Editors note: Daily readers know that the US State Department asks for testimony every year on the “size and scope” of the Refugee Admissions program for the upcoming fiscal year.
In past years in addition to mailing in testimony, the State Department invited members of the public to appear and comment in person. This year that did not happen and we can only assume the long-established procedure was abandoned as members of the public who had concerns about the program came to outnumber the contractors and their supporters (I joked with one of our friends there two years ago that I bet everyone in the room was there on salary except us!)
This year only mailed-in testimony was accepted. If you sent testimony and would like it published, please send it to us for our consideration. And, don’t forget to send it to all of your elected officials!
So that testimony doesn’t disappear into a black hole, write to Delicia Spruell (spruellda@state.gov) and ask for the entire public record of the consultation/hearing.
Below is longtime VDARE writer Brenda Walker’s excellent statement.
Walker: It is neither morally right nor Constitutional for the government to harm Americans so that foreigners may be helped, no matter the initial good intentions.
For that reason, the refugee resettlement program should be shut down as an improvement for the American people.
Here is how the California native begins to build her case:
America is in its sixth year of a jobless “recovery,” yet the State Department continues to import tens of thousands of unskilled refugees from the Third World as if the economy were bubbling along with jobs for all who want them. The entire program seems painfully out of touch with the degree of economic suffering in the country and the effect on our poorest citizens of increasing job competition.
Here in California, the unemployment rate has dropped below 8 percent for the first time in six years as of April, indicating the long difficult struggle to climb back from the recession. Child poverty is running around 22 percent this year, another sign of the state’s poor economic performance. But the State Department resettled 5,173 refugees in California in 2012 when the economy was even more dismal.
Also in 2012, it was reported that the government placed hundreds of lead-poisoning-impaired Burmese refugees in Oakland, a chronically depressed city with too much homegrown crime and poverty. The federal program of dumping poor Third World people with learning disabilities has added to an already crushing burden on the city, and seems altogether a cruel use of government power.
Go to VDARE and read it all.
All posts relating to this year’s hearing are archived here: Testimony for 5/29/2014 State Dept. meeting.