chishti says. "We can't expect a huge leap on immigration policy. If people expect that this is going to happen tomorrow, they will be in for a big disappointment."

Sources

Religion News Service

NPR

Former Liberal Democrat Minister, Sarah Teather, who is the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, says the asylum process in Britain is "deeply and profoundly flawed."

It is pushing people into destitution, she says.

Speaking at the 40th conference of the National Justice and Peace Network (NJPN) in Derbyshire during the weekend, Teather told attendees "deliberate cruelty" has become "a tool of government policy" on refugees.

She said the policy aims to try and "get people to give up their claim for shelter."

Justice and peace representatives from Britain were joined at the conference by missionary groups including the Columbans, Mill Hill Missionaries and Assumption Sisters.

Exploring the conference theme 'In the shelter of each other the people live', Teather and other speakers discussed building a Church and a society with the most vulnerable at its heart.

The 30,000 asylum seekers who apply to come to Britain each year are "a tiny number", Teather says.

"Very few people actually make it here to claim asylum but those who do make it have a very difficult time.

"Everyone faces the same hermeneutic of suspicion" and things become "really difficult" if the government doesn't recognise someone as a refugee, she says.

In her opinion, besides deliberate cruelty, a web of policies aims to make life difficult for asylum seekers.

These include enforced destitution, diminished access to legal aid, the criminalisation of work, and forcing people like landlords to report on those who don't have immigration status.

Recently the Jesuit Refugee Service undertook research into those who attend their day centre. This provided information about the 62 per cent who had been street homeless within the previous 12 months.

Some were street homeless for extended periods. Others were sporadically homeless, moving around from sofa to sofa among their friends.

The research also found 40 per cent of those whose applications for refugee status are turned down initially have those decisions overturned on appeal.

"That gives you some sense of how bad the initial decision-making is," Teather said.

Source

• The Tablet
• Independent Catholic News
• Image: Daily Express

So says a collective of Catholic humanitarian groups, religious orders and coalitions of women religious who have been working with trafficking victims.

They say ideally, "safe, legal and responsible migration pathways" that make it easier for vulnerable migrants and refugees to enter countries are needed so the migrants do not feel forced to turn to smugglers to reach their destinations.

They are also calling for for more government and private collaboration to educate people at risk on the most common ruses used by traffickers.

This could involve visiting refugee camps to run programmes on the dangers of human trafficking and to advise migrants on how to protect themselves from the most common ruses used by traffickers.

Human trafficking occurs everywhere. Some are trafficked within local settings and others across international borders. They are used in domestic service, sexual and labor exploitation, begging, forced marriage, organ removal, to provide surrogate wombs and to commit criminal acts," the collective said in a statement.

It also noted that while human trafficking victims are estimated on in the tens of millions, worldwide convictions of human traffickers are fewer than 10,000,".

Caritas Internationalis, Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans, Dominicans for Justice and Peace, Franciscan International, Jesuit Refugee Service, Talitha Kum (the Worldwide Network of Religious Life against Trafficking in Persons) and the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations signed the statement.

It was distributed by the International Union of Superiors General, which is an organisation representing the heads of Catholic orders of women.

Source

• Crux
• Image: Human Trafficking Center

This program was initiated by Fr. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit superior general, who had seen the devastating impact of war on people in Japan where he cared for the victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The initiative was even more remarkable because it occurred at a time when the Jesuits were being forced to cut back because of declining numbers.

It was 1980 and the victims of war this time were refugees fleeing Vietnam.

"He didn't have any great ideas beyond walking with them to see what would happen," explains Jesuit Fr. Thomas Smolich, international director of Jesuit Refugee Service. "Being Jesuits, we can't just stop with walking with people, so we began very quickly to train people, to prepare people for their relocation, often times in English-speaking countries like the States, Canada or Australia."

Today Jesuit Refugee Service works in 45 countries serving 724,000 people, 55 percent of whom are Muslim. It has a staff of 1,800 people and a budget of about $50 million.

It is quite small in comparison with Catholic Relief Services, Caritas International, Doctors without Borders, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which also work with refugees.

Jesuit Refugee Service's motto is to accompany, serve, and advocate for and with refugees.

"It's very Ignatian," explains Smolich. "It's very consistent with who we are. We listen to people's stories, we walk with people, we hear who they are, we hear what they want, and we do our best to provide services that meet those needs. More than anything, we help people find a voice, a voice to express what has happened to them, what they want, and what they can do in their future." Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter, article by Jesuit Fr. Thomas J. Reese, senior analyst for National Catholic Reporter.
• Image: Jesuits in Ireland

Yet at his six-month mark, which falls today, Pope Francis is drawing better reviews on those five scores than anyone might reasonably have anticipated back on March 13, either in terms of the magnitude of the task or the background of 76-year-old Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

When he stepped onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square, this was immediately a pope of firsts: the first pontiff from the developing world, the first from Latin America, the first non-European in almost 1,300 years, the first Jesuit and, of course, the first to take the name Francis. The new pope charmed the world that night by humbly asking the crowd to bless him before he blessed them and by referring to himself as "bishop of Rome" rather than more exalted titles.

Since that memorable debut, Francis over and over again has demonstrated a capacity to surprise.

He plunges willy-nilly into crowds, to the delight of the masses and the horror of his security team. He speaks his mind with sometimes startling frankness, such as his famous "Who am I to judge?" line with regard to gays. He makes phone calls to people out of the blue, including ordinary folks who've written him to share some personal struggle, and involves himself daringly in the issues of the day, such as his recent full-court press against military strikes in Syria.

This week, Francis was back in the headlines twice. On Tuesday, he visited a facility in Rome run by the Jesuit Refugee Service, where he proposed that unused convents and monasteries could be converted into housing for immigrants and refugees. On Wednesday, the Italian daily La Repubblica splashed a letter from the pope across its front page, written to a renowned leftist and atheist journalist, assuring him that God's mercy reaches nonbelievers, too.

Make no mistake: Francis is a phenomenon, a force of nature who's raised expectations, upset predictions, created a new sense of possibility, set tongues wagging and, in some quarters, sent anxieties soaring, all in the short span of half a year. Continue reading

Sources

• John L. Allen Jr. in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Today's Catholic News

John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent.

Benjamin is currently based in London and his concert on 24 August will raising funds on behalf of the Day Centre for destitute asylum seekers run by the Jesuit Refugee Service UK at the Hurtado Jesuit Centre in Wapping, East London.

The Day Centre provides a service for destitute asylum seekers who are not eligible for and do not receive asylum support or assistance from social services. It welcomes people of all nationalities and all faiths (or none), offering practical assistance tailored to an individual's needs, whether they find themselves destitute or detained under immigration rules.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, of Tongan and Samoan descent, Benjamin Makisi began singing with the Tongan Wesley Methodist church choir in Wellington and was encouraged to pursue singing as a career by his parents. He graduated with a Master of Performance (Opera) with High Distinction from the University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music and a Bachelor of Music (Performance) from Victoria University in Wellington. He had also received his tutoring in New York, London and in Italy.

Source

• ICN
• Image: GG.govt.nz