And, once we pass the 50,000 cap (aka ceiling), then the Supreme Court will be effectively running the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.
Refugees arriving over the Presidentially-determined ceiling of 50,000 are the responsibility of nine unelected judges who have decided that relatives can’t possibly be terrorists! The ceiling has been a cornerstone of the refugee program for 37 years and last week the Supremes took it upon themselves to lay out fuzzy parameters for exceeding the ceiling set by President Trump that no President in at least a decade has exceeded (maybe ever!).
I just checked the latest numbers at Wrapsnetand see that as of today we have admitted 49,255 refugees this fiscal year. (The fiscal year ends September 30th).
We should hit 50,000 within a few days. So, will the members of the court begin getting the daily Presidential security briefing when that happens? And, come to think of it, who tells the Supremes that they have exceeded their Constitutional authority? Hmmmm?
Here are the top ten ‘welcoming’ states (so much for Texas trying to get out of the program):
Just so you know, 3 states and the District of Columbia got less than 10 each (Mississippi–6, Hawaii–3, DC–2, and Wyoming–0).
This post is filed in my‘Supreme Court’archive.
A word of caution! All of these reports being leaked out about conversations between the White House and the State Department must be viewed with a skeptical eye.
That said, this story sounds plausible because we know that Stephen Miller, a longtime Trump aide and expert on immigration and refugees, is a key White House strategist on the subject. The 31-year-old Miller has been at Trump’s side since the earliest days of the Trump campaign.
We also have gotten previous suggestions that Tillerson aide Brian Hook (a Bushie) is soft on the refugee program, see here. Could Hook be the source for the discord story? Now that the Supreme Court has added a new wrinkle by doing away with the whole concept of a Presidentially-designated CEILING that is a cornerstone of the Refugee Act of 1980, we can imagine that disagreements are surfacing between the White House immigration hardliners and the DOS which is largely being run by career bureaucrats who loved Obama and Hillary.
I suspect it is the ‘careers’ who put together the bragging graphic, here. Ten Pittsburghs is going to sell the USRAP? Did the Secretary’s office ever eyeball it before it was posted?
Here is what Politico is reporting:
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson argued with senior White House aide Stephen Miller over immigration issues last week in a second recent clash with the White House.
Miller pushed Tillerson and the State Department to be tougher on immigration and make changes to the programs they control, according to four people familiar with the conversation in the West Wing. John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, was also present.
It is pretty outrageous to attribute the news of discord to “four people familiar with the conversation.” One person might have leaked it back to the DOS and three career bureaucrats are then “familiar with the conversation” and presto! Politico has a story with four sources! The lead Politico reporter, Josh Dawsey, quoting “four people familiar with the conversation” says on his twitter page that he is a “cigar & bourbon” kind of guy (what is that on his shirt?). Politico welcomed him in December with this comment: “We are very excited to welcome Josh to the newsroom on December 12, and to turn him loose on Washington and the incoming Trump administration.” http://talkingbiznews.com/1/wsj-reporter-dawsey-hired-by-politico-to-cover-white-house/
[….]
Miller has been holding meetings to address how to further curb the entry of refugees into the United States, per two administration officials, and has closely worked with senators on legislative proposals to sharply cut other forms of legal immigration. [ I sure hope to learn that reform of the US Refugee Admissions Program is on the Administration’s list of legislative proposals! If it isn’t than we will never see any real reform!–ed]
[….]
This week, CNN reported that the White House has proposed moving the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to the Department of Homeland Security, along with its bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. [See my post here.—ed]
Those are among the State Department’s biggest functions and are among the government’s largest immigration arms. They control refugee vetting and releasing passports, among other issues.
[….]
Tillerson has grown increasingly frustrated at the White House and chafed at taking direction from younger Trump aides and not being able to implement State Department policies and offices like he would like, people familiar with his thinking say. [Who the heck are “people familiar with his thinking?” Dawsey could be making up this whole story!—ed]
Tillerson has grown especially agitated that less experienced figures like Miller – who previously worked on the Hill for attorney general and former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions – have been giving him commands.
The former ExxonMobil CEO was promised autonomy by Trump and is fond of reminding others of that.
More here. Politico reporter Dawsey has a lot of nerve reporting that Miller is somehow less experienced than Tillerson about immigration and immigration law! Endnote: I think it’s time for all of us in the blogosphere to start highlighting especially young reporters (Dawsey is only 5 years out of Journalism school!) who act like kingmakers (or destroyers) and report stories based on ‘sources familiar with someone’s thinking!’
Charleston, WV citizen activist, Brenda Arthur, pointed us to this interesting and useful pageat the US State Department website—it is a review of the work of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) for 2016.
By the way, PRM is still being run by career bureaucrats who have close ties to the resettlement contractors*** and have longtime ideological leanings toward ‘welcoming’ large numbers of third worlders to America.
This graphic (below) is very useful. Remember though that the US State Department (DOS) share of the costs for refugee resettlement is only a portion of the cost of admitting an average number (about 64,000 is the average over the last ten years) of refugees to the US each year.
Greater amounts of your tax dollars go to the Dept. of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement for refugee welfare and for awarding grants to contractors for myriad activities. There is another chunk that goes to the Dept. of Homeland Security for ‘screening’ refugees around the world. Go here, the artwork is useful! But, 10 Pittsburghs? And, this is Trump’s DOS bragging!
More than ten times the population of Pittsburgh!
*** Resettlement contractors receive the majority of their funding from taxpayers via PRM and ORR. One of the contractors is 99.5% funded by you, others are well up in the range of 95% plus. There can be no real reform of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program if these ‘non-profits’ continue to call the shots. The minute a new Administration signals a slowdown for a few years, the contractors, which receive funding on a per (refugee) head basis, put their community organizer hats on and run to the Leftwing media screaming bloody murder.
I think it has dawned on them that the Supreme Court, in writing refugee law, has just exploded the decades-long concept that a ceiling is a CEILING. Here they predict that it will be a refugee free-for-all for months to come. Effectively they are saying there is NO ceiling (no longer even Obama’s 110,000) in place at least until October!
I was interested to see that Eric Schwartz is back…..
From Bloomberg:
The refugee ban will actually add more refugees.
Schwartz was Obama’s first Asst. Sec.of State for PRM (Anne Richard’s predecessor). He is now head honcho of this pro-refugee lobbying group. RI is not a resettlement contractor. https://www.refugeesinternational.org/people/
Trump used his power to reduce refugee entries for the current fiscal year to 50,000 from the target of 110,000 set by President Barack Obama. But the number of refugees who enter the U.S. is likely to end up higher. Under the Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling, refugees who have “bona fide” ties to the country may be admitted, and they don’t count as part of the cap.
Immigration advocates say that more than half of all refugees admitted each year have such ties. So even though the U.S is just days away from hitting the 50,000 figure, many more refugees may be entering the country while the 120-day ban is in effect.
“In all likelihood, I would expect we would end up with more than 50,000 this year,” said Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International and former assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. “Once we get to 50,000 there will inevitably be some number of refugees that meet the ‘bona-fide’ test and if the administration monkeys around with that by trying to slow down approvals, then they’ll be in violation of the court decision.”
More here. So you can tell where they are going with this…
We haven’t written much about Refugees Internationalin the last few years (ever since Ken Bacon of Clinton/Lewinsky/Linda Tripp fame died while heading this organization).
We have written several important posts on Soros groupie Schwartz, see here.
This post is filed in my new category, ‘Supreme Court’which will include all posts related to the decision handed down last week.
Here is the news being reported everywhere in the last couple of day….
So, if they were all escaping the Syrian regime and it is still in place, why return? Truth is they weren’t all running from Assad, but from rebels and ISIS.
From Qasioun News:
Agencies (Qasioun) – The U.N. refugees agency UNHCR said that nearly half a million Syrian refugees have returned to their homes since the beginning of the year.
How about a hotline for unhappy refugees to call in to the DOS to get help to go home? https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/01/16/comment-worth-noting-lets-have-a-repatriation-fund-to-send-unhappy-refugees-home/
Andrej Mahecic, UNHCR spokesman said that humanitarian agencies recorded a “notable trend of spontaneous returns to and within Syria in 2017, with more than 440,000 internally displaced people going back to their homes in the first six months of this year.
Another 31,000 refugees have come back from foreign countries in the same period, particularly from Turkey, where authorities agreed to open the borders to allow thousands of people to celebrate the end of Ramadan with their families. Some of these refugees will opt to return to Turkey, but others will stay, according to local media reports. In total, 260,000 refugees have gone back to Syria from neighboring countries since 2015.
Most people returned to the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, over which the government has taken back control from the rebels. The reasons for their return vary: Some are looking for their missing relatives, others want to find out what’s left of their belongings and others think the security situation has improved enough for them to come home to live.
You will never hear this!
As time goes on and if the Syrian situation improves, the US Department of State (and its contractors) will never report how many Syrians resettled in America, at great expense to the US taxpayer, will opt to go home to Syria!
In fact, I previously heard from unhappy Iraqis that they wanted to go home after finding out that the streets are not paved with gold in America.
I think Wrapsnet should keep data on refugees who leave America to go home!
See my post: “Syrians are opportunists” from August 2015, here.
I guess the refugee industry must soon find some new poster children to use as propaganda for their open borders agenda!
