Last night a reader sent the transcript of the State Department press briefing where intrepid reporter, Matthew Lee, must have gotten his information. Our reader pointed out that the whole thing reads like a shopping trip — how many Iraqis can we dig up and get to America to stick with our quota? (By the way, they are aiming for 1000 a month.) You gotta read the transcript and laugh because the reader hits that nail on the head.
But, then here is a part of the transcript and an example of the sort of thing the Associated Press isn’t mentioning in its articles because it presumably doesn’t fit the points they want to promote. You know: desperate suffering refugees, it’s all our fault they are refugees, we must bring them to America ASAP and Bush is bad.
Ambassador (we deserve to be whipped) Foley mentioned that in the last month there were 114 no-shows—refugees who had been processed and reached the point of having airline tickets in hand and they never showed up at the airport.
We also had, unfortunately, 114 “no shows.” In other words, these were refugees who had passed successfully every stage of the process: they were approved, they were cleared, they were booked, they had tickets, they were supposed to get on airplanes and they were unable to travel because it turned out that either they did not have the necessary exit permits or it was believed that they did not have the necessary exit permits. We also have some, frankly, as I told you before, refugees who simply don’t – for unknown reasons – appear even though they have been – have their airplane tickets. So there’s a certain amount of attrition that we have to deal with, and the arrival numbers would have been really in the 1,250 range had we not had those no shows.
Just wondering what that cost the US taxpayer?
This admission intrigued some reporters who jumped in with questions. Terry Rusch (In charge of Admissions at the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration) had an answer:
Yeah (inaudible). In one or two countries there – some places are very straightforward. In Turkey, for example, refugees who are registered have to go and live in assigned communities all around the country. And some of them do this and others don’t. If they don’t, and they haven’t completed all the requisite paperwork for registration, showing evidence they have been there throughout this period, their getting exit permits is a more complicated process. And the people who are issuing these exit permits – or not – are either not mindful or it doesn’t particularly bother them that somebody has a plane ticket for the United States. That’s not their main concern. Their main concern is they have regulations that people are supposed to have done X, Y, and Z before they issue an exit permit. So I don’t think it’s anything people are trying – preventing people from leaving to go to the United States. It’s more of a bureaucratic red tape exercise.
Foley then reiterates how very important it is that they get this problem solved because as the year progresses they need every one of those refugees to meet their shopping quota.
It’s bureaucratic, but these countries also take those requirements very seriously, and so we are looking at this problem. We are certainly aware that as we get near the end of the fiscal year, and we’re mindful of reaching our goal, that we want to make sure that the refugees themselves are keenly aware of the requirements so that they can meet those requirements in the various countries and not be barred from getting on airplanes.
The discussion of how hard it is to get exit visas in many countries led into a discussion of where are these refugees anyway. I bet most reporters (and me too) thought they were exclusively in Syria and Jordan, afterall isn’t that where we keep hearing the millions of suffering are located?
But our capacity was much more robust and remains more robust in Jordan. So I believe that we are still seeing more arrivals from Jordan than we are from Syria. But they are one and two. And then the other source countries are Egypt and Turkey and the states of the Gulf. And also, we have Iraqi refugees in disparate parts of the world, and that requires us to schedule, in effect, circuit rides not only for DHS adjudicators but for our processing entities which don’t have installations in the region. So they need to do the same thing and we send – Terry, could you describe some of the far-flung places we will process Iraqi refugees?
Then Ms. Rusch again:
New Delhi. I think there was one processed in Beijing recently. Malaysia. Well, far-flung – Greece. But they’re turning up in lots of places.
What!!! We are scouring the world for Iraqis? They are in India, Turkey, the Gulf States, and China and Malaysia, and even Greece. If those Iraqis have the wherewithal to get to China and Greece, why do we need to track them down, at enormous expense to the taxpayer, and get them to America?