Daniel Horowitz has penned an excellent (and frightening) analysis of who is being admitted to the US through myriad legal programs (in addition to the usual refugee numbers that we know are way down in recent months).
Conservative Review (hat tip: Cathy):
Aimless fighting in Afghanistan — while we bring Afghanistan to our shores
Whoever thought of the strategy of sending our troops to referee Islamic civil wars on their soil while bringing their civil wars and terror financing to our own shores was brilliantly dumb. But that is still the strategy of the West in combatting jihad. The European countries are even worse than we are in importing the Middle East, but we are not that far behind. Meanwhile, we continue to put our boots on their ground and shoulder the burden of endless wars that would not affect us if not for our immigration policies.
Here’s a novel idea: What if we focused on our own borders, stopped self-destructing through our front-door immigration policies, busted up terror financing networks globally and domestically, and disrupted the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical networks operating here at home?
Unlike China, Russia, North Korea, and potentially Iran, nothing that happens in these Sunni hellholes – from Somalia, Yemen, Niger, and Mali to Syria and Afghanistan – can harm us … unless we bring them to our country, as we did for years and are increasingly doing now. Yet our endless and aimless missions, chasing our tails in their sand dunes at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of precious U.S. lives, have depleted our resources and our resolve to deal with those who truly pose a conventional threat to our homeland, now or in the future.
One year later, the Afghanistan surge is a failure….
[….]
The miserable irony is that while nothing in Afghanistan can come close to hurting us, as the Taliban has nowhere near the global reach of a group like Hezbollah, we are bringing Afghans here at a record pace. Just in the first quarter of 2018, we brought in 5,718. At that pace, 2018’s total number will dwarf the recent trend of 12,000 per year. We’ve brought in over 86,000 Afghans since 9/11! In last year’s defense authorization bill, Congress authorized another 3,500 special immigrant visas, which grant refugee status to Afghan officials, despite a SIGAR report showing that half of all the foreign personnel who have gone AWOL in this country after being brought here for training were Afghans. Most are still at large and unaccounted for.
The rise in immigration from Afghanistan reflects a broader trend of importing the Middle East to our country. I counted the number of green cards given out in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, to nationals from 47 majority-Muslim countries, and the total number was up to 167,000. The pace for 2018, based on hard data from the first quarter, seems to be tracking with that rate. This is still a very high level and only very slightly down from Obama’s record year in 2016. Overall, we’ve admitted 2.2 million immigrants from those countries from 2001 through March 31, 2018.
See my previous posts on Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders. While the number of regular refugees is declining under the Trump Administration, Afghan SIVs are treated as refugees and their numbers are helping the refugee contractors stay afloat because the contractors (the VOLAGs) are paid to place them as well.