Still thinking things through.

First, it’s important to remember that the need to respond to the plight of refugees is nothing new.

For example, 66 years ago, on March 21, 1952, the National Council of Churches issued a statement on “United States Immigration and Naturalization Policy.”

The statement began:

The plight of the world’s uprooted peoples creates for the United States, as for other liberty-loving nations, a moral as well as an economic and political problem of vast proportions. Among these peoples are those displaced by war, and its aftermath; the refugees made homeless by reason of Nazi, Fascist, and Communist tyranny and more recently, by military hostilities in Korea, the Middle East, and elsewhere; the expellees forcibly ejected from the lands of their fathers; and the escapees who every day break through the Iron Curtain in search of freedom. These persons long for the day of their deliverance and for the opportunity to reestablish themselves under conditions of peace and promise. A problem of equal urgency is involved in the surplus populations that cannot now be supported by the economies of their respective countries. The pressure exercised by these surplus people is of a kind seriously to threaten the stability and well-being of the entire world.

The National Council of Churches sees in this situation an issue that can be resolved only as nations, collectively and separately, adopt policies dictated by considerations not only of justice and mercy, but also of sound mutual assistance.

The council called for eliminating “discriminatory provisions based upon considerations of color, race, or sex,” and argued that “enlightened immigration and naturalization laws would add immeasurably to the moral stature of the United States and would hearten those nations with which we are associated in a common effort to establish the conditions of a just and durable peace.”

Those principles appear as relevant today as in 1952.

Jumping to the present, the number of refugees of war, famine, violence, and poverty is at record levels, according to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees.

We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record.

An unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.

There are also an estimated 10 million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement.

The UN figures include 40 million “internally displaced people.” That means people driven from their homes but not out of their countries. That’s what happened to many during the recent eruption of the volcano on Hawaii Island. The UN also estimated an additional 25.4 million refugees (which includes 5.4 million Palestinian refugees) and 3.1 million asylum-seekers.

Most of those refugees are far from the U.S. The brunt of the refugee crisis has been felt far from our shores.

The countries hosting the most refugees, according to the UNHCR, are Turkey, Uganda, Pakistan, Lebanan, and Iran.

Turkey has taken in 3.5 million refugees from the wars in the region, according to UN figures.

The U.S., on the other hand, will admit less than 30,000 refugees this fiscal year, reportedly the lowest number in four decades.

Is this because we’ve been overrun? Hardly.

An article published by Lawfare Blog reported data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection which shows the number of persons stopped for attempting unauthorized entry into the U.S. has dropped dramatically.

The peak in apprehensions of irregular migrants actually took place some 17 years ago, in FY2000. At that point, U.S. Border Patrol agents caught 1,643,679 migrants attempting to enter the United States without the appropriate papers, compared to 303,916 apprehensions in this past fiscal year.

Smaller numbers, but still an issue.

Time for us to be working harder than ever with our international partners to find workable solutions, right? But the Trump administration has done just the opposite.

In December 2017, the U.S. pulled out of the Global Compact on Migration, and withdrew from a conference about to convene in Mexico where negotiations were set to continue seeking “humane solutions” to the problem of displaced people. It’s just one of many forums for international cooperation that the U.S. has turned its back on.

And the U.S. was “conspicuously absent” this summer when the negotiations ended with an agreement “on improved ways to handle the global flow of migrants.”

“The goal of the agreement is to preserve the basic human rights of all migrants, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general,” according to a story in The New York Times.

“Countries have the right and even the responsibility to determine their own migration policies, and to responsibly manage their borders,” Mr. Guterres said. “But they must do so in full respect for human rights.”

Ms. Arbour called the agreement a necessary mechanism for a world where migration was an undeniable reality.

“It’s not helpful to ask whether migration is a good thing or a bad thing,” she said in an interview with The New York Times editorial board earlier this week. “It’s a thing, it’s happening, it’s always happened. It will always happen.”

See: “GLOBAL COMPACT FOR SAFE, ORDERLY AND REGULAR MIGRATION,” Final Draft, 11 July 2018.