Refugee Resettlement: The High Cost of Good Intentions
Article publisher:
American Thinker
Article date:
19 December 2017
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
The Refugee Act of 1980 created the official United States Refugee Admissions Program... Resettlement policies have devolved into another bureaucracy, where government and non-profit agencies work to protect their jobs and expand “services.”
Currently, legitimate refugees must prove that they are persecuted for one of several reasons: political persuasion, religion, race, etc., but efforts are underway by the refugee industry to expand the definition to anyone moving anywhere for any reason...
... Now, 40 years after the last American left Vietnam, we are still taking refugees from Southeast Asia. At least 1.5 million have come in as refugees alone, and it has detonated a chain of non-refugee immigrants.
One of the greatest misunderstandings about the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is that anyone getting into the country as a refugee, or anyone who was granted asylum (after getting here on their own), becomes a legal, permanent resident on track to citizenship. Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and other nations take many more refugees than the U.S., but there is no comparison: in those countries, refugees are only hosted temporarily and will never be voting citizens.
In the U.S., they are permanent residents and ultimately become voting citizens. In fact, we allow in the largest number of permanent refugees of any country in the world...
In 2007, there were about 48,000 refugees who settled here; by 2013, that number rose to 70,000. Last year, 85,000 were welcomed to our shores. Over the last 10 years, more than 700,000 refugees have come to live in America permanently.
Refugee contractors receive over $2 billion in taxpayer dollars annually -- between $2,000 and $5,000 per refugee -- to create resettlement plans for hundreds of unsuspecting towns and cities...
The contractors’ job is to help refugees find work and housing, sign them up for welfare, medical care, get the children enrolled in school… then move on to a new set of paying “clients.”...
The refugee industry sends their wish list -- created in virtual secrecy -- to Washington, where the State Department and the White House set a limit based on the number of refugees contractors claim that cities and towns can absorb. Congress’ only role is to “consult” and, of course, appropriate money. According to Ken Tota, Deputy Director at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Congress has never in his 25-year tenure questioned the refugee quota proposed by the administration.
In recent years, as many as 95 percent of the refugees coming to the U.S. were referred by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees or were the relatives of U.N.-picked refugees...
There is simply no logic to U.S. refugee policies. In July, a State Department report named Somalia as “a safe haven for terrorists,” yet 2,775 Somali refugees arrived in the United States last year...
... nothing has been done about the negative impact on communities and the secrecy by which refugees are placed in unsuspecting locales...
President Trump has yet to put his own person at the head of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, which has resulted in “deep state” bureaucrats undermining the White House at every turn. If the administration does not get a handle on the intricacies of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, no wall building will stop the flow of vaguely defined “refugees.”...