Update September 14th: Do we want to be Europe? This should be the theme of Election 2016! Here.
Update: Many more details here. Apparently it was Secretary of State Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson who delivered the (bad) news. The report has been printed, so look for it tomorrow. It is very useful. This is not the end of it. The Republican Congress must still fund it. Will they???
Senator Jeff Sessions, an advisor to the Trump campaign and a long time leader for immigration sanity on the Hill has just released this press release (here and below). Apparently the US State Department (Kerry? Richard?) delivered the Presidential determination and held a consultation with at least the Senate Judiciary Committee (we assume the House Judiciary Committee was present).
The number is well short of what the contractors have been demanding, but not a surprise. Frankly, the money isn’t there in the budget for even 110,000. (Remember too, this is only the resettled refugees, not the other so-called humanitarian arrivals, like the unaccompanied alien children, the asylees etc.).
Obama had previously said he wants $2.2 billion for ORR alone (not including costs to the US State Department and Homeland Security) and his determination delivered today must have put the amount at $1.5 billion for everything (the numbers just don’t make sense).
Throughout the Obama Administration the ceiling for resettled refugees was set at 70,000 each year with 85,000 arriving in FY16 ending Sept. 30th. The contractors in the refugee industry were pushing for 200,000, here.
This is what Sessions said today:
Sessions: Obama Administration Endangers Americans With Reckless Plans To Admit 110,000 Refugees in FY 2017—A 57% Increase Over FY 2015
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest made the following statement regarding the Obama Administration’s plans to admit 110,000 refugees to the United States in Fiscal Year 2017:
“Despite opposition by the American people, a documented link between terrorism and individuals admitted to the United States as refugees, and over $19 trillion in debt, the Obama Administration has committed the United States to admitting 110,000 refugees during Fiscal Year 2017—a roughly 57 percent increase in the number of refugees the United States admitted as recently as FY 2015, and a roughly 29 percent increase from the Administration’s target for FY 2016.
The common sense concerns of the American people are simply ignored as the Administration expands its reckless and extreme policies.
Terrorists have announced that they will infiltrate the refugee population and have successfully done so multiple times in Europe over the last year. These asylum-seekers are overwhelmingly male who make the journey from hotbeds of terrorism to countries throughout Europe. Earlier this year, General Philip Breedlove, who served as NATO’s top commander, said that ISIS was ‘spreading like cancer’ among the refugee population. And unsurprisingly, there have been numerous terror attacks in Europe this year linked to the refugee crisis. Indeed, just this past weekend, Germany’s Interior Minister said that there are more than 500 terrorists inside Germany alone who are capable of carrying out terrorist attacks. It is all but certain that many of those potential terrorists exploited the refugee crisis to get to Germany, and that there are likely thousands more all across Europe today.
Here in the United States, we face the same risks. The Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have acknowledged that terrorists could infiltrate the refugee population. And for good reason—as it is clear that terrorists have done so successfully in the past. The Director of the FBI has testified that he cannot certify that every refugee admitted to the United States is not a security threat, and recently compared the FBI’s anti-terrorism mission to ‘looking for needles in a nationwide haystack’ while also figuring out ‘which pieces of hay might someday become needles.’ Regardless, President Obama and his Administration are now pushing their extreme policies even further by stubbornly placing the requests of the United Nations above the safety of the American people by surging refugee admissions to 110,000.
The Administration’s claim that the program costs roughly $1.5 billion drastically understates the true costs of initial resettlement—as it does not include costs for programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, or Supplemental Security Income, among others.
In addition to the very serious national security implications and the initial resettlement costs, admitting 110,000 refugees will result in an enormous long-term financial burden on the taxpayers. Robert Rector, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has estimated that the total lifetime cost of admitting 10,000 refugees —which includes all costs at the federal, state, and local level—is $6.5 billion. Using Mr. Rector’s numbers as a baseline, admitting the 110,000 refugees that the Obama Administration proposes to admit beginning on October 1 will result in a total lifetime cost to the taxpayers of $71.5 billion. This would be added every year that these levels are continued.
The simple fact is that it would be safer and more cost-effective to establish safe zones for refugees as close to their homes as possible—particularly for those from the Middle East. One estimate found that resettling one refugee in the United States was nearly 12 times more expensive than providing care for that refugee abroad. With the prospect for a cease-fire in the region, there is even more reason to focus on providing temporary support for displaced persons in the region.
The American people do not support these radical plans, which amount to a complete betrayal from their leaders in Washington.”
Keep a lookout for the State Department report to Congress that accompanies the official consultation. It is a treasure trove of information you need in your ‘pockets of resistance’.
And, this doesn’t change a thing—keep hounding your Washington representatives this week and next to cut the budget for the whole darn program. Let’s have a moratorium on bringing in tens of thousands of low-skilled workers who have not been properly vetted until the Refugee Admissions Program is overhauled!
Final thought….. Since the level set each year is a ceiling, it seems like it would be perfectly legal for a new President to come in in January and halt the whole program at whatever level they had reached by late January 2017 and still be perfectly legal. In the year following 9/11 we admitted only about 20,000 (don’t remember the exact number), so it is possible to stop this train in mid-year!