Best hope for reforming US Refugee Program is now,
during the Presidency of Donald Trump, says expert, by
Ann Corcoran 4/24/18
“I saw first-hand the flagrant abuses and scams
that permeate the refugee program.” (Mary Doetsch, retired
Foreign Service Officer)
It cries out for a fix, and President Trump might just be the person to
do it.
Undoubtedly,
many individuals who work within the refugee field have humanitarian aims.
But refugee resettlement has
morphed into a numbers-driven, financially motivated business, growing blindly
at the expense of the American public and our national security.
Will President Donald Trump and
soon-to-be Secretary of State Pompeo, do what must be done and overhaul the
USRAP?
Mary
Doetsch is a retired US State Department Foreign Service officer who spent
eight years (of a 25-year career) as a Refugee Coordinator serving on four
continents.
As
someone who has worked on the inside, her op-ed at the Washington Examiner today carries more weight than anything I
could ever write as an outsider looking in!
Entitled:
US refugee program needs a complete overhaul
Ms.
Doetsch opines (emphasis is mine):
During
my career in the State Department, I became a refugee coordinator in the U.S.
Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP, because I wanted to help and support
persecuted persons in legitimate need of international protection. But the
pervasive fraud I saw during my eight years in the field was alarming.
There
once was a time when private charities, civic groups and faith-based
organizations provided the bulk of funds and volunteers to resettle and help
assimilate refugees in the United States. Today’s deeply flawed system relies
almost exclusively on nine federal contractors (paradoxically referred to as
“Voluntary Agencies” or VOLAGS) to resettle refugees.
The
contractors have a vested interest in processing ever-larger numbers of
applicants, since they make money on every refugee settled. And as non-governmental organizations they can and
do lobby for advantageous changes to law, something they could not do if they
were government agencies. Their lobbying umbrella wields enormous influence
over refugee admissions policy, pressuring Congress and the bureaucracy to
increase admissions and provide ever greater funding. They
stage political rallies, file lawsuits against unfavorable policies, and lobby
for causes that coincidentally help their bottom lines, yet this linkage is
rarely, if ever, mentioned.
This
isn’t just important from the oft-discussed security perspective, but also
because of the rampant fraud and abuse that has permeated this program for
generations.
As a former Refugee Coordinator who served throughout the Middle East,
Africa, Russia and Cuba, I saw first-hand the flagrant abuses and scams that
permeate the refugee program. I witnessed widespread exploitation and misuse,
from identity fraud to marriage and family relation scams, and from private
individuals profiting from their involvement in USRAP to distortion of the
actual refugee definition to ensure greater numbers of people who should really
just be migrants are admitted as refugees.
While refugee admissions have been declining under the Trump
administration, without structural reform in the USRAP these numbers could
again skyrocket under a new administration more favorable to the refugee
industry.
Midway
into fiscal year 2018, fewer than a quarter of the 45,000 individuals proposed
in the FY18 refugee ceiling have entered the country. This slow-down in admissions may reduce the
problem of fraud, but it cannot be eliminated without a complete overhaul of
the program.
I’ve
only snipped a portion of Doetsch’s op-ed, click here to read it all.
What
you can do….Contact the White House and tell the President it is now
or never to overhaul the US Refugee Admissions Program, or once out of office
the program will go back in to high gear. Reducing numbers for a few
years is not enough!
Comments
Refugees need to be
kept in camps in or near their home countries where they can grow their own
food and have clean water, sanitation and some level of healthcare. They need
to work in these camps to stay out of trouble. When the war or disaster that
caused them to leave their homes is over, the camps need to close and send
these refugees back home.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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