Refugees on the rise

    “Bring ‘em home” is a common phrase in the U.S., written on posters, spoken through megaphones and even alleged as a promise of action by a few candidates for political offices. However, the same phrase can also be heard thousands of miles away in Iraq, where more than 3.9 million refugees (almost 16% of the country’s population), displaced by the half decade long war, struggle to find a home. The number of Iraqi refugees admitted into the U.S. since the war began in 2003 is only 4,993.

    Roughly 40% of Iraq’s middle class is believed to have fled. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return. The insurgents have targeted all kinds of people, from university professors to bakers. An estimated 331 schoolteachers were slain in the first four months of 2006, according to the Human Rights Watch, and at least 2,000 Iraqi doctors have been murdered and 250 kidnapped since the 2003 U.S. invasion.    

    The Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan live in impoverished communities with little international attention to their plight and little legal protection. The U.S. originally went into Iraq with the intention of liberating the Iraqi people from a tyrannical regime. What has instead happened is that there has been a fatal blow to the geopolitical balance of the region and as a result sparked the beginnings of a civil war.

    Refugees International has said that the Iraqi refugee crisis is even worse than the tragedy in Darfur, Sudan, where an estimated 400,000 people have died and two million have been relocated by attacks on their villages by government backed militias.

    It is thought that two million Iraqis have already fled their country; UN agencies expect another million to follow them into exile in 2007. Ethnic cleansing has internally displaced an additional two million Iraqi civilians. No one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the war: estimates range from 250,000 to 650,000.   

    Countries like Lebanon are unable to accommodate the great number of refugees, currently amounting to more than 40,000. Many of the refugees are put in prison because the country does not currently have a refugee law. Therefore the refugees are treated like illegal immigrants and given the ultimatum of returning to Iraq and risking their lives or remaining in Lebanon and staying in jail. Though the U.S. has  spent billions of dollars per month on this war, the amount of money used to aid the Iraqi refugees is only in the millions.

    Though small strides have been made in the area of aid the bottom line is more needs to be done. Representatives from the State and Homeland Security departments said they are committed to substantially increasing the number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States this year to 12,000, a small dent in the nearly 4 million who are homeless.

     The strain on Iraq’s neighbors threatens to destabilize the entire region. Jordan, a strong ally of the United States with a population of 6 million, has received 500,000 Iraqi refugees for an 8 percent increase in the country’s population during a two-year period.

    The U.S. administration has also increased humanitarian assistance for displaced Iraqis to $200 million in 2008, up from $43 million in 2006. The amount is laughable when compared to the billions of dollars spent on the war itself.

    The U.S. needs to meet with bordering countries such as Syria and Jordan to discuss the influx of refugees and how we can help. The U.S. also needs to let more refugees into the U.S. Lastly lawmakers need to recognize what is happening and try to end the refugee problem rather than ignore it.