Testimony to the US State Department from Paul
in Montana, by Ann
Corcoran, 5/24/16
Editor: I am still combing through my hundreds
of e-mails to find the testimony you sent to the US State Department in response
to the DOS request for public comment on the “size and scope” of the UN/US
Refugee Admissions Program for FY2017.
The day before
the deadline for submission of testimony I noticed (maybe you were all ahead of
me and noticed!) that the dates were wrong in the Federal Register. I
happened to see a comment sent by lawyers to the DOS asking that the comment
period be re-opened because citizens, who might like to have testified, didn’t
think the notice was for a comment period this year, but for last year. See here.
From Paul who
says when the federal government demonstrates such incompetence in so many
areas, how could we expect any competent fix for the complicated UN/US State
Department Refugee Admissions Program:
To Whom It Should Concern:
The United
States exists to benefit our own citizens, and public policy should be made
with that concept foremost in mind, not based upon uninformed sentiment and
emotion. In the current instance, this means ending the refugee resettlement
program, for many irrefutable reasons.
First, going
back decades and even ignoring the obvious concerns about terrorists embedded
in “refugee” influxes, U.S. asylum programs have been fraud-ridden (which is
the reason that quotation marks should usually enclose the word “refugee”). A
notable example was the discovery in 2008, via DNA testing, that many “refugee”
“families” from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana weren’t families at
all, just unrelated people who’d spotted an opportunity to move to the U.S.
Then there’s
the matter of costs. In the experience of many small cities around the country
(e.g. Amarillo, Texas; Springfield, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire),
the resulting local impacts can be daunting and onerous. After a spell, they
find their schools and social-services agencies begging for relief from the
influx.
A Dinka
dictionary is not adequate. Feds expected Manchester, NH school system to
provide a Dinka interpreter when a student from S. Sudan acted up in high
school there. Local taxpayers must foot the bill!
Consider, for
example, the ordeal of Lynn, Massachusetts, a city of 90,000 just north of
Boston with a school district serving 15,000 students. Lynn’s schools took in
about 500 students from Central America between 2011 and 2014. One might think
such an increase in school population of “only” 3.5 percent wouldn’t be a big
deal, but that’s not how it’s worked out for the city.
As Lynn’s Mayor
Judith Kennedy told an audience at the National Press Club in August 2014, her
health department had to curtail inspection services to afford the surge in
immunizations needed by the schools’ new arrivals. She had to end an effective,
gang-suppressing community-policing program to free up resources for the
schools. With many of the arrivals illiterate in any language, the schools
needed many more classroom aides along with interpreters. (The school
district’s website broadcasts the availability of translation services in
Arabic, Creole, Khmer and Spanish.) Altogether, Mayor Kennedy had to shrink
every other department’s 2015 budget by 2 to 5 percent from its 2014 level to
accommodate a 9.3 percent increase in school funding.
(Yes, Lynn’s
influx includes—besides “refugees”—illegal aliens and ordinary immigrants, but
all three categories of arrivals from third-world countries impose comparable
burdens on taxpayers.)
Such costs for
translators and interpreters are an unfunded mandate the national government
levies on states and localities, applicable to court proceedings, too. The requirement
is open-ended. For example, in 2014 Manchester, New Hampshire, got in trouble
with federal bureaucrats in a school-expulsion case by failing to provide an
interpreter for Dinka, the language of South Sudan.
Dinka!!!
Finally, beyond
the specific matter of refugee resettlement, our national government
demonstrates seemingly universal incompetence, from Transportation Security
Administration airport screeners’ 95 percent failure rate at intercepting test
contraband to the slack immigration vetting of San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen
Malik to the Environmental Protection Agency’s flooding Colorado’s Animas River
with orange, toxic mine waste. So who believes that, with hard-to-investigate
“refugees,” suddenly the feds will perform?
In short, it’s time to end
it, not try to mend it, as mending anything complicated is manifestly
beyond the capabilities of the ever more feckless federal bureaucracy.
This is the
sixteenth testimony in our series leading up to the deadline for comments to
the Dept. of State on May 19th. Go here for where they are archived to see what
your fellow citizens have said.
I intend to
keep posting testimonies, a few a day, until I have exhausted my long list! I
had no idea so many of you would respond to my offer! But, thank you for
your hard work!
P.S. I should
have mentioned it, but I have been adding photos and other images just to jazz
up the plain text, I hope you all don’t mind!
No comments:
Post a Comment