One report: Trump Dept. of State to cut funding to
UN by 50%, by Ann Corcoran 3/15/17
That is the news from The Hill two
days ago! Finally an elusive number I’ve wondered about for years is mentioned
here:
The US pays $1.5 billion
of the $4 billion annual budget of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. That
is the agency of the UN choosing our refugees for your towns and cities!
The Hill: President Trump’s administration has told the State Department to cut
more than 50 percent of U.S. funding to United Nations programs, Foreign Policy
reported.
The push for the drastic reductions
comes as the White House is scheduled to release its 2018 topline budget
proposal Thursday, which is expected to include a 37 percent cut to the State
Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budgets.
It’s not clear if Trump’s budget
plan, from the Office of Management and Budget, would reflect the full extent
of Trump’s proposed cuts to the U.N.
The U.S. spends roughly $10 billion annually on the U.N., and the cuts could have the greatest impact on
peacekeeping, the U.N. development program and UNICEF, which are funded by
State’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
The fate of other popular programs, like the World Food Programme and
U.N. refugee operations, are less clear. The
World Food Programme’s funding comes from the Department of Agriculture. Let the wailing
begin….
Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign
Relations, said the alterations would spark “chaos” if true. “It would leave a gaping hole that other big donors would
struggle to fill,” he told FP, pointing to how the U.S. provided $1.5 billion of the
U.N. refugee agency’s $4 billion budget last year.
“Multiply that across other
humanitarian agencies like the World Food Programme and you are basically
talking about the breakdown of the international humanitarian system as we know
it.”
More here, and then yesterday The Washington Post reported the news as well, but does not mention the UNHCR. The Post quotes
Trump’s UN Ambassdor Nikki Haley as saying the following in her confirmation
hearing in January. (Just a reminder dear readers that Haley works for Trump,
so let’s hope she is now on the same page as the President!)
Let’s talk about USAID
for a minute! We haven’t written much over the years about the Agency
for International Development which
also gives gobs and gobs of (your) money to some federal refugee contractors.
I knew the International Rescue
Committee couldn’t be pulling in millions from
solely seeding refugees in places like Missoula, Montana, so I checked USA Spending just
now to see what they were getting from USAID. Yikes! Here is a screen
shot of one tiny portion of one page. (These are grants from 2008 to 2016).
The IRC received nearly
$1 billion from US taxpayers during the Obama years! No
wonder they have money to community-organize against citizens in small city
America!
Pew: Almost 2,500 refugees from travel-restricted
countries entered US since Trump took office, by Ann Corcoran 3/15/17
Pew Research has done a handy little
summary of where we stand with refugees admitted this fiscal year, but most
importantly they made a useful graph of how many entered from travel-restricted
countries since the first week of December, through Trump’s inauguration and up
to last Friday.
There is nothing we haven’t already
been talking about as we reported also from Wrapsnet over recent weeks and
months, but they put it in a neat little package for your review on the eve of the 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement.
Pew Research Center: A total of 2,466 refugees from six countries under new
travel restrictions – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – have
resettled in the United States since Donald Trump became president, according
to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data. The number of
refugees from the six travel-restricted countries represents 32% of all
refugees who have entered the U.S. since Trump took office.
Do you see that big spike ending on
inauguration day? That is because the Obama State Dept. was working night and
day to get as many Muslims in to the US as possible in the week before the
Trump team took over.
Pew
continues….Including refugees from countries
with no travel restrictions, a total of 7,594 refugees have entered the U.S.
during Trump’s first seven weeks in office (Jan. 21 to March 10). Of these
refugees, 3,410 are Muslims (45%) and 3,292 are Christians (43%), with other
religions or the religiously unaffiliated accounting for the rest.
So far in fiscal 2017 (which began Oct. 1, 2016), refugees who hold
citizenship from the six restricted countries have accounted for more than a
third (34%) of 37,716 refugee admissions. More here.
President Trump has set
the ceiling for the entire 2017 fiscal year at 50,000, a number we explained here is not
that low!
This post is filed in our Trump
Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’
Endnote: It is amusing to me to see
research/articles like this because for years and years (I started writing RRW
in 2007) no one paid any attention to the numbers, religions and ethnicities of
refugees entering the US. It is nice to see so many news outlets educating the
public!
No comments:
Post a Comment