Thursday, May 4, 2017

Trump Fails on Refugee Issue

At this point in the fiscal year, more refugees have entered US in FY2017 than in any of the previous ten years by Ann Corcoran on May 3, 2017

Trump is on target to beat Obama numbers in two of O’s fiscal years! There are some fascinating statistics at the Refugee Processing Center for those of you interested in getting the facts.

Below is a screenshot graph at Wrapsnet showing this year and ten previous fiscal years.  It doesn’t yet include the month of April, but checking that number separately I found we admitted 3,316 in April.  So add that to the 39,098 on the chart (for the end of March) we see that we are now up to 42,414. That is the highest number for this time in the fiscal year (FY17 ends on September 30th) than in any of the previous ten fiscal years.

If Trump reaches the 60,000 refugee admissions mark (900 a week would get him there), for the remainder of fiscal year, he will have surpassed Obama admissions in FY11 and FY12!

I especially want to direct your attention to the column for ceiling and the one for actual admissions. Note that we never reach the ceiling (although Obama came awfully close in his last year as he was driven to admit thousands of Syrian Muslims). See that Obama never set a ceiling anywhere 110,000 until his final months in office. Why?

The average admissions in the previous ten years is around 66,000 and if Trump’s State Department does bring in 900 a week as they said they would, here, then Trump will admit just over 60,000 this fiscal year bypassing his supposed reset of the ceiling to 50,000.

If Trump reaches the 60,000 mark he will have surpassed Obama admissions in FY11 and FY12!  I don’t remember any crying and moaning, or Obama bashing, in the media from the federal refugee contractors in those years. Here is the chart. Remember the ceiling is just that—a ceiling! Nothing in refugee law says the President must bring in that number!

The chart has not been updated for April yet. However, looking up data separately, we admitted 3,316 refugees last month. So if you tally up the columns you will see that as of the end of April (7 months in to the fiscal year), we have admitted more refugees, at this point in the year, than any of the previous ten fiscal years.

Since Inauguration day (as of today), Donald Trump’s Dept. of State has admitted 12,594 refugees. 43% of those are Muslim refugees from Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and even Burma (406 are Rohingya Muslims).


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