Report: White House considering refugee cap of
25,000 for Fiscal Year 2019, by Ann Corcoran 8/2/18
Two months to go in fiscal year and Trump on target to admit lowest number of refugees to US in decades, by Ann Corcoran, 8/2/18.
It
begins…..The annual negotiating about how many refugees the President should
aim to admit to the US in the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1 of
this year, is underway.
But
the difference between those machinations for say 2016 when the refugee
resettlement contractors, which are paid by the head to place refugees in your
towns and cities, were pushing for 200,000 and up and Obama set the ceiling for his final
year at 110,000 and today demonstrate that the President, who ran on reducing
the numbers, is keeping his word.
Stephen Miller has been with the
President since early in the campaign. I had a laugh just now. When looking for
a photo for this post I see that the vast majority of Miller’s media photos
show him with a scowling expression on his face.
The contractors
have already staked out 75,000 as their top desired number and now comes word that the “evil”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s right hand man on issues involving immigration, wants
far less.
25,000
is the number being bandied about, but rumors persist that Miller continues to
think that a cap of 15,000 would take care of the TRULY persecuted people.
The New York Times has a very detailed report.
I can’t snip it all, but encourage you to read the whole thing.
Don’t lose sight of one important point: We have a backlog of 700,000 asylum
claims to process. Those are people who got in to the US by some other means
(mostly illegal) and claim they should be considered as refugees. If granted
refugee status they become eligible for all the welfare goodies a UN-chosen
refugee flown to the US gets.
Therefore
as the refugee contractors help more and more migrants coming illegally across
our borders file asylum claims, they are only making it worse (under this
President) for refugees waiting abroad.
The New York Times: WASHINGTON — The White House is considering a second sharp
reduction in the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States,
picking up where President Trump left off in 2017 in scaling back a program
intended to offer protection to the world’s most vulnerable people, according
to two former government officials and another person familiar with the talks.
This time, the effort is meeting with less resistance from inside the
Trump administration because of the success that Stephen Miller, the
president’s senior policy adviser and an architect of his anti-immigration
agenda, has had in installing allies in key positions who are ready to sign off
on deep cuts.
Last
year, after a fierce internal battle that pitted Mr. Miller, who advocated a
limit as low as 15,000, against officials at the Department of Homeland
Security, the State Department and the Pentagon, Mr. Trump set the cap at
45,000, a historic low. Under one plan currently being discussed, no more than 25,000 refugees could be
resettled in the United States next year, a cut of more
than 40 percent from this year’s limit. It would be the lowest number of
refugees admitted to the country since the creation of the program in 1980.
The program’s fate could hinge on Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state.
His department has traditionally been a strong advocate for the refugee
program, but Mr. Pompeo is now being advised by two senior aides who are close
to Mr. Miller and share his hard-line approach, according to the people briefed on the
discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to reveal internal deliberation about a decision that has yet to be
completed.
Mary Giovagnoli, director of Refugee Council
USA, told the Times. “There’s a continued concentration of power in the hands
of folks who don’t support a robust refugee program.”
A
White House official who also did not want to be identified declined to confirm
or deny whether deep cuts to the program, including a cap of 25,000, were under
consideration. See my previous post. We will be admitting fewer than 25,000 this year (FY18)!
But
the official implicitly made the case for substantially reducing refugee
admissions. A “migration crisis” was gripping the country, the official said,
and the administration was instead prioritizing asylum cases in which a person
is already in the United States and claims a credible fear of returning home.
Another steep reduction in refugees would be the latest piece of a
multipronged effort by the president — devised and driven in large part by Mr.
Miller — not just to crack down on illegal immigration, but also to
fundamentally change the face of legal immigration in America.
The
approach would move away from a system that prioritizes diversity, family ties
and providing protection for persecuted people and toward one singularly
focused on merit and skills. The president’s periodic efforts to pressure
Congress to enact such policies have gone nowhere, but he has used his
executive power to make changes where he can.
Don’t
get excited. Although the President can dramatically reduce numbers and
do some tinkering here and there, real and lasting reform of the Refugee Act of 1980 must
be undertaken by the craven Chamber of Commerce-types and chickens in Congress
before Trump’s presidency ends in 2020 or 2024.
Leaving
the contractors (as political activists) and the present system in place will
do nothing in the long term.
The NYT continues……after 18 months in the West Wing and a record
level of turnover in the administration, Mr. Miller has succeeded in
surrounding himself with figures who may be more amenable to gutting refugee
admissions.…two men who are close to Mr. Miller and share his restrictionist
views on immigration have been named to senior positions at the State Department:
Andrew Veprek, the deputy assistant secretary of refugees and migration, and
John Zadrozny, who recently moved from Mr. Miller’s inner circle at the White
House Domestic Policy Council to the policy planning staff at the department. Much,
much more here.
I
told you about the lobbying arm (RCUSA) of the refugee industry here on Tuesday. They have big bucks to lobby Congress as
we learned when word got out that they had hired the
now disgraced Podesta Group to lobby for more refugees (more paying
clients for them).
These
(below) are the nine federal resettlement contractors which are largely paid
for their ‘humanitarian’ work by you, the US taxpayer. As
the numbers of incoming refugees decline so too does their income. A
continued reduction in the number of incoming refugees could cause one or more
of these supposed non-profits to go under due to poor budgetary management—they
never planned for a rainy day when federal bucks might dry up!
The
number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the
taxpayer) to place the refugees into your towns and cities and get them signed
up for their services
(aka welfare)!
From
most recent accounting, here.
Ethiopian Community
Development Council (ECDC) (secular)(93%)
International Rescue
Committee (IRC) (secular)
(66.5%)
US Committee for
Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular) (98%)
As
of August 1, the US admitted 18,251 refugees to the country with 48 states
sharing the load.
George Bush previously held the record
for low admission years following 9/11.
There
are only two months left in the fiscal year (FY19 begins October first) and at
the present rate, the Trump Administration should come in just over 22,000.
Previous low admission years came in the wake of 9/11 when President
Bush dramatically slowed the program out of concerns for national security.
Here
is a map from Wrapsnet of where the 18,251 have been
placed thus far. Note that Texas is the numero uno ‘welcoming’ state even
though the governor officially withdrew the state from the program (shows how
futile that was!). Turning the red state blue! (See my right hand sidebar where I have
recorded each month’s number of ‘new Americans’ this fiscal year.)
No comments:
Post a Comment