U.S. admits fewer Iraqi refugees than promised

WASHINGTON — U.S. admissions of Iraqi refugees are nose-diving amid bureaucratic in-fighting despite the Bush administration’s pledge to boost them to roughly 1,000 per month, according to State Department statistics obtained by the Associated Press.

For the third straight month since the United States said it would improve processing and resettle 12,000 Iraqis by Sept. 30, the number admitted has actually slid, the figures show.

The steady decline — from 450 in October to 362 in November and 245 in December — means the administration will have to allow in 10,943 Iraqis over the next nine months, or roughly 1,215 per month, to meet the target it has set for itself.

But that goal will be difficult to meet and there are few precedents for such large influxes since hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees were resettled here after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

In the past five years — with few exceptions, notably Somalia and Liberia — the United States has never been able to admit more than 1,000 refugees per month from any country, according to an AP review of statistics from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Iraqi refugees are subject to more security checks than those from almost all other nations and the most Iraqis ever admitted to the U.S. in a single month since 2003 was 889 this past September.

The administration has come under heavy criticism from advocacy groups and lawmakers for its poor performance on admitting Iraqi refugees who have fled violence since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Many critics say, and Bush aides have acknowledged, that the administration has a moral obligation to Iraqi refugees.

In response, it vowed to fix the problems that include bickering between the State Department, which runs refugee resettlement, and the Homeland Security Department, which must screen would-be Iraqi admittees, and a lack of cooperation from countries, notably Syria, where many of the estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees are seeking shelter.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 2 million Iraqis have fled their country. The U.N. refugee agency has referred more than 14,000 Iraqis to the United States for resettlement.