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How many refugees could the USA settle quickly, distributed into communities across the country? This is not a proposal, just a back-of-the-envelope search for some sense of what’s do-able, if we were determined to do something. Suppose the bishops caught fire and decided they were all going to move as fast as possible to settle refugees. They are all going to put refugee families in every parish. How many parishes are there? The Official Catholic Directory for 2014 says there are 17,483 parishes in the country. So if every parish takes a family or a group – on average, of four people – that’s about 70,000 refugees settled. Catholics are about 22% of the nation. So if Catholics can take 70,000, then other religious communities and organized civic groups (colleges, ethical societies), matching that, should be able to raise that by a factor of 5. All religious communities, and organized civic communities, should be able to take 350,000 refugees.  I mean, if people noticed that ...

A fifth estimate of America’s fair share of Syrian refugees The allocation plan used the European Union combines four factors: population, GDP (gross domestic product), unemployment, and the number of refugees welcomed in past five years.  Population and GDP are weighted equally. After those factors are combined to get an estimate of the nation’s fair share, there two correctives: unemployment and the history of welcoming refugees are correctives, that reduce a nation’s estimated fair share by up to 25%. Please note that the EU estimates of fair share for relocating refugees started with a decision that Europe would take only 120,000, or 3% of the total number of Syrian refugees. That was a political decision, not based on any theory of justice. The World Bank estimated, in 2014, that the GDP for the world was $77.9 trillion, and the GDP for the USA was $17.4 trillion, or 22%. I have not figured out how to use GDP as a means to figure out fair share of refugees. The European ...

Fair Share Estimate #4 – REAL POPULATION DENSITY The chart provides one way to estimate what is fair when the nations of the world try to figure out how to help Syrian refugees. How many should go where? This is NOT A POLICY PROPOSAL! This is a sketch to help think. It’s simply a list of the 25 largest nations, the 25 nations with the most arable land, and the 25 nations with the largest populations. It gives the REAL POPULATION DENSITY of each nation as of 2014 (CIA World Factbook). “Real population density” requires a little effort to understand. But consider Antarctica. There aren’t a lot of people at the South Pole. In 2005, there was the largest crowd ever wintering over there: 86 people! With five million square miles to share, that’s over 50,000 square miles apiece. But there’s not a lot of food, not a lot of shelter, not much light for months. So everybody was hanging out at one dinky little station, and it was crowded. “Real population density,” also called “p...

Fair Share Estimate #3 – ARABLE LAND only The chart provides one way to estimate what is fair when the nations of the world try to figure out how to help Syrian refugees. How many should go where? This is NOT A POLICY PROPOSAL! This is a sketch to help think. It’s simply a list of the 25 largest nations, the 25 nations with the most arable land, and the 25 nations with the largest populations. It gives the arable land of each nation as of 2014 (CIA World Factbook, charted conveniently in Wikipedia). It calculates what percentage of the world’s arable land that nation has (divide by 15,750,000 square kilometers, the world total). Then it provides an estimated “fair share” (multiplying the percentage times the number of Syrian refugees at the end of 2015, about 4 million). “Arable land” is a slippery idea. The term is useful to the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN). It refers to land that is being used for agriculture. It excludes deep deserts, steep moun...