Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: In 1999, the United States government decided to accept up to 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees for resettlement. The refugees, who had lived in Kenyan refugee camps since fleeing Somalia’s civil war in 1992, were the largest group of African refugees ever accepted for resettlement in the United States. As illiterate, non-English speaking, uneducated, rural subsistence farmers, they were also markedly different from most previously admitted refugees. Only a miniscule number of African refugees had been accepted for resettlement during the Cold War years, when the U.S. defined a refugee as someone fleeing communism and almost all admitted refugees came from Soviet Bloc countries, Cuba, and Indochina. To many observers, the decision to accept Somali Bantu refugees appeared to mark a new direction in U.S. refugee resettlement policy from one motivated by foreign policy concerns and national interest priorities to one defined by an ethic of humanitarianism.
Author: Catherine Besteman
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1533883725