How to Select Refugees for Private Sponsorship

This summer, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that the worldwide refugee crisis, the worst in absolute terms since World War II, had reached a new record high. Recognizing that the refugee crisis is beyond what governments alone can handle, UNHCR has urged nations to create “privately sponsored admission schemes,” allowing the private sector to shoulder the burden of resettlement.Many governments have heeded this call, but despite the strong philanthropic traditions among Americans, the United States has still not created such a program. There are many questions that need to be answered before the government can move forward. The most pressing is how to select the refugees for resettlement. Here are several different models for sponsorship that policymakers should consider:1) Use the current system without an option for sponsors to select specific refugees. Except in a few rare cases (see #3 below), the State Department, UNHCR, or one of UNHCR ’s non-governmental partner organizations identifies refugees in need of resettlement. While sponsors would not select the refugees that they wished to sponsor under this model, the government could, as it does when placing refugees with the nonprofits that coordinate all resettlement today, match refugees with sponsors that it felt were best suited to meet their needs. This method’s primary virtue is that it would be the simplest to administer and implement because it requires no further chang...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs