Editor:  From time to time we post guest columns and other comments which we think are important to highlight. And, as you know if you’ve been following RRW for the last few weeks, we have been nagging you to call your members of Congress, Senators too, and tell them to defund the Refugee Admissions Program in the on-going budget battle.
This is from one of our readers, Merrill McCarthy, who did call and has reported here (below) what she learned in the process.

Here is what one caller learned (and suggests):

I made my calls today to Speaker Ryan and others in the House to encourage them to follow the lead of Babin and Brat.

I have been making calls on various issues since the early days of the Tea Party and today was different. With the exception of Speaker Ryan there was most often a staffer on the other end of the line instead of voicemail or the dreaded message the mailbox was full.

The staffers seemed to be receptive and they listened. Nobody tried to hurry me off the phone. At first I felt sad that having such an easy time getting through meant there were not a lot of other people calling, but then the thought occurred to me that they were actively taking the pulse of the callers. Most everyone would agree that the attacks on our soil in the last couple of days are an ominous sign of how quickly we are moving toward the new normal of European style chaos.

I told the staffers that we must halt refugees from areas that are hotbeds of terrorism or from areas that are so disrupted that there is no way to vet their people. It is irresponsible to open the door that allows even one terrorist to slip through the cracks.

We also need leadership to develop sound public policy on the refugee question. For too long vested interests of the UN and the VOLAGs have been running the show. The time has long since arrived to put our citizens first. That does not mean we abandon the refugees. There is a solution that helps both US citizens and refugees by working to establish safe zones so people are able to stay in their home countries to ride out the storm.

This helps the US by eliminating the burgeoning costs of a program spending money by the billions to bring refugees here and provide them with all types of ancillary services and accommodations, including ongoing welfare and entitlement programs. And for what? Many seem to resist assimilation and more and more we are seeing homegrown jihadis. Let’s stop importing and growing terrorists.

At the cost for every refugee we help here, we could help 12 in the home country. Isn’t that a far more compassionate approach? Is it not better policy to help people stay and rebuild their own country, rather than leaving things so unstable that an ongoing vacuum is created? It seems rather cruel to pull people out of their culture, traditions, climate, and kinship and allow the UN to disperse them to the four corners of the wind.

And we have a responsibility to take care of our own first. We have veterans, the elderly, the poor and the disabled. We hear of children in this country going to bed hungry. These are the people we should be helping first. Instead we have refugees squeezing our own people out of jobs and affordable housing and draining taxpayer dollars with ongoing entitlements.

This is the time for leadership and a new paradigm in refugee policy. More and more people are waking up to the detrimental nature of what has been going on in the dark for decades. Once examined, the only thing that makes sense is helping the refugees in their own regions. It is better for them and it is better for the US citizen.

Now is the time to call Congress and stress there is an alternative to business as usual on the refugee question. Let’s reframe the argument. Help 1 or help 12? It seems like an easy argument to make.

Keep calling! They are listening!
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