AFRICA/UGANDA – Uganda’s immigrant integration model confronts US administration plans

AFRICA/UGANDA – Uganda’s immigrant integration model confronts US administration plans

Photo UNHCR

by Cosimo Graziani

Kampala (Agenzia Fides) – Uganda announced in recent days that it has reached an agreement with the United States to accept refugees who are denied asylum in the US. The measure is aimed at those who have declared that they do not wish to return to their countries of origin.

The news was announced by Ugandan Foreign Minister Harry Okello Oryem. The Ugandan government has set two conditions for the government in Washington: first, the expelled asylum seekers must not have committed any crimes, and second, they must not be unaccompanied minors.

Although no further details on the agreement have been disclosed, the Ugandan government has expressed its preference for accepting asylum seekers of African nationality and has clearly rejected those from countries where drug cartels play a significant role. This can be interpreted as a refusal to accept refugees from South America who are not wanted by the US government.

For Uganda, this is the first agreement of its kind, while for the United States, it is part of a targeted policy of deporting migrants to Africa: in recent months, Washington has deported a dozen refugees to South Sudan and the Kingdom of eswatini.

Uganda thus confirms its status as a country with a reception policy that pursues a very specific strategy: the integration of migrants into the country’s economic and social fabric.

To understand the implications of this strategy, we must start with a comment from the Minister of Foreign Affairs regarding the type of people to be welcomed: “How can we welcome [criminals, editor’s note] into local Ugandan communities?”

In recent years, Uganda has been a model of integration not only in Africa but worldwide. The country is home to 1.8 million refugees from the continent’s most important crisis areas: Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. There are fourteen refugee camps throughout the country, the first of which opened in the 1950s. The largest is the Bidibidi camp on the border with South Sudan—the country from which most of the refugees originate. This makes Uganda the country with the highest number of accepted migrants in Africa.

This policy is also based on the “Pan-Africanism” of the last century. This ideological approach led to measures that led to the adoption of a law in 2006 regulating the rights and responsibilities of immigrants in Uganda. This law stipulates that refugees are granted freedom of movement, freedom of association, and the same rights as citizens regarding property, education, and employment. Furthermore, the system also provides for microcredit and the allocation of housing for refugees.

However, as crises on the continent intensified, this model began to crumble. Statistics on the number of new arrivals in 2024 indicated approximately 2,500 arrivals per week, a number that was extremely difficult for the authorities in Kampala to manage. Added to this was the lack of funds from international donors, which, according to UNHCR sources from the same year, covered only 13% of needs. As a result, the first refugees began leaving the country in 2024 in search of better living conditions.

The agreement with the United States, meanwhile, appears to confirm Uganda as a welcoming country for refugees. However, given the recent problems, the plans announced by the US government with great media attention for the massive expulsion of immigrants to Uganda are unlikely to be realized in this form. (Agenzia Fides, 31/8/2025)

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