U.S. to accept 10,000 Burundian refugees from Tanzania

The United States announced on Tuesday that it will accept 10,000 Burundian refugees from Tanzania from now through 2008.

"At the request of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and also working in cooperation with the government of Tanzania, where these refugees have been for many years, we are planning to offer permanent resettlement to a group of Burundian refugees who've been in western camps in Tanzania, some of whom initially fled from Burundi back in 1972," said Tom Casey, deputy spokesman of the State Department.

"The current estimate that we have now is there's approximately 10,000 individuals that will be in this group. And our expectation is that they would be brought to the United States over the course of the next couple of years," Casey said.

The number would make the group one of the largest ever offered permanent resettlement in the United States, a status which allows them to eventually gain citizenship.

More than 79,000 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean have been offered resettlement in the United States since 1975, 50, 000 of them from Cuba, according to the U.S. State Department.

Source: Xinhua