Out of more than 60,000 total refugees resettled in the U.S. in fiscal year 2023, 56 Palestinians were admitted. In the past 10 years, fewer than 600 Palestinians in all have come to the U.S. as refugees, according to the State Department.
The numbers are so low in large part because Palestinians cannot follow the same pathway into the U.S. as other nationalities. The 1951 Refugee Convention that established the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and defined the criteria for refugees around the world explicitly left out Palestinians living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The U.S. uses the refugee agency to identify potential refugees.
Palestinians who do find their way to the U.S. as refugees may be coming from other parts of the world while they retain their Palestinian citizenship, or they may have been referred as refugees to the U.N. refugee agency by nongovernmental organizations, according to the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides support to refugees entering the U.S.
A spokesperson for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service told NBC News neither it nor other traditional refugee advocacy organizations have called for raising the number of Palestinians admitted to the U.S. because of the international rules complicating their resettlement.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, accused one of his opponents, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, of trying to “import” Palestinians into the U.S.
Speaking Tuesday on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” DeSantis renewed his calls to block Palestinian refugees.
“The average person in Gaza that’s been taught to hate Jews, you know, their view is they don’t necessarily want their own state. What they seek is the destruction of the Jewish state. And that is not limited to Hamas. That is a widespread, deeply embedded belief amongst Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip,” DeSantis said.
Source: NBC News
