According to a report on refugee resettlement, more refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo have been resettled in Georgia than any other country since October of last year, following a trend among other states.
According to the report, of the 1,469 refugees resettled in Georgia over the past five months, 267 have come from the Central African country that is both war-torn and one of the poorest in the world.
No other country is that highly represented, though the state has resettled 206 refugees from Syria, 192 from Burma, and 176 from Afghanistan.
Venezuela is also highly represented, with 146 refugees from that country being resettled in the state.
As The Star News Network has chronicled this week, Congolese refugees are being resettled across the United States in droves.
Nearly 40 percent of Ohio’s refugee intake in the same timeframe has been from Congo.
A similar pattern can be observed in Arizona, where 42 percent of resettled refugees are from Congo, and in Tennessee, where Congo also tops the list of refugees resettled by national origin.
As reported by The Star:
The Central African country is the largest nation on the continent and the 11th largest in the world.
Congo has been engulfed in turmoil since it gained independence in 1960. The Second Congo War, which raged from 1998 to 2003 resulted in the deaths of nearly five and a half million people. The country’s only successful peaceful transfer of power occurred in 2018, though the country is still involved in military conflict in its eastern region. It is the fourth poorest country on earth.
Meanwhile, a significant number of refugees from other war-torn and politically unstable nations have been resettled in Georgia, including 68 from Guatemala and 63 from Somalia, a country known for having no formal government.
Another 32 refugees have been resettled from Honduras, along with 31 from Nicaragua.
President Joe Biden’s administration has reopened the floodgates for refugee resettlement.
“U.S. refugee resettlement has fluctuated significantly over the past decade, reflecting the priority of presidential administrations,” the Migration Policy Institute reported. “While the Trump administration reduced the annual resettlement cap to a historical low of 15,000 by its last year in office (FY 2021), President Joe Biden reversed course and raised the cap to 62,500 for the remainder of FY 2021 and then to 125,000 for FY 2022 and FY 2023. Despite these increases, the pace of actual resettlement has lagged, although it has steadily ticked up as the pandemic has waned and processing resumed.”
“Approximately 11,400 refugees were resettled in FY 2021, 25,500 in FY 2022, and 31,800 in the first eight months of FY 2023. Over the 43 years of the modern resettlement program, an average of approximately 73,300 refugees have been resettled annually.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.
Photo “Congolese Refugees” by Alex Mukuka. CC BY-SA 4.0.
