Bill
launched to halt refugee resettlement, Obama's infusion of 500,000 Third Worlders 'extremely
unsettling', by Leo Hohmann, 7/31/15
A Texas congressman has introduced legislation
that would halt the resettlement of United Nations-certified refugees in the
U.S. pending a full study on the program’s impact on the nation’s economy and
national security.
Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, introduced the
Resettlement Accountability National Security Act, or HR 3314, which places an
“immediate suspension on allowing immigrants into the United States under the
refugee resettlement program, until the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
completes a thorough examination of its costs on federal, state and local
governments.”
According to the U.S. government data, nearly
500,000 new immigrants have come to the U.S. under the resettlement program
since President Obama took office – with the state of Texas and its taxpayers
taking in more than any other state.
Since 2002, a total of 69,490 refugees from more
than a dozen countries have been resettled in Texas. That does not include
“secondary migration,” which involves refugees moving into Texas after first
being resettled elsewhere.
Texas, California lead
the way
The Lone Star State absorbed 7,214 refugees in
fiscal 2014, followed by California with 6,108 and New York with 4,082.
Michigan received 4,006 refugees and Florida 3,519 to round out the top five.
Minnesota, when secondary migration is included, also makes the top five with
more than 4,000 refugees arriving every year.
The refugees pour in from Iraq, Somalia, Burma,
Bhutan, Cuba, Afghanistan and even Iran and Syria.
And it’s not only major urban centers receiving
refugees. Cities like Amarillo, Texas; Manchester, New Hampshire; Twin Falls,
Idaho; Lewiston, Maine; Wichita, Kansas; and St. Cloud, Minnesota, have been
slammed with refugees from the Third World over the past decade. Most arrive
with no English or job skills, and the nine major resettlement agencies that
get government cash to do the resettlement work typically only provide aid for
three to five months. After that, the refugees are mainly the responsibility of
state and local governments.
Almost all of America’s refugees are selected by
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
After they are assigned to the U.S., the
Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are responsible for screening them
for connections to foreign terrorist organizations. FBI Counter-terrorism
Deputy Director Michael Steinbach testified before Congress in February that it
is impossible to screen refugees from a “failed state” like Syria, where the
U.S. has no boots on the ground and no access to reliable law enforcement data.
Somalia has similarly devolved into chaos.
‘Economic and social
costs’ wearing on communities
“It is extremely
unsettling that the Obama administration would continue to expand the U.S.
resettlement program at such an irresponsible pace in light of our economic and
national security challenges,” said Babin in a statement
on his website. “While this program
may be warranted in certain situations, it is continuing at an unchecked pace.
For the past decade, the U.S. has been admitting roughly 70,000 new refugees a
year, with little understanding of the economic and social costs on our
communities.”
The costs of the resettlement program have
ballooned to $1 billion a year, according to the State Department’s website,
and that only covers the costs of grants used to administer the program. The $1
billion figure does not include the cost of social welfare programs that
refugees immediately qualify for upon entry into the country. And, as some
elected officials have cited, many of the costs to state and local governments
are not fully funded by the federal government.
“Our legislation institutes a common-sense pause
in the program so that we can better understand the long-term and short-term
costs that this program has on local governments, states and U.S. taxpayers,”
Babin said. “It also gives us an opportunity to examine potential national
security issues related to entry and resettlement, particularly as federal law
enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about home-grown terrorists.”
Resistance growing in
South Carolina, Idaho, Minnesota
A public backlash against the refugee
resettlement program has sprung up in recent months in several communities,
including Spartanburg, South Carolina; Twin Falls, Idaho; and St. Cloud,
Minnesota.
The refugee resettlement industry, which
includes legions of immigrant rights advocates, lawyers and community
organizing groups funded by George Soros, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations,
among others, churned out a document in 2013 on how to deal with so-called
“pockets of resistance.”
The
document, authored by the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society, one of the nine government contractors doing
resettlement work, advised refugee advocates to research the backgrounds of
local people who oppose resettlements and turn them over to the Southern
Poverty Law Center for public shaming as “racists” and “anti-Muslim” bigots.
This strategy has already been employed to
varying extents in Spartanburg, St. Cloud and Twin Falls as residents have
become organized and started demanding answers about how many refugees will be
arriving, from what countries, and what the social and economic impact will be
on school systems, job markets, health care and housing.
Shutting down First
Amendment rights of resisters
In St. Cloud earlier this week, a speaker, Ron
Brantsner, was scheduled to address refugees and their economic impact at a
local VFW hall. Brantsner, a former Minnesota resident now living in
California, spoke on the same topic earlier in Little Falls, Minnesota,
attended by about 100 people. He has worked in the past with the Minutemen
along the U.S.-Mexican border, and that was enough to get him branded a
“racist” by a local union organizer in St. Cloud.
Jane Conrad, who has worked to organize home
health-care workers for the Service Employees International Union, found out
about Brantsner’s speaking engagement and announced a rally would be held
Saturday, Aug. 1, on the court house square in St. Cloud, denouncing the
“racists” who dared to listen to a speaker with whom she disagreed.
The VFW canceled the event at the last minute,
but some local residents showed up anyway and were told by VFW staff they were
welcome to come in and have dinner. A state legislator and a uniformed police
officer were present, as was a friend of Conrad, the union organizer. A local
resident, Bob Enos, reportedly stood up and gave a few words, described as a
“pep talk,” by those in attendance, about the progress made in resisting the
resettlement program on economic grounds. The union rep reported back to
Conrad, who also got a professor at St. Cloud State University to send out an
email denouncing the residents as guilty of bigotry.
Now, Conrad has again called for a protest rally
at 12 p.m. Saturday at the County Courthouse in St. Cloud. The residents
concerned about the growing refugee population overburdening their town are not
backing down. They are organizing their own event and serving BBQ at the VFW Saturday.
A large biker group has reportedly said it will
make a showing. “Anyone who shows the least resistance to refugee resettlement
has to expect this type of aggressive agitation from the left,” said Ann
Corcoran, author of Refugee Resettlement Watch and an activist who helped stop
refugee resettlement in her town of Hagerstown, Maryland, about eight years
ago. “You have to organize your own forces to confront the agitators and show
them you won’t back down. In St. Cloud, Jane Conrad was stirring up the racial
unrest, going to the Somalis and stirring them up. Our people were not the ones
bringing race into the discussion.”
Branding veterans as
‘racist’
Keishia Buckentine, manager of the VFW Post 428
in St. Cloud, was present at the meeting and heard the short talk by Enos. She
said he made no mention of race.
“They are accusing us of
being supporters of racism, which we are not,” Buckentine
told
the St. Cloud Times. “I find it disgusting
they would treat a group of veterans like this.”
But Corcoran is not surprised. “This kind of
trashing of the First Amendment rights of average American citizens who speak
out or even question the refugee program is right out of the playbook of the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s document,” Corcoran said. “St. Cloud residents
have vowed not to bend to what they see as discrimination and intolerance
against opposing views.”
The city of St. Cloud – in the heart of former
Rep. Michele Bachmann’s district – has been swamped in recent years by Third
World refugees sent by the U.S. State Department working in concert with the
United Nations and its resettlement agencies, which includes Catholic Charities
and Lutheran Social Services.
Bachmann said the refugee resettlement program
has become something it was never intended to be – a steady stream of
Third World population transfers to American cities and towns.
“What began as a heartfelt, caring response to a
jihadist-created humanitarian crisis has morphed into an expansion of Third
World immigration at U.S. taxpayer expense,” she told WND. “We now know the
U.N. and U.S. State Department unilaterally foist large numbers of unvetted
persons onto local communities. The state and local taxpayers, in addition to
federal taxpayers pick up the tab, without the local communities consent.
“Destabilizing local communities often follows
with concerned citizens wrongly smeared and demonized by community organizers
who actively work to increase the number of immigrants.”
Corcoran
also notes the irony that a union organizer would be leading the protest in
Minnesota against those seeking to turn off the refugee spigot.
“We believe that Lutheran Social Services is
literally acting as an employment agency for the large meat-packing companies
operating in nearby towns and in need of an abundant supply of cheap labor,”
Corcoran said. “Why American union workers don’t get it is beyond me.”
Babin isn’t the only Texas congressman showing
concerns for the growing refugee influx into that state.
Rep. Michael McCall, R-Texas, the chairman of
the House Committee on Homeland Security, has also been critical of the refugee
resettlement program. He has called two hearings on the national-security risks
associated with importing refugees specifically from Syria, which has the
highest concentration of jihadists of any country currently involved in the
program with the possible exception of Somalia.
Yet the administration plans to take in
thousands from Syria and is continuing to admit about 800 a month from Somalia.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/bill-launched-to-halt-refugee-resettlement/
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