Ukrainians seeking further information on the State Department website are informed that they “should not attempt to apply for visas in order to travel to the United States as refugees,” but should instead “contact local authorities or UNHCR [the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] for refugee processing.”
What they are not told is that, according to the National Immigration Forum, the process of applying for refugee status and getting into the US “has grown increasingly complicated…encompassing numerous government agencies, at least five separate information technology systems, and a trove of inscrutable acronyms…. UNHCR currently estimates the process from referral to resettlement…to take between two and 10 years.”
This heartless chasm between rhetoric and reality is not a recent occurrence. The United States has, for over a century, identified as and congratulated itself on being a nation of immigrants—while erecting nearly insurmountable barriers to refugees and asylum seekers, in particular those who are not considered white and do not worship Jesus.
A brief glance at the last major European refugee crisis makes this all too clear. In Germany at the end of World War II, 7 million to 10 million homeless, ill-clothed, malnourished or starving, diseased, and disoriented concentration, death, and labor camp survivors, POWs, and political prisoners wandered the roadways and haunted the town squares and marketplaces in search of food and shelter. American military forces took the lead in rounding them up, transporting them to assembly centers, and assisting in their repatriation. Among them, the Western Europeans, the Italians, and most of the Soviet citizens were happy to return home, but a million Eastern European refugees refused repatriation. They included Jews who had no homes, families, or communities to return to; non-Jewish Poles, Baltic nationals, and Ukrainians who refused to return to countries now destroyed by war and annexed or dominated by the Soviet Union; and Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians who fled their homelands because they had collaborated with the German occupiers during the war and feared imprisonment, forced exile, or execution should they return home. By the fall of 1946, after an influx of Polish Jews who had survived the Nazi genocide by fleeing to the Soviet Union and had then returned to Poland, only to be forced out by virulent anti-Semitism and pogroms, the displaced persons population in Germany included upwards of 250,000 Holocaust survivors, nearly 500,000 non-Jewish Poles and Ukrainians, and 164,000 Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.