Obama makes it official! Wants 110,000 refugees
admitted to US in FY17, starts in 18 days! by Ann Corcoran 9/13/16
Update: Many more
details here.
Apparently it was Secretary of State Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh
Johnson who delivered the (bad) news. The report has been printed, so look for
it tomorrow. It is very useful. This is not the end of it. The Republican Congress
must still fund it. Will they???
Senator Jeff
Sessions, an advisor to the Trump campaign and a longtime leader for
immigration sanity on the Hill has just released this press release (here and below). Apparently the US State
Department (Kerry? Richard?) delivered the Presidential determination and held
a consultation with at least the Senate Judiciary Committee (we assume the
House Judiciary Committee was present).
Senator Jeff
Sessions, a Trump advisor from the very beginning obviously believes that only
with Donald Trump in the White House will we see any sanity return to the
immigration issue.
The number is
well short of what the contractors have been demanding, but not a
surprise. Frankly, the money isn’t there in the budget for even 110,000.
(Remember too, this is only the
resettled refugees, not the other so-called humanitarian arrivals, like the
unaccompanied alien children, the asylees etc.).
Obama had
previously said he wants $2.2 billion for ORR alone (not including costs to the
US State Department and Homeland Security) and his determination delivered
today must have put the amount at $1.5 billion for everything (the numbers just
don’t make sense).
Throughout the
Obama Administration the ceiling for
resettled refugees was set at 70,000 each year with 85,000 arriving in FY16
ending Sept. 30th. The contractors in the refugee industry were pushing for
200,000, here. This is what Sessions said today:
Sessions: Obama
Administration Endangers Americans With Reckless Plans To Admit 110,000
Refugees in FY 2017—A 57% Increase Over FY 2015
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Subcommittee
on Immigration and The National Interest made the following statement regarding
the Obama Administration’s plans to admit 110,000 refugees to the United States
in Fiscal Year 2017:
“Despite
opposition by the American people, a documented link between terrorism and individuals admitted to the United
States as refugees, and over $19 trillion in debt, the Obama Administration has committed the
United States to admitting 110,000 refugees during Fiscal Year 2017—a roughly
57 percent increase in the number of refugees the United States admitted as
recently as FY 2015, and a roughly 29 percent increase from the
Administration’s target for FY 2016.
The common
sense concerns of the American people are simply ignored as the Administration
expands its reckless and extreme policies.
Terrorists have
announced that they will infiltrate the refugee population and have
successfully done so multiple times in Europe over the last year. These asylum-seekers are overwhelmingly male who make the journey from hotbeds of
terrorism to countries throughout Europe. Earlier this year, General Philip
Breedlove, who served as NATO’s top commander, said that ISIS was ‘spreading like cancer’ among the refugee
population. And unsurprisingly, there have been numerous terror attacks in Europe this year linked to the
refugee crisis. Indeed, just this past weekend, Germany’s Interior Minister
said that there are more than 500 terrorists inside Germany alone who are capable
of carrying out terrorist attacks. It is all but certain that many of those
potential terrorists exploited the refugee crisis to get to Germany, and that
there are likely thousands more all across Europe today.
Here in the
United States, we face the same risks. The Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have acknowledged that terrorists
could infiltrate the refugee population. And for good reason—as it is
clear that terrorists have done so successfully in the past. The Director of the FBI has testified that he cannot certify that every refugee admitted to
the United States is not a security threat, and recently compared the FBI’s anti-terrorism mission to ‘looking for needles
in a nationwide haystack’ while also figuring out ‘which pieces of hay might
someday become needles.’ Regardless, President Obama and his Administration are
now pushing their extreme policies even further by stubbornly placing the
requests of the United Nations above the safety of the American people by
surging refugee admissions to 110,000.
The
Administration’s claim that the program costs roughly $1.5 billion drastically
understates the true costs of initial resettlement—as it does not include costs
for programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, or
Supplemental Security Income, among others.
In addition to
the very serious national security implications and the initial resettlement
costs, admitting 110,000 refugees will result in an enormous long-term financial
burden on the taxpayers. Robert Rector, Senior Fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, has estimated that the total lifetime cost of admitting 10,000
refugees —which includes all costs at the federal, state, and local level—is
$6.5 billion. Using Mr. Rector’s numbers as a baseline, admitting the
110,000 refugees that the Obama Administration proposes to admit beginning on
October 1 will result in a total lifetime cost to the taxpayers of $71.5
billion. This would be added every year that these levels are continued.
The simple fact
is that it would be safer and more cost-effective to establish safe zones for
refugees as close to their homes as possible—particularly for those from the
Middle East. One estimate found that resettling one refugee in the United States
was nearly 12 times more expensive than providing care for that refugee abroad.
With the prospect for a cease-fire in the region, there is even more reason to
focus on providing temporary support for displaced persons in the region.
The American
people do not support these radical plans, which amount to a complete betrayal
from their leaders in Washington.”
Keep a lookout for the State Department report
to Congress that accompanies the official consultation. It is a treasure trove
of information you need in your ‘pockets of resistance’.
And, this doesn’t
change a thing—keep hounding your Washington representatives this week and next
to cut the budget for the whole darn program. Let’s have a moratorium on
bringing in tens of thousands of low-skilled workers who have not been properly
vetted until the Refugee Admissions Program is overhauled!
Final
thought….. Since the level set each year is a ceiling, it seems like it would be perfectly legal for a new
President to come in in January and halt the whole program at whatever level
they had reached by late January 2017 and still be perfectly legal. In
the year following 9/11 we admitted only about 20,000 (don’t remember the exact
number), so it is possible to stop this train in mid-year!
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