Center for Immigration Studies fellow, Don Barnett of Nashville, TN, recently traveled to New York to make a presentation on the Refugee Resettlement Program and tell the audience about the Tennessee initiative enacted into law last year that attempts to get some local control over the program. Up until now the US State Department and non-governmental organizations are able to drop refugees off in communities against the wishes of many local residents. Tennessee lawmakers want to see that changed.
Here is a report from the website American Rattlesnake:
One of the most harmful aspects of our nation’s current immigration policy is its manifold refugee resettlement programs, the disastrous consequences of which have been amply documented on this website. That’s why the speech Don Barnett, currently a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and expert on refugee resettlement in the United States, delivered to the Penn Club on Tuesday night is so crucial to understanding the scale of the problem faced by small towns and communities throughout America. A former employee of the United States Information Agency within the U.S. State Department, he spent an extensive part of his career working in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, which produced most of the refugees brought to the United States during the Cold War Era.
Today we have a much different approach to refugee resettlement that, as Barnett pointed out repeatedly during the course of his speech, is completely untethered to any concrete American foreign policy goal, and which is divorced from any traditional definition of the term itself. Even as President Obama promises to end the signature law that allowed hundreds of thousands of refuseniks and political and religious dissidents to emigrate from Russia and the former USSR, the amount of refugees being sent to America from the third world increases exponentially. As Barnett noted in his talk, and as even open borders advocates readily concede, the United States accepts more than four times as many refugees as every other industrialized nation combined.