Your tax dollars:
You are probably aware that the last Congress never did pass an Appropriations bill for the fiscal year (FY 2011) that we began on October 1st, 2010 and is about to take up the matter with votes expected in mid February. Although the Constitution says that all money bills must originate in the House of Representatives, at the end of the 111th Congress the US Senate was actually driving the appropriations debate with a draft Appropriations bill.
According to the blog MicEvHill the following is a summary of the spending that was proposed in the last Congress for Refugee and Asylee programs (MicEvHill doesn’t seem to have links for the individual posts which makes finding things very difficult, you need to go here and scroll down to the story on January 5th). The new House of Representatives is proposing an appropriations cut which takes the spending back to 2008 levels.
The grand total cost of the Refugee program as proposed by the Senate is just over $2,500,000,000 (that is billions!), while 2008 levels would take it down a half billion to around $2 billion.
From MicEvHill:
*Refugee Admissions and Overseas Refugee Assistance. The draft Senate bill would have appropriated $1.685 BILLION in fiscal year 2011 for Department of State’s Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA) account, which funds both refugee admissions and overseas refugee assistance. Congress appropriated the same amount for the MRA account in fiscal year 2010. However, it only appropriated $1.296 BILLION for the MRA account in fiscal year 2008.
*Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance. The draft Senate bill would have appropriated $45 MILLION in fiscal year 2011 for the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) account, which funds draw-downs for emergency refugee situations. Congress appropriated the same amount for the ERMA account in fiscal year 2010. However, it appropriated $76 MILLION for the ERMA account in fiscal year 2008.
*Office of Refugee Resettlement. The draft Senate bill would have appropriated $767.1 MILLION in fiscal year 2011 for the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates the federal government’s refugee resettlement, trafficking victim assistance, torture victim assistance, and unaccompanied alien children programs. Congress appropriated $730.928 MILLION for ORR’s activities in fiscal year 2010. However, it only appropriated only $628 MILLION for ORR in fiscal year 2008.
*Refugee and Asylum Adjudications. The draft Senate bill would have directly appropriated $176.4 MILLION in fiscal year 2011 to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for processing applications for asylum or refugee status. Congress appropriated $50 MILLION for refugee and asylum adjudications in fiscal year 2010. However, it did not appropriate any funds for that purpose in fiscal year 2008.
Granted, some of this funding gets sent abroad—like that ERMA money ($20 million) that Obama sent to the Palestinians in 2009, here, but this means that with about 100,000 combined refugees and asylees we admit each year the cost of this program could be more than $20,000 per refugee ($100,000 for a family of 4?). You know the refugees aren’t getting much so you can see why this is such a cash cow for the immigration industry (including the UN, by the way).
And, that number does not include the cost to cities and states for health care, education, public housing, public safety and so on.
Who benefits the most? Volags like the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (which lobbies for more legal immigration and for amnesty for illegal immigrants) and big companies who need cheap labor like Tyson Foods benefit.
What is that expression again? Doing well by doing good?