Utah

Data shows Utah has welcomed over 8,500 refugees since 2012

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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah has long branded itself as one of the nation’s most welcoming states for refugees.

Although Utah may not welcome as many refugees as its more populous peers, data shows the Beehive State accepts its fair share — and perhaps a bit more — of the nation’s refugees.

Utah has accepted just over 8,500 refugees since 2012, according to data from the Refugee Processing Center, an office within the U.S. State Department that places Utah as the 25th state in terms of total number of accepted refugees.

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But when those numbers are adjusted for population size, Utah ranks 11th for refugees accepted per capita despite having the 30th largest population size.

States with similar populations to Utah’s 3.3 million — namely, Connecticut (3.6 million), Iowa (3.2 million), Nevada (3.1 million) and Arkansas (3.0 million) — each resettled fewer refugees than Utah. To its credit, Iowa was close on Utah’s heels, coming in at 12th for refugees accepted per capita.

Zooming out to the national picture, refugee resettlement is not equally shared between states. Over 50% of refugees resettled in 2016, for example, were accepted by just 10 states. Utah was not one of them.

California, Texas and New York resettled a combined 20,738 refugees (about 24%) that year. Meanwhile, Wyoming is reported as accepting only a single refugee in 2023 after years of holding out as the only state in the country not to resettle refugees.

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The number of refugees Utah has accepted over the past decade closely mirrors national trends. Utah’s annual number of refugees peaked in 2016 before plummeting in the following years as the Trump administration’s decision to slash refugee caps and the COVID-19 pandemic brought U.S. refugee resettlement to an all-time low.

The Refugee Processing Center data only includes refugees admitted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. This excludes large chunks of Ukrainians, Afghans, Venezuelans and other foreign nationals who aren’t legally defined as refugees. Instead, many of these Utahns arrived in the state through Special Immigrant Visas and humanitarian parole or have Temporary Protected Status, an immigration status the U.S. grants to immigrants from a limited list of countries experiencing difficulties that allow them to live and work in the country.

Utah has also welcomed hundreds of individuals from those countries, including at least 700 Ukrainians and over 900 Afghans in recent years.

Where are Utah’s refugees from?

Refugees in Utah come from a variety of countries, with some living in refugee camps outside of their home countries for months or years before finding a new home in the state.

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But a handful of countries stand out as the top countries of origin for Utah refugees. Over the past decade, nearly 2,000 refugees have come to Utah from the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost 1,400 from Somalia, about 1,200 from Iraq and a little over 1,100 from Myanmar (formerly Burma).

On the opposite end of the spectrum, several countries — ranging from Russia and Thailand to Chad and Cambodia — each have only one or two refugees in Utah, according to the data.

Overall, refugees from 53 countries have arrived in the Beehive State since 2012.

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Sydnee Gonzalez is a multicultural reporter for KSL.com covering the diversity of Utah’s people and communities. Se habla español. You can find Sydnee at @sydnee_gonzalez on Twitter.

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