It begins…..
The annual negotiating about how many refugees the President should aim to admit to the US in the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1 of this year, is underway.
But the difference between those machinations for say 2016 when the refugee resettlement contractors***, which are paid by the head to place refugees in your towns and cities, were pushing for 200,000 and up and Obama set the ceiling for his final year at 110,000 and today demonstrate that the President, who ran on reducing the numbers, is keeping his word.
The contractors have already staked out 75,000 as their top desired number and now comes word that the “evil” Stephen Miller, Trump’s right hand man on issues involving immigration, wants far less.
25,000 is the number being bandied about, but rumors persist that Miller continues to think that a cap of 15,000 would take care of the TRULY persecuted people.
The New York Times has a very detailed report. I can’t snip it all, but encourage you to read the whole thing.
Don’t lose sight of one important point:
We have a backlog of 700,000 asylum claims to process. Those are people who got in to the US by some other means (mostly illegal) and claim they should be considered as refugees. If granted refugee status they become eligible for all the welfare goodies a UN-chosen refugee flown to the US gets.
Therefore as the refugee contractors help more and more migrants coming illegally across our borders file asylum claims, they are only making it worse (under this President) for refugees waiting abroad.
The New York Times:
WASHINGTON — The White House is considering a second sharp reduction in the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, picking up where President Trump left off in 2017 in scaling back a program intended to offer protection to the world’s most vulnerable people, according to two former government officials and another person familiar with the talks.
This time, the effort is meeting with less resistance from inside the Trump administration because of the success that Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser and an architect of his anti-immigration agenda, has had in installing allies in key positions who are ready to sign off on deep cuts.
Last year, after a fierce internal battle that pitted Mr. Miller, who advocated a limit as low as 15,000, against officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Pentagon, Mr. Trump set the cap at 45,000, a historic low. Under one plan currently being discussed, no more than 25,000 refugees could be resettled in the United States next year, a cut of more than 40 percent from this year’s limit. It would be the lowest number of refugees admitted to the country since the creation of the program in 1980.
The program’s fate could hinge on Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state. His department has traditionally been a strong advocate for the refugee program, but Mr. Pompeo is now being advised by two senior aides who are close to Mr. Miller and share his hard-line approach, according to the people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal internal deliberation about a decision that has yet to be completed.
A White House official who also did not want to be identified declined to confirm or deny whether deep cuts to the program, including a cap of 25,000, were under consideration.
See my previous post. We will be admitting fewer than 25,000 this year (FY18)!
But the official implicitly made the case for substantially reducing refugee admissions. A “migration crisis” was gripping the country, the official said, and the administration was instead prioritizing asylum cases in which a person is already in the United States and claims a credible fear of returning home.
[….]
Another steep reduction in refugees would be the latest piece of a multipronged effort by the president — devised and driven in large part by Mr. Miller — not just to crack down on illegal immigration, but also to fundamentally change the face of legal immigration in America.
The approach would move away from a system that prioritizes diversity, family ties and providing protection for persecuted people and toward one singularly focused on merit and skills. The president’s periodic efforts to pressure Congress to enact such policies have gone nowhere, but he has used his executive power to make changes where he can.
Don’t get excited. Although the President can dramatically reduce numbers and do some tinkering here and there, real and lasting reform of the Refugee Act of 1980 must be undertaken by the craven Chamber of Commerce-types and chickens in Congress before Trump’s presidency ends in 2020 or 2024.
Leaving the contractors (as political activists) and the present system in place will do nothing in the long term.
The NYT continues….
…after 18 months in the West Wing and a record level of turnover in the administration, Mr. Miller has succeeded in surrounding himself with figures who may be more amenable to gutting refugee admissions.
[….]
…two men who are close to Mr. Miller and share his restrictionist views on immigration have been named to senior positions at the State Department: Andrew Veprek, the deputy assistant secretary of refugees and migration, and John Zadrozny, who recently moved from Mr. Miller’s inner circle at the White House Domestic Policy Council to the policy planning staff at the department.
Much, much more here.
Photo of Ms. Giovagnoli: I told you about the lobbying arm (RCUSA) of the refugee industry here on Tuesday. They have big bucks to lobby Congress as we learned when word got out that they had hired the now disgraced Podesta Group to lobby for more refugees (more paying clients for them).
*** These (below) are the nine federal resettlement contractors which are largely paid for their ‘humanitarian’ work by you, the US taxpayer.
As the numbers of incoming refugees decline so too does their income. A continued reduction in the number of incoming refugees could cause one or more of these supposed non-profits to go under due to poor budgetary management—they never planned for a rainy day when federal bucks might dry up!
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees into your towns and cities and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!
From most recent accounting, here.
- Church World Service (CWS) (71%)
- Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) (secular)(93%)
- Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) (99.5%)
- Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) (57%)
- International Rescue Committee (IRC) (secular) (66.5%)
- US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular) (98%)
- Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) (97%)
- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) (97%)
- World Relief Corporation (WR) (72.8%)