United States Refugee Admissions Program

The United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) is a consortium of federal agencies and nonprofit organizations working together, both overseas and domestically, to identify and admit qualified refugees for resettlement into the United States. As a program, USRAP is tasked with some of the humanitarian efforts that the United States chooses to undertake. Every year, thousands of refugees are welcomed into the United States and given the opportunity to build a better life for themselves. In this way, USRAP demonstrates the commitment of a people to humanitarian principles.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) claims that USRAP’s mission is "to offer resettlement opportunities to persons overseas who are of special humanitarian concern, while protecting national security and combating fraud."

The goals of USRAP are as follows:

According to the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. refugee resettlement program is based on the United States’ aspirations, which are compassion, generosity, and leadership and since 1975, over 3 million refugees from all over the world have been welcomed to the United States.

In response to the growing crisis in Europe posed by the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, private citizens took responsibility for the first refugee resettlement undertaken by the United States. Groups of concerned citizens worked to assist political, intellectual, cultural and scientific leaders who had fled the increasing repressive Fascist governments in Germany, Italy and Spain. Among those rescued in that initial group of refugees were the political scientist Hannah Arendt, the painter Marc Chagall, the novelist Franz Werfel, the philosopher Alfredo Mendizabal, the medical scientist Fritz Kahn, the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz, the historian Golo Mann, and the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Otto Meyerhoff. Early actors in assisting refugees were the International Rescue Committee, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and Church World Service (CWS) who assisted thousands of refugees resettle in cities throughout the United States before the end of 1946. In the early stage of refugee resettlement in the U.S., faith communities in the United States played a significant role in protecting refugees and in helping them resettle. These faith-based organizations focused on resettling refugees during World War II and immediately thereafter. (Note: this was before the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and long before the U.S. ratified the 1967 Protocol.)

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