Safe Zones Needed

A New House Bill on Syrian Refugees Doesn’t Protect Americans by Jeff Sessions November 19, 2015 4:00 AM

The current proposal being considered in the House of Representatives in response to the president’s dangerous refugee plan — the American SAFE Act — fails to defend the interests of the American people. It is based on a flawed premise, as there is simply no way to vet Syrian refugees. Just over a month ago, officials from the Department of Homeland Security admitted before the Immigration Subcommittee that there is no database in Syria against which they can run a check. They have no way to enter Syria to verify the applicants’ personal information. And we know the region is being flooded with false documents. Moreover, when the administration was asked if Syrian refugees could end up coming to the United States and joining ISIS like Minnesota’s Somali refugees, the answer was blunt: “We can’t predict the future.” Each year, the U.S. permanently resettles more than 100,000 Muslim migrants inside the United States. In just the past year, refugees and migrants allowed into America from Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ghana, Kuwait, and Bangladesh have been implicated in terrorism. And, as we have seen, the U.S.-born children of migrants are also at risk for radicalization. RELATED: There Are Serious, Unbigoted Reasons to Be Wary of a Flood of Syrian Refugees Ignoring this reality, the American SAFE Act allows the president to continue to bring in as many refugees as he wants from anywhere in the world. With respect to Syria and Iraq, the American SAFE Act requires only that the president direct his secretary of Homeland Security, director of National Intelligence, and FBI director (all his appointees) to sign off on the administration’s screening process — a process that the White House continually asserts is adequate and “ensures safety.” The plain fact is that this bill transfers the prerogative from Congress to President Obama and ensures that the president’s refugee resettlement initiative will continue unabated. Of course, the president can easily veto the measure as well. There is only one true check now against the president going it alone: congressional funding. In his annual budget request, the president asked for more than $1 billion to fund the Refugee Admissions Program. All Congress has to do is make clear that the president’s funding request will not be granted unless he meets certain necessary congressional requirements — the first of which should be to make clear that Congress, not the president, has the final say on how many refugees are brought into the United States and from where. RELATED: Who Believes Obama’s Crew Can Vet the Syrian Refugees.

Finally, the House plan does not offset a single penny of increased refugee resettlement costs. As currently structured, the House plan would give the president the money he wants for refugee resettlement and then leave taxpayers on the hook now and in the years to come for the tens of billions of dollars in uncapped welfare, education, and entitlement costs certain to accrue. Thus, in addition to the enormous welfare costs — 91 percent of recent Middle Eastern refugees are on food stamps and 73 percent receive free health care — we will also be taking money directly from Americans’ Social Security and Medicare trust funds to provide retirement benefits for refugees. The real costs of this refugee expansion have not even been ascertained.

A recent analysis finds that admitting 10,000 refugees to the United States presents a net lifetime cost to taxpayers of $6.5 billion, meaning that under the current plan to admit 85,000 refugees this fiscal year, taxpayers will be on the hook for $55 billion. For the cost of resettling one refugee in America, we could successfully resettle 12 refugees in the region. Creating safe zones in Syria and the region is a vastly more effective and compassionate strategy. Such a proposal recently was put forth by former Secretary of Defense Gates and General Petraeus, among others. More Refugee Crisis Who the ‘Syrian Refugees’ Are — Not All of Them Are Syrian Donald Trump Can’t Say ‘No’ — Is That What We Want in a President? Common Sense on Syrian Refugees By a three-to-one margin, voters want us to reduce immigration — not increase it even further. And a majority of voters oppose resettling Syrian refugees in the U.S. rather than in a regional safe zone. Yet this bill allows the president to expand record immigration while allowing a new ongoing resettlement program for Syrian refugees opposed by a majority of voters. With immigration at a record high, deficits surging, wages flat-lining, schools overcrowding, crime rising, and terrorism threats increasing, it is time to place priority on protecting the safety of Americans and their financial security. We face a real crisis. The administration must change its strategy to creating safe zones and to accelerating actions that can bring the fighting to a close. There is no other solution. The solution is not to have the populations of all the Middle Eastern countries move to Europe and the United States. — Jeff Sessions is a U.S. senator from Alabama.

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by Jessica Vaughan October 22, 2015 4:00 AM The mass-migration spectacle unfolding in Europe in recent months, preceded by news of destruction and mayhem committed by ISIS in Syria, has touched the hearts and consciences of Americans. Images of desperate, weary people trudging into Europe have prompted demands from faith leaders, members of Congress, refugee-resettlement contractors, and newspaper editorial boards for Americans to “do our part.” And by “do our part” they don’t mean we should send more blankets, food, and clothing. They mean “bring more Syrians to the United States.” It didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to quickly convince the president to expand the annual refugee-admissions total from 70,000 in 2015 to 100,000 in 2017. Zeal for ramping up refugee resettlement is not so prevalent outside the elite groups demanding more admissions. A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that only 39 percent of Americans were in favor of admitting more refugees; 46 percent were opposed. It is remarkable that this category of immigrant, formerly sacrosanct, apparently is now as controversial as the categories “guest workers” and “anchor babies.” How did that happen? RELATED: Syrian Refugees: The U.S. Should Do More Part of the answer is the sheer number of new arrivals in refugee and other categories. The United States has admitted approximately 500,000 U.N.-designated refugees since President Obama took office in 2009. That is 70 percent of all such refugees who have been resettled worldwide. Every year, tens of thousands more have been granted political asylum and humanitarian parole. In addition, about 500,000 people, including Haitians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Somalians, who arrived either illegally or as temporary visitors, have since been granted temporary protected status, because of crises in their homelands. And in the past three years more than 150,000 Central American families and teenagers have surged over the southern border, been apprehended by the Border Patrol, and then been released to join friends and family in the United States. RELATED: The U.S. Shouldn’t Feel Migrant Guilt Some point to these numbers as proof that we can easily absorb more. “We welcomed approximately 200,000 refugees during the Balkan Wars, 700,000 refugees from Cuba, and more than 700,000 refugees from Vietnam,” wrote a group of 27 Senate Democrats to colleagues. “Compared with these historic numbers, we can do better than 10,000 slots for Syrian families.” We can do better, for the refugees and for the host communities, but bringing more refugees here is not necessarily better. We can do better, for the refugees and for the host communities, but bringing more refugees here is not necessarily better. To survive here, they require a considerable support network and a large array of welfare services. Gone are the days when community groups, often churches, would sponsor and serve as the primary source of financial support for refugees. Now the resettlement effort is funded almost entirely by governments (i.e., taxpayers) and carried out by a network of government contractors, known as “volags,” or voluntary agencies, though no volunteering is involved. Each refugee receives from the State Department an initial grant of $1,975, of which the local resettlement contractor may keep $750, to cover a couple of months’ worth of furnished housing, food, clothing, and other immediate necessities. The resettlement contractors help refugees find jobs — but also make sure they sign up for longer-term traditional welfare benefits for which they are immediately eligible, such as food stamps, public housing, cash assistance, health care, and child care. In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services doles out approximately $1.5 billion in grants to state and local agencies, schools, and non-profits for refugee-oriented support programs, such as legal advocacy, language education, mental-health services, domestic-violence prevention, and follow-on immigration-application assistance. RELATED: Media Coverage of Europe’s Migrant Crisis Ignores the Long-Term Problems It Poses The resettlement agencies and their federal funders boast that most refugees become self-sufficient within four months, which is conveniently about the time that the direct federal support grants run out and the responsibilities of the refugee contractors end. The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, for example, claims that 92 percent of the refugees it assisted in 2014 became economically “self-sufficient” within 120 days. They earned an average wage of $9.66 an hour. But, according to the MIT living-wage calculator, a person really needs to make $11.13 per hour to live in Vermont, and more like $23 per hour to support a small family there. What the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Programs call self-sufficiency in fact entails dependency on public welfare. Refugees deserve our compassion and need a hand. But if local communities are expected to provide most of the support, surely they deserve a say in the process. Right now they have none. Earlier this year, a Congressional Research Service report found that 74 percent of the refugees who arrived in the past five years were on food stamps, 56 percent were accessing Medicaid, 47 percent were receiving cash assistance, and 23 percent were in public housing. Only 11 percent were getting health insurance through an employer. Other studies have shown that refugees are twice as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the population. The Heritage Foundation has calculated that the 10,000 Syrians who would be admitted under the president’s plan would eventually collect about $6.5 billion in services over the next 50 years. Much of that would be borne by local communities. It’s no surprise that most refugees are dependent on government support. Most arrive destitute, and many have had little opportunity for education. By definition, they faced persecution or some other trauma in their homeland. They deserve our compassion and need a hand. But if local communities are expected to provide most of the support, surely they deserve a say in the process. Right now they have none. Share article on Facebookshare Tweet articletweet The Refugee Act of 1980 transformed refugee resettlement from a largely charitable endeavor into a huge government-grant program carried out by organizations that are classified as non-profits but should be more accurately described as government contractors. Communities do not choose to host refugees; they are chosen by the contractors. Some big-city mayors recently announced their willingness to host some of the Syrian refugees, as a public gesture of support for greater admissions, but in practice relatively few refugees are resettled in major cities, because the cost of living is too high. Instead, employees of the nine principal resettlement organizations meet each week in a nondescript office suite outside Washington, D.C., to identify resettlement locations and divvy up the cases, according to agreements they make with local partners, who become their subcontractors. RELATED: Why Do Migrants Always Flock to the West? The local groups are encouraged to coordinate with local officials, but in practice little consultation occurs. “We really don’t have any say, to be honest,” Ed Pawlowski, the mayor of Allentown, Pa., told a reporter recently. Local government officials, including the schools and police and health departments, typically are not asked how many can be accommodated, but are told how many are arriving. There is little to no outreach to the public at large, and ordinary members of the community rarely, if ever, have the chance to weigh in. The contractors do make an effort to spread refugees around the country. But a significant amount of uncontrollable “secondary migration” occurs, when refugees decide to relocate, either for jobs or for more-generous welfare benefits or to join an established community of prior refugees with whom they share language and culture. Some communities may end up with a larger refugee population than they originally expected, which partly explains how refugees have disproportionately clustered in, for example, Minneapolis; Lewiston, Maine; and Dearborn, Mich. Some of the primary resettlement areas have experienced a double-whammy influx of both refugees and new illegal family and teen arrivals from Central America. Some municipal governments have started to complain that contractors are “dumping” refugees in their cities without taking responsibility to help them succeed. Refugees often have little to lose by moving, because most of the time they are getting from the resettlement contractors very little in the way of real support outside of some cash assistance. Some municipal governments have started to complain that the contractors are “dumping” refugees in their cities without taking responsibility to help them succeed. One mayor, Domenic Sarno, of Springfield, Mass., begged for the State Department to suspend refugee resettlement in his city for the sake of those who had already arrived, saying the city needed time to properly absorb them. The local contractors had placed groups of Somalian refugees in decrepit, substandard housing in some of the seediest parts of the city and left them to fend for themselves — to arrange for heat and other basic winter necessities that were completely unfamiliar to them. Many were isolated, without skills to navigate city life, and some became victims of crime. They felt, and were, abandoned by the resettlement organizations. The local resettlement groups, backed by the State Department, replied that the mayor had no legal ability to halt the flow of refugees into his city and that his complaints would only be harmful to the vulnerable refugee population. The CEO of one of the sponsoring volags stated that the solution was for the mayor to work together with them to lobby federal and state governments for more funding for their services. RELATED: Putting an End to the ‘Refugee Crisis’ Meanwhile, other “pockets of resistance,” as they are called by one of the national refugee contractors, are forming all over the country, demanding transparency and accountability from the federal government and the volags. Some states and localities have tried opting out of the official federal resettlement program, only to find that the State Department allows contractors to run “private” resettlement programs and continue bringing in refugees anyway. More Refugee Crisis Who the ‘Syrian Refugees’ Are — Not All of Them Are Syrian Donald Trump Can’t Say ‘No’ — Is That What We Want in a President? Common Sense on Syrian Refugees Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing focused on the president’s plan to resettle more Syrians. Federal officials squirmed under questioning about fraud, the inadequacy of security vetting, and high dependency rates among refugees. Several bills have been introduced to require federal agencies and their contractors to consult more with local governments. One bill would block further refugee admissions until the total cost of resettlement programs can be determined and published. Transparency and accountability are badly needed, not only for local governments and taxpayers footing the bill but for Congress to assess whether the current paradigm, including the current practice of allowing the president to set annual admissions targets for refugee resettlement, should be continued year after year. Given the enormous cost of refugee resettlement, and the limits to what individual communities can manage, lawmakers must resist calls for drastic increases in government resettlement programs and instead put the emphasis on providing more assistance to refugees in safe havens nearer their homeland. — Jessica Vaughan is director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. Did you like this?

Related Refugee Resettlement Is Immoral Mark Krikorian November 16, 2015 Before Welcoming Thousands of Syrian Refugees, We Should Consider What Somali Immigrants Have Brought the U.S. Ian Tuttle September 11, 2015 Many ‘Syrian Refugees’ Are Neither Syrian nor Refugees Ian Tuttle September 22, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/syrian-refugees-belong-in-safe-zones-outside-america