A new federal memorandum was published on Oct. 31, entitled, “Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2026.”
“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” wrote President Donald Trump in the memo, “and after appropriate consultations with the Congress, I hereby make the following determinations and authorize the following actions.
“Admissions of up to 7,500 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year 2026 is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
This memo specified that refugee admissions would “primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa,” along with “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”
Although tighter formal restrictions have been anticipated since the President suspended ongoing refugee admissions on his first day in office, the actual extent of restrictions has been a shock for many hoping to enter the country.
A member of the Rohingya Muslim minority who fled genocide in Myanmar, 31-year-old Mohammed Faisal told the New York Times amidst sobs how his paperwork was paused even though the United States was his “dream country.”
“The U.S.A. is a country of immigrants who work hard, and I want to work hard.”
How do these new limits compare with restrictions on refugees earlier in U.S. history? The Deseret News spoke with several historians to find out.
‘Basically abolishing the refugee program’
The 7,500 determination announced represents a 94% decrease from former President Joe Biden’s refugee target — a drop so steep from previous decades that one scholar said it effectively eliminates the refugee program, at least for now.
David Haines is an emeritus professor of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, and author of “Safe Haven: A History of Refugees in America” in 2010. “It’s not right,” he says about this latest federal move, noting that it “basically completely abolishes the program.”
The uncontrolled influx of people into America’s borders also didn’t feel right to many. And Haines acknowledges Biden’s permissive approach to immigrants as a whole (including refugees), “kind of set it up for a counter reaction from Trump.”
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Simon Hankinson has defended the logic of this 7,500-refugee limit. “Until you plow through that massive multimillion-person backlog, it seems to make sense to lower the number coming through the (refugee) program ... to lower that down as far as practicable.”
Until the U.S. government has time to address the millions of immigrants who entered illegally or legally through humanitarian parole programs, he says, it’s unwise to admit more refugees.
‘Let’s not admit too many okay?’
The Refugee Act of 1980 set “up to 50,000” refugee admissions as cap for that period, allowing the president, in consultation with Congress, discretion to raise the number for humanitarian reasons.
One goal of the Act was to make sure Presidents didn’t admit too many refugees, Haines explains — with the annual presidential determination acting effectively as “an early alarm for a president like Joe Biden who wants to take in a lot more people.”
“There’s a bickering zone about what the number should be,” Haines says, “but not that refugees shouldn’t be a sizable component of American immigration.
“Nobody ever considered that the presidential determination would be unacceptable to most people because it was too low.”
Yet, Haines acknowledges cycles of increased or decreased refugee/immigrant inflow, with one president putting on the brakes, prompting another president’s acceleration. Biden’s original desire to increase immigration, Haines suggests, may have been partly from Trump lowering it during the first administration — prompting an attempt to “make up” for that shortfall.
A history of openness and restriction
There are signs of unique openness in American history to those seeking refuge. Haines highlights how some early founders like Washington and Jefferson were “very tuned” to the fact that America was “a potential refuge for anybody fleeing either religious persecution or political persecution — a way to get away from the autocratic European countries of the time.”
“There’s an argument that all American history is immigrant history or refugee history,” he says.
But such a portrayal of U.S. history can be overstated, cautions David-James Gonzales, assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University and author of Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California.
Although Gonzales shares Haines’ worries about the current extent of refugee restriction, he calls the current administration’s stance more of a “continuity” with previous U.S. history’s restrictive tendency towards refugees.
Dating back over 100 years, he says “America’s immigration policies and bureaucracy are devoted to restriction of saying, ‘These are the people we don’t want here.’”
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act began nearly 70 years of restrictions on immigrants from China and Asia as a whole, Gonzales notes — along with a later period where Americans felt deep suspicion of foreigners in the wake of World War I. At this time, he says, the “gates to the United States were largely shuttered,” especially towards those from Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.
This changed after World War II, when President Harry Truman pushed to bring in approximately 400,000 displaced refugees from Europe between 1946 and 1952. Before the war, U.S. numerical limits implemented in 1921 ensured that certain arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe were dramatically reduced.
Most tragically, the steep resistance to Eastern European Jews coming between 1924-1945 led to Cuba, Canada and the United States all turning away the MS St. Louis in 1939, with 254 of the passengers eventually killed in the Holocaust after being forced to return.
Prioritizing certain refugees
“We’ve always had forms of immigration restriction and mobility restriction in the United States,” agrees Yael Schacher, Director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. Yet she points out that people showing up on the nation’s ports and borders are “asylum seekers” and legally distinct from refugees. Compared with a more open-ended asylum process, Schacher underscores how U.S. refugee policy has designated certain groups in the nation’s best interest to prioritize for entry.
For instance, in addition to Truman’s efforts following the war, Eisenhower presided over more than 200,000 “escapees from communism” entering the country between 1953 and 1956, especially from the Iron Curtain — followed by about 38,000 Hungarian refugees in “Operation Safe Haven” after the 1956 Communist uprising.
After decades of favoring refugees fleeing communism (Vietnam, USSR, Cuba, Laos), Gonzales says the U.S. entered a unique period of “more liberal expansion of refugee and asylum policy outside of those just fleeing communism.”
In this period, the U.S. begins to admit a wider range of people fleeing persecution for religion, race, political opinion, or being part of a gender or sexual minority, including victims of human trafficking.
Subsequent U.S. refugee policies have prioritized other humanitarian crises (Africa and the Balkans in the 1990s–2000s), and those fleeing religious/ethnic persecution (Burma, Bhutan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the 2000s–2010s), with an added emphasis on the Middle East in the 2010s-2020s (with refugees from Iraq and Syria, in addition to Burma, Bhutan, DRC, Somalia).
In the last 5 years, the U.S. has admitted more people from Syria and Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with a new influx from Afghanistan and Venezuela following these countries’ crises.
Looking across recent decades, Schacher says there has been “very, very little refugee resettlement from the Western Hemisphere,” aside from Cubans, with more of a focus on Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Compared with asylum seekers crossing the border, the official refugee program is “very well screened,” says Haines, ensuring that “people coming in have some justifiable reasons for being here.”
“So it’s not a risky program.”
250 years of refugee history
For the first 100 years of the Republic, arrivals of refugees and immigrants grew gradually with the size of the new nation. Even with immigration quota restrictions following World War I, the number of refugees entering the country continued to grow.
Since the official refugee program began in 1980, the refugee quota has never been as low as the new 2026 determination, with the next lowest numbers taking place during COVID (just over 11,000 in 2020 and 2021 each), during the previous Trump administration (22,000 in 2018), and post-9/11 (27,000 to 28,000 annually in 2002 and 2003).
“The U.S. has essentially closed the door to many people it promised,” Schacher says, referring to Afghan women and others still seeking resettlement in the United States.
“This decision isn’t abstract. It leaves behind real people,” says Shawn VanDiver, President of AfghanEvac, about Afghans who have received earlier assurance about safe haven in the U.S., and who won’t likely be included in this 7,500 cap.
This administration is “trying to return us to 100 years ago,” Gonzales argues — an earlier period of U.S. history he says reflected more nativist, restrictionist immigration policy.
In terms of public policy, Haines adds that refugee policy can also signal to the world that we as a nation “want different kinds of people in the United States” and “that we also want the world to know that we are pretty open-minded people who recognize there are problems in the world and we would like to help.”