33 Countries of Origin’ Profiles

20 deportations to Kosovo. Foreigners commissioner Marieluise Beck called on the German government to allow private citizens to sponsor Kosovars; there are about 100,000 Kosovars in Germany. During the Bosnian war, Germans were permitted to sign affidavits of support for Bosnians who had Temporary Protected Status in Germany. The US planned to shelter 20,000 Kosovars in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but they were reluctant to travel so far from Kosovo without any assurance of entering the US. Kosovars in Guantanamo would have restricted rights to apply for asylum, according to a 1993 US Supreme Court ruling. [Guantanamo Bay is the place where 50,000 Cuban and Haitians were housed in the early 1990s at a cost of about $250 million. Most of the Haitians were returned to Haiti; most of the Cubans were eventually permitted to enter the US.] In late April, the US agreed that 20,000 Kosovars could enter the US as refugees, eligible for welfare, housing and other resettlement assistance, if they had US relatives as distant as aunts, uncles and cousins. Legal US residents may also agree to sponsor Kosovars who are their relatives, with priority given to admissions from the 130,000 Kosovo Albanians in Macedonia. For more information, call 800-727-4420. After one year of US residence, the Kosovars could become legal US immigrants. Some Albanian-American groups were critical, noting that accepting the Kosovars as refugees sent the signal that they would be unlikely to return soon. The US has granted temporary protected status to about 3,000 Kosovars in the US when the bombing began. The US resettled 2.3 million refugees since 1975; most were from Vietnam and the former Soviet Union. The US, which anticipates 78,000 refugees in FY99, resettles