World events in recent years have brought large numbers of civilians seeking safety to America’s doorstep, from war in Ukraine to spiraling violence in Haiti to the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan.
Could the Israel-Hamas war lead to a rise in the number of Palestinian refugees coming to the US?
It’s a complex situation for the Biden administration to consider, with global tensions on the rise and domestic political pressures intensifying by the minute.
And several US presidential hopefuls are already making the issue a major point in their primary campaign stump speeches.
Here’s a look at some key questions, and the answers we know so far.
Are there any plans for the US to welcome refugees from Gaza?
So far more than 1.4 million people have been displaced inside Gaza since war erupted after Hamas militants attacked Israel earlier this month, according to the UN.
The Biden administration hasn’t announced any new measures to resettle Palestinian refugees in the United States, or any parole programs that would create a pathway for them to come here.
“Right now…the focus is on getting humanitarian assistance in and trying to work on some measure of safe passage out,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said earlier this month when asked whether some refugees from Gaza should come to the United States.
Egyptian officials have yet to open the only functional border crossing that would allow people to leave Gaza.
But on the Republican presidential primary campaign trail, several candidates have made a point of saying they’d block Palestinians from coming to the US over terrorism fears. Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls the enclave and attacked Israel earlier this month, is considered a terrorist group by the US, the European Union and Israel.
Some Republican lawmakers have even introduced bills dubbed “The GAZA Act,” with the letters of the Palestinian territory’s name standing for: “Guaranteeing Aggressors Zero Admission.”
Sunil Varghese, policy director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, calls such proposed measures xenophobic, and adds that they fail to acknowledge a fundamental reality.
“There’s no way to get out of Gaza. There’s no safe way to get out of the region. … Civilians in Gaza are stuck there under continuing bombardment. Egypt is not opening its borders. Israel is not opening its borders. … Even Palestinian Americans cannot get out,” Varghese says.
So discussions about banning Palestinian refugees from coming to the US don’t make logical sense, he says.
“It’s hard to see it as anything but fear-mongering,” Varghese says. “At the same time, I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that there might be very, very vulnerable folks, even people with US ties, that we need to welcome.”
What are Palestinians saying?
Palestinians who spoke with CNN recently from a refugee camp inside Jordan’s capital said their families don’t want to leave Gaza, even if the border crossings are opened.
“Gaza is their home. They will stay there even if it means being wiped out by an airstrike,” said Abdel-Munim Dababsheh, 49.
Hanya Sabawi, who left Gaza as an infant but whose family remains there, told CNN she doesn’t know whether her family will have homes to go back to.
“And the biggest fear of course, is that they’re going to be evacuated and turned into refugees. This is what everyone is now openly talking about, as if they didn’t matter,” she said. “They don’t want to move. They would rather die in Gaza than move.”
Are Palestinian refugees already living in the US?
The United Nations estimates that there are 5.9 million Palestinian refugees in the world, most of whom are now the descendants of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled or fled their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. That includes more than 1 million of Gaza’s roughly 2 million residents. Many other Palestinians live in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Far fewer live in the United States.
Of the more than 1 million refugees resettled in the United States in the past 20 years, just over 2,000 have been Palestinian, according to an analysis of government statistics by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
“That’s, of course, a tiny number, and the numbers we see tell a lot of important dynamics,” says Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the institute who manages its Migration Data Hub.
One reason the number in the US is so small: Most Palestinian refugees are ineligible to be resettled in the United States due to the way the US admits refugees. Most refugees come to the United States via the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but another UN agency deals with most Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. That organization does not provide resettlement services, Varghese says.
That doesn’t mean there are not many people in the United States who consider themselves Palestinians. The number of people in the US claiming Palestinian ancestry has nearly quadrupled in the past 30 years, according to MPI’s analysis of government statistics. A growing share of them are US-born.
“The fact that we see the proportion of US-born people who identify as Palestinian growing,” Batalova says, “is because there are not that many coming in.”
Could more Israelis start coming to the US if the fighting intensifies?
The situation is different for Israeli citizens.
Coincidentally, just weeks before the war broke out, the United States added Israel to the list of countries whose citizens don’t need to obtain tourist visas to enter the US. The policy allows Israeli passport-holders to apply to enter for up to 90 days the US through a CBP electronic authorization system.
“Now there is an opportunity to come to the United States which was not available before, so we’ll see how that unfolds,” Batalova says.
So far, it appears the war has been drawing Israelis to return to Israel from abroad and fight, rather than inspiring many to flee the country. But if fighting intensifies, more may come to the US, Batalova says.
Are we likely to see an influx of people from the region arriving at the US-Mexico border?
When war erupted in Ukraine, cities along the US-Mexico border began to see a notable increase in arrivals of Ukrainians and Russians who were seeking asylum in the US.
Something similar is unlikely to occur in this case, Batalova says, because Palestinians in Gaza are essentially a “trapped population” that’s not free to travel. And the recent changes to US policy that make it easier for Israelis to travel directly to the United States make a stopover in Mexico unnecessary.
In addition to vows to ban refugees from Gaza from coming to the United States, several GOP presidential primary contenders have also claimed, without evidence, that those responsible for the October 7 terror attacks in Israel are already crossing the US-Mexico border.
But a US Customs and Border protection spokesperson told CNN that the agency has seen “no indication of Hamas-directed foreign fighters seeking to make entry into the United States.”
What policy steps is the US likely to take?
“Uniting for Ukraine,” a Biden administrations program, has allowed more than 100,000 Ukrainians to come to the United States since it began in 2022.
It’s unlikely the Biden administration would create a similar program for Palestinians, Batalova says, given existing domestic political pressures, such as the influx of migrants from all over the world already at the US-Mexico border.
Smaller efforts may be more likely, she says, such offering temporary protected status to the hundreds of Palestinians who are in the US on student visas.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Batalova says. “There might be some small-scale symbolic measures.”
But the more than 1 million people in Gaza who’ve already been displaced in this war are unlikely to find a home in the United States.
CNN’s Krecyte Villareal, Nada Bashir, Celine Alkhaldi and Nadeen Ebrahim contributed to this report.
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