Advocacy May 07, 2026

Refugee Resettlement Policy and the Hazara: What the Numbers Show

The global resettlement quota for refugees - managed through UNHCR and funded largely by Western governments - fell from 195,069 available places in 2024 to 31,281 in 2025. That is an 84 percent collapse in a single year. Over 500,000 Afghan refugees were projected to need resettlement in 2025.

For Hazaras, who face documented targeted persecution from the Taliban as an ethnic and religious group, the trajectory of resettlement policy in the four countries most associated with post-2021 Afghan commitments - Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States - is a record of promises made at scale and delivered at a fraction of that scale. Where numbers exist, they tell the story. Where they do not, the absence is the story.

The Promise vs. the Record

When Kabul fell in August 2021, four countries made public commitments to Afghan refugees:

Australia announced 31,500 places for Afghan nationals over four years (26,500 under the humanitarian program, 5,000 under the family migration stream).
Canada revised its initial 20,000-person commitment upward to at least 40,000 and met that target ahead of its December 2023 deadline.
United Kingdom launched the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme with a stated goal of resettling up to 20,000 people over several years.
United States conducted the largest single military evacuation in its history, bringing over 79,000 Afghans to American territory between July 2021 and January 2022.

What each of those commitments meant in practice differed significantly. Legal status, processing times, access to services, and pathways to permanence varied by program, by arrival mode, and by year. Canada delivered on its headline number. Australia is on track within its allocation but at an uneven pace. The UK's primary resettlement scheme closed in July 2025 with 22,000 applications still pending. The US evacuated tens of thousands under a legal status - humanitarian parole - that confers no path to permanent residency, then failed to pass legislation to fix that, and then terminated temporary protections for 11,700 of those same people.

Australia

Australia allocated 31,500 places to Afghan nationals across 2021-22 to 2025-26. The pace of delivery has been uneven.

In FY 2022-23, 2,543 offshore humanitarian visas were granted to Afghan nationals. In FY 2023-24, that number rose sharply to 6,961 - a 118.5 percent year-on-year increase. Afghan nationals were among the top three nationalities in the offshore program, accounting, with two other nationalities, for 69.3 percent of all offshore resettlement grants in 2023-24. The Afghan-born population in Australia now stands at 88,730, roughly twice the 2014 figure of 45,310.

The headline allocation and the growing population, however, coexist with a system that treats identically persecuted people very differently depending on when and how they arrived.

The Refugee Council of Australia identifies eight distinct legal categories of Afghans in Australia. At one end: those who came through the offshore humanitarian program, who receive permanent residency on arrival. At the other: 229 Afghan nationals sent to offshore processing on Nauru or Manus Island, permanently excluded from Australian settlement regardless of protection need. In between are thousands on Temporary Protection Visas and Safe Haven Enterprise Visas who must reapply every three to five years, cannot sponsor family members, and cannot travel. As of December 2022, 4,573 Afghan nationals were in this "legacy caseload" - the second largest national group after Iranians.

The determining variable in all of this is not the nature of the threat a person faces. It is the date they arrived and whether they came by boat. The July 19, 2013 cutoff for boat arrivals is still operative policy.

The fast-track review process applied to legacy caseload arrivals produced demonstrably flawed outcomes. Average processing time for a permanent protection visa through that system went from 334 days in 2018-19 to 1,076 days by 2022-23. Courts overturned approximately 40 percent of Immigration Assessment Authority decisions that were appealed. Around 8,500 people remain in unresolved status; approximately 1,200 have not received initial decisions.

In February 2023, the Albanese government announced a permanent pathway via the Resolution of Status visa (subclass 851) for TPV and SHEV holders. By June 30, 2024, 18,026 RoS visas had been granted.

On the Hazara-specific question: the Australian government explicitly named Hazaras as a priority in the post-2021 allocation, alongside women, girls, and children. That language is in the 2022-23 Discussion Paper. A 2025 academic review in SAGE Journals documents that Hazaras on temporary protection visas reported "constant fear of deportation" and significant mental health impacts from the uncertainty of their status - outcomes that flowed directly from the legal framework they were placed in.

No official Australian data separates Hazara outcomes from Afghan outcomes generally.

Canada

Canada committed to 40,000 Afghan refugees and delivered. As of July 2023, approximately 35,000 Afghan individuals had arrived under all pathways. The full 40,000 target was met before the December 2023 deadline - the one clear example among the four countries of a headline commitment fulfilled on schedule.

Of the arrivals recorded through October 2023: 20,155 came through the humanitarian program; 2,585 arrived under the public policy for extended families of former interpreters.

The Immigration and Refugee Board's processing of Afghan asylum claims was notably fast and favorable in the immediate post-2021 period. By April 2022, the IRB had finalized 418 Afghan claims with an 88 percent acceptance rate. Afghan cases were triaged for streamlined processing: average time in inventory dropped from 16.5 months in August 2021 to 10 months by April 2022, well below the overall IRB average of 18 months. Government-assisted refugee processing times remained long in the broader program (25-27 months), but Afghan-specific claims moved faster through dedicated channels.

Canada's Special Immigration Measures program includes, among eligible groups, "members of religious and ethnic minorities" - language that implicitly covers Hazaras. No tracking data by ethnicity within the Afghan cohort is published.

There is no public Canadian dataset that separates Hazara admissions, acceptance rates, or processing outcomes from Afghan national data generally.

United Kingdom

The UK's Afghan resettlement architecture had two main programs: the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) for those who worked directly with British forces and government, and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) for a broader population of vulnerable people.

As of December 31, 2025, UK government data records 37,950 total arrivals under formal Afghan programs (40,900 across all categories). The breakdown:

ARAP: 19,795
ACRS Pathway 1 (August 2021 evacuees): 10,525
ACRS Pathway 2 (UNHCR referrals): 1,680
ACRS Pathway 3 (British Council, GardaWorld, Chevening): 1,679
Afghan Resettlement Referral (emergency): 4,241

ARAP received 141,000 applications. 19,795 people arrived. That is roughly 14 percent of applicants reaching the UK.

ACRS was announced with a commitment of up to 20,000. Total ACRS arrivals under all three pathways: approximately 13,900.

Both schemes closed to new applications on July 1, 2025. At closure, approximately 22,000 applications were still pending decisions.

The pathway most likely to reach Hazaras in third-country situations - specifically those in Pakistan and Iran who were referred by UNHCR rather than having worked for British entities - is Pathway 2. That pathway produced 1,680 arrivals against a 20,000-person commitment.

On grant rates for Afghans seeking asylum through the standard UK channel (separate from the resettlement schemes): the shift is dramatic. The grant rate was 99 percent in 2023. In the year ending June 2025, it fell to 40 percent. By December 2025, it was 34 percent. In 2024, the UK's grant rate for Afghans (59 percent) was below the EU average (81 percent) and below the rates in Germany, Greece, France, and Switzerland.

The policy driver of this decline: in August 2024, the Home Office issued guidance stating the security situation in Afghanistan was "no longer considered as severe as previously assessed" and that risk must be judged on an individual basis. This guidance, and the higher evidentiary standard introduced under the Nationalities and Borders Act 2022, explain most of the grant rate collapse.

This guidance applies to Afghans as a nationality. It does not contain a Hazara-specific carve-out.

Parliamentary debates in January 2023 included explicit calls to ensure ACRS pathways reached Hazaras and other persecuted minorities. No evidence exists that this was tracked or that a Hazara-specific pipeline was established within any pathway.

United States

The scale of American engagement with Afghan refugees after August 2021 was without recent precedent. Over 79,000 Afghans arrived in the US between July 2021 and January 2022. Approximately 200,000 have arrived since 2021 across all pathways.

The legal architecture of that arrival matters enormously.

The vast majority of the initial wave - approximately 76,000 of the 79,000 - entered on humanitarian parole, a temporary administrative status that confers no path to permanent residency. Parole is not refugee status. It is not asylum. It can be revoked.

Formal refugee admissions through the US Refugee Admissions Program tell a different and slower story:

FY 2022: 1,620 Afghan refugees (6.3% of total US admissions)
FY 2023: 6,590 (11.0%)
FY 2024: 14,680 (14.7%)

Afghanistan ranked second among all refugee-sending countries in FY2024. These are formal refugee admissions - not parole arrivals. The gap between the evacuation-era parole population (~76,000) and formal refugee status grantees illustrates the legal precarity built into the US response.

Special Immigrant Visas, designed for those who worked with US government entities in Afghanistan, reached a record 26,500 granted in 2023 (up from 11,000 in 2022). These function as lawful permanent residency. But SIV eligibility is tied to employment history with qualifying US entities - not to persecution risk, ethnicity, or religious minority status.

The P-2 (Priority 2) designation announced in August 2021 expanded USRAP access to former US government employees not qualifying for SIV, US-funded program staff, and US-based NGO and media employees. Again, the access criterion is employment relationship, not ethnic or religious vulnerability.

As of early 2023, the government had processed only 11 percent of applications submitted through Operation Allies Welcome. DHS was sued in September 2023 for failing to meet Congressionally mandated 150-day processing deadlines. Processing in Pakistan was expanded in July 2023 with "significantly increased capacity" by January 2024.

The Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have provided green cards to eligible Afghan parolees and SIV holders, had bipartisan support in the 118th Congress and never received a floor vote.

In April 2025, DHS terminated Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan. The termination took effect July 14, 2025, stripping work authorization from 11,700 Afghan TPS holders and making them subject to deportation. These individuals are part of the post-2021 arrival cohort.

Hazara-specific data in the US context: none exists. No US government database tracks refugee or asylum outcomes by Afghan ethnicity. The SIV and P-2 programs are built around employment relationships, not persecution profiles. A Hazara who arrived on parole, who does not qualify for SIV, whose TPS has now been terminated, and whose asylum application is in a 150-day-deadline queue that was already producing backlogs, is in a legally fragile position with no designated recourse.

The Hazara-Specific Layer

Here is what the data confirms: every country studied here tracks Afghan nationals. None of them track Hazaras.

This is not a bureaucratic coincidence. Immigration systems in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US categorize applicants by nationality. Ethnicity is not a standard data field in resettlement statistics. The result is that the most persecuted ethnic subgroup within the Afghan refugee population is invisible to the measurement systems that would be used to assess whether they are being reached.

What the evidence does show:

The Taliban's conduct toward Hazaras is documented at a level that places them in a distinct risk category. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and OMCT document systematic extortion, forced recruitment, forced labor, physical abuse, and property confiscation directed at Hazaras by Taliban forces. The New Lines Institute documents at least 61 attacks against Hazaras in the three years following the Taliban's return to power and estimates 25,000 Hazaras have been forcibly displaced since August 2021.

These facts about persecution severity are not in dispute among human rights organizations. The question is whether resettlement programs were designed to capture this risk profile.

In Australia, Hazaras were named as a priority - but the fast-track system that processed thousands of boat-arrival Afghans (a route historically associated with Hazara arrivals) produced demonstrably flawed decisions at a 40 percent court reversal rate. The 2023 RoS visa pathway addressed the legal status of 4,573 Afghans in the legacy caseload; Hazaras form an unquantified share of that group.

In the UK, Pathway 2 of ACRS - the route designed for UNHCR-referred refugees in third countries, the route structurally most likely to reach Hazaras in Pakistan or Iran - produced 1,680 arrivals against a 20,000-person scheme. The Home Office's 2024 guidance downgrading Afghanistan's threat assessment contains no Hazara exception. The grant rate fell from 99 percent to 34 percent.

In Canada, "members of religious and ethnic minorities" appear in the SIM eligibility criteria. No published data shows how many Hazaras arrived under that criterion or how their claims were decided.

In the US, SIV and P-2 access is governed by employment history, not ethnic persecution risk. Parole confers no protection. TPS has been terminated. The Afghan Adjustment Act failed.

The absence of disaggregated data is not a neutral fact. It means there is no accountability mechanism. No government can tell you whether its Afghan resettlement program reached Hazaras in proportion to their persecution risk, because none of them measured that.

What the Numbers Mean for Advocates

The data presents several concrete points of leverage:

On data collection: No government in this study publishes ethnicity-disaggregated refugee data for Afghan cohorts. Advocates can push for this change specifically - it does not require new legislation in most jurisdictions, only a change to intake data collection protocols. Without this, the gap between need and placement for Hazaras remains unverifiable and therefore unaccountable.

On the UK grant rate collapse: Afghan grant rates fell from 99 percent to 34 percent following the August 2024 Home Office guidance. That guidance is the proximate cause. Advocates with standing in the UK legal system have a clear target: the factual basis of that guidance, and its inapplicability to Hazaras who face documented group-targeted persecution.

On ACRS Pathway 2: 1,680 people arrived against a 20,000-person commitment, and the scheme is now closed with 22,000 pending. The 22,000 pending cases are a specific, bounded population. Advocates who can document Hazara representation within that pending pool have a concrete argument for prioritized processing.

On US parole status: The failure of the Afghan Adjustment Act leaves approximately 76,000 initial parole arrivals without a clear legal pathway. The 11,700 TPS terminations are a separate but related problem. Both are active legislative and litigation matters.

On the global gap: UNHCR's resettlement quota collapsed from 195,069 in 2024 to 31,281 in 2025. Over 500,000 Afghan refugees need resettlement. The gap is structural and driven primarily by the US withdrawal from its traditional role as the world's largest resettlement country. Any advocacy that focuses only on individual country programs without addressing the US's withdrawal from global resettlement is working around the biggest variable.