Your tax dollars:
As I said yesterday when I told you about the President’s report to Congress on the refugee program for FY2010, there would be lots more interesting information included in the report.
Note that on page 59, the US takes 75% of the world’s UNHCR-referred refugees! The number doesn’t include others we have picked up through other means and does not include asylees. After the US at 75% comes Canada (8%), Australia (7.8%), Sweden (2%), and New Zealand (1%).
Now check out the cost of the program on page 58. The figure reported here, $891,800,000, does not include the taxpayer funding of programs relating to healthcare, subsidized housing, education, food stamps and so forth from local and state governments.
It looks to me that at minimum, it costs way over $10,000 a year per refugee. And, now that the International Rescue Committee is reporting to us that only about 20% of refugees are finding work, the cost to care for more refugees will only go up.
See my post last month on refugee horrors in Houston:
For years, agencies across the country have used private funds, unpaid overtime and volunteers to patch together a system that before the recession was typically able to find jobs for more than 80 percent of refugees after six months. Those numbers are plummeting — to as low as 20 percent at one national agency, the International Rescue Committee, which Bob Carey, its vice president of resettlement and migration policy, expects is more or less the situation at most. In some states, refugees are becoming homeless.