In a little-noticed announcement, the former vice president committed to a more ambitious refugee policy than existed under Obama.
After a laundry list of all of the evil doin’s of President Trump (with Stephen Miller’s help), Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick goes on to say:
Undoing this damage will be a heavy lift for whoever next occupies the Oval Office, but there is some cause for optimism.
Last Sunday, on World Refugee Day, Joe Biden laid out how he would reverse Trump’s assault by committing to several essential immigration actions: Having pledged that if he is elected he will restore “America’s historic role as leader in resettlement and defending the rights of refugees everywhere,” Biden had set specific targets that will increase refugee resettlement in the United States.
His plan would aim to admit 125,000 refugees to the U.S. (that’s up from a ceiling of 18,000 under Trump, and more than Obama admitted). In his announcement last week, he added a new pledge: to work with Congress to establish a minimum admissions number of at least 95,000 refugees annually.
In addition to those actions, Biden has promised to:
pursue policies that increase opportunities for faith and local communities to sponsor refugee resettlement. I will make more channels, such as higher education visas, available to those seeking safety. I will repeal the Muslim ban—and other discriminatory bans based on ethnicity and nationality—and restore asylum laws, including ending the horrific practice of separating families at our border. I will work with our allies and partners to stand against China’s assault on Hong Kong’s freedoms and mass detention and repression of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities and support a pathway for those persecuted to find safe haven in the United States and other nations.
This is how we always get beat by the Left. They are proactively working to change the Refugee Act of 1980 to make it harder for any president in the future to reduce the number of refugees to be admitted.
Where is our side in Congress? There is no one that I know of working to pull the debate in the direction of greater restrictions and protections for towns and cities who might be inundated with more impoverished people.
Slate continues….
The proposal mirrors the plan set forth in the Refugee Protection Act of 2019, now pending a vote in the House of Representatives. It signals that Biden isn’t just running against Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-immigrant dog whistles, but is also committing energy and, more importantly, resources to fulfilling the United States’ reputation as a nation that welcomes those in need of shelter, and also to making the U.S. government a central player in solving a global refugee crisis that has only grown more exigent as a result of COVID-19. It signals that Biden understands that solving the refugee crisis is both a hefty administrative lift and a moral and democratic imperative.
Obama’s immigration legacy nothing to celebrate, suggests Joe!
Also notable is that Biden isn’t seeking to simply return to Obama-era policies, but is going further, faster, in a tacit statement that Barack Obama’s immigration legacy was not, in fact, anything to celebrate.
Should Biden win the White House in 2020, he will face an administrative state that has been hollowed out from within. The government agencies tasked with refugee resettlement will need to be rebuilt to do the work of meeting the 125,000 refugee admission target, and as we learned in the Obama era, even with a Democrat in the White House, refugees have been a constituency with little power or pull.
But the commitment to work with Congress to create a new floor on refugee admissions is the truly radical aspect of Biden’s new pledge. It would mean that whoever takes office in future could not do what Trump and Stephen Miller did and set a future ceiling at 18,000 or even lower, because there would be legislation in place to preclude it.
If nothing else, these past four years have revealed what kind of statutory protections refugees will require to prevent another Trump-like presidency from closing America’s doors again.
So for all of you asking me ‘what do we do?’ You need to work to re-elect Donald Trumpas I said in November of 2019. If Biden wins there will be nothing more for me to do. I don’t plan to chronicle into my dotage the cultural and economic death of our country.
“I would say that asylum by now pretty much exists in name only.”
(Doris Meissner)
Normally I don’t write about news that you are seeing everywhere except if I can add some bits of information that you haven’t heard about (unless you are a longtime reader of Refugee Resettlement Watch, that is!).
Donald Trump is wrecking havoc on the asylum system that the Open Borders industry has been relying on for more than a decade to admit ever larger numbers of migrants/refugees to America because the industry knew that the normal Refugee Admissions Program couldn’t change America fast enough.
Just so you know the heretofore primary UN/US refugee program involves the selection of refugees who are supposedly being persecuted and flies them to America.
The other side of the program, created in 1980 with the help of people like Doris Meissner, involves the asylum process where migrants arrive at our borders or on flights into the country and then claim asylum. If found to have a legitimate fear of being persecuted if returned to their home country, they are granted asylum and given all the taxpayer-funded goodies that chosen refugees are getting.
Ten years ago I learned that Open Borders Inc. was shifting its focus to the asylum process in order to change America by changing the people at a more rapid rate than the normal refugee process provided them. (Nevermind that at the time, we were admitting 80,000 or so refugees in any given year!)
But before I get to that….
Here is Nina Totenberg writing at NPRabout the case that gave Trump a rare victory in the courts last week.
Supreme Court Sides With Trump Administration In Asylum Cases
The U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a major victory on a signature issue Thursday, ruling that asylum-seekers whose claims are initially denied by immigration officials have no right to a hearing before a judge.
DC Swamp reporter Nina Totenberg
The decision authorizes the Trump administration to fast-track deportations for thousands of asylum-seekers after bare-bones screening procedures.
Immigrants who make a claim for asylum must initially prove to immigration officials that they have a “credible fear” of persecution in their country of origin to proceed with the full asylum process. If they fail, they can be deported without ever having the opportunity to make their case in court.
That’s what happened to Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, the subject of the case. Thuraissigiam is a Sri Lankan farmer who sought asylum, telling immigration officials that he had been abducted from his fields, arrested, blindfolded by men in a van, interrogated and beaten so badly with wooden sticks that he spent 11 days in the hospital.
Thuraissigiam is Tamil, an ethnic minority that has long been persecuted by the majority Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka. His abduction fits a pattern of similar violence carried out against Tamils there. After he fled his country, he journeyed for seven months to get first to Mexico and then the United States to seek asylum.
“Fits a pattern” because he had the story spoon fed to him by some immigration lawyers?
Thuraissigiam’s case illustrates the speed of expedited deportation proceedings that have become routine. Following a quick hearing with no lawyer present, an immigration officer said he believed Thuraissigiam’s account of the violence he suffered but ultimately denied his claim for asylum because Thuraissigiam could not specify who arrested him or why.
Is that because someone had fed him the story to recite and they forgot, or he was too dumb to remember, some key elements of his made-up persecution tale?
Doris Meissner, working to change America for 4 decades!
And, does no one ever ask where on earth a poor Tamil ‘farmer’ got the money for a seven-month journey to the US border?
Nevermind, that legitimate asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first safe country they enter. How many countries had he already passed through before getting to the US/Mexican border?
Nina of the swamp then quotes Doris of the swamp:
Doris Meissner, who served in top positions at the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, twice heading up the department, said that Thursday’s ruling is not a significant departure from past practices. But she added that the way the Trump administration has carried out the screening of asylum-seekers has been a dramatic departure from practices in previous administrations, effectively making it impossible for people to win asylum in even the most dire situations.
“I would say that asylum by now pretty much exists in name only,” she said.
Donald Trump has put a serious roadblock in Meissner & Company plans to use the asylum process to speed up the diversification of America.
The peanut farmer signed the Refugee Act into law, but Kennedy and Biden were behind it.
In 2010 I attended the ‘celebration’ marking the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Refugee Act of 1980 by Jimmy Carter.
The attendees at Georgetown Law School were very much focused on the asylum system as they stated forthrightly that the normal refugee process wasn’t bringing in enough of the third world.
(By the way, this surprised me. In 2010 I was only three years into learning about the Refugee Resettlement Program and so this giddy focus on asylum came as a surprise to me.)
Meissner, speaking at the event, specifically chortled that when they crafted (meaning she was in on the crafting) of the Refugee Act, they had anticipated the odd ballet dancer from Russia asking for asylum, but had not dreamed of the numbers that were beginning to use the system.
Her delight at the increasing asylum numbers was evident.
Here is just one of many mentions I have made about that 2010 event, Meissner and the asylum process. In that 2011 post I called for a Congressional investigation (ha! ha!) of the fraud I believed was happening with asylum claims and NGO lawyers.
Actually even mention of the book, banned in some parts of the world, could bring the speech police down on RRWagain just as it approaches its 13th anniversary. (It was this time last year that they succeeded inshutting down RRWfor a few months.)
Chronicles has published an excellent obituary about the man who told the truth nearly a half century before most see it now—western civilization is committing suicide by ‘welcoming’ mass migration from the third world.
You might have noticed how mention of the novel by Trump adviser Stephen Miller caused the Left (specifically the Southern Poverty Law Center and its media sycophants) to melt down last year, see here at NPR.
Below is a bit of an obituary for the “thinker” by Srdja Trifkovic at Chronicles:
(emphasis is mine)
The great and good French novelist and thinker Jean Raspail died on June 13, three weeks short of his 95th birthday. I was deeply saddened by the news, although at his age it was to be expected. It is ironic that he succumbed to the COVID-19 virus, the product and totemic symbol of our age and the globalized world, both of which he loathed with a passion.
[….]
Marine Le Pen
In Camp of the Saints, his best-known work, Raspail castigated the “submersion” of France by the landing of a fleet of derelict boats from India loaded with refugees. The rest of the grim story is known to Chronicles readers, or should be.
“We must reread The Camp of the Saints, which, beyond evoking with a talented pen the migratory perils, had—long before [Michel Houellebecq’s] Submission—mercilessly described the submission of our elites,” tweeted Marine Le Pen in tribute to Raspail. In addition to his resolute stand against all Third World—but especially Muslim—immigration, and in line with his traditionalist understanding of Catholicism, Raspail condemned communism and capitalism with equal force, as the two monstrous twins born of modernity.
[….]
In his final years—almost five decades after publishing his prophetic dystopia—Jean Raspail was resigned that our civilization is on the “road to disappearance.” As he explained in an interview published in Valeurs Actuelles in 2013, he had no desire to join the massive circle of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration because, in his view, such talk is useless:
The people already intuitively know that France, as our ancestors shaped her over the centuries, is on the road to disappearance. The audience is being kept amused by endless talk about immigration, but the final truth is never stated.
[….]
What can be done? Raspail’s verdict was clear:
There are only two ways to deal with immigrants. Either we accommodate them, and France—her culture, her civilization—will be eradicated without so much as a funeral. In my view, that is what is going to happen. Or else we do not accommodate them at all, which means we stop sanctifying the Other and rediscover our neighbors.
Jean Raspail will be sorely missed by all Frenchmen and other Europeans who refuse to go gently into the multicultural night.
There couldn’t be a better time in world history, as the heathen hordes (of various hues!) run wild in the streets of the civilized world, erasing history and attempting to silence anyone who disagrees with them through intimidation and fear, to read The Camp of the Saints.
The Washington DC based Niskanen Center is sad to report that between Trump’s policies and the Chinese Virus the refugee numbers for fiscal year 2020 have shrunk to unimaginably low numbers.
I know it seems like an eternity ago when the President set the refugee admission ceiling for fiscal year 2020 at 18,000 the lowest ceiling ever proposed by any President since the Refugee Admissions Program became law in 1980.
The fiscal year ends on September 30th so there is no chance for any serious recovery of the numbers as the virus is not going away and there are only a little over 90 days before the year ends. We will be watching however as September rolls around and Donald Trump sets the ceiling for FY2021!
Here is the Niskanen Center described at Wikipedia as being “aligned with left-libertarian causes.” Read about themand see what we are up against (as if extreme fake humanitarian Leftists weren’t enough of a problem).
These types are always trumpeting that the refugee program has gotten wide support on both sides of the aisle, but they never say that most Republicans who back the program do so at the behest of Chambers of Commerce and big companies looking for cheap legal labor!
2020 Sees Record Low Refugee Resettlement From COVID-19 and Previous Policy
As of World Refugee Day 2020 [June 20th—ed], the U.S. has resettled 7,684 refugees in fiscal year 2020,which began in October 2019. Since the suspension of the program, the U.S. resettled just 304 emergency cases. To compare, the FY 2019 program resettled nearly 20,000 refugees through mid-June — and that was still historically low given resettlement standards over the decades.
But the low admissions totals can’t just be considered a result of COVID-19 suspensions. President Trump limited resettlement to just 18,000 slots this year — the lowest ever. And as we detailedlast year, a variety of changes to U.S. refugee policy would make reaching even the 18,000 mark highly difficult without the pandemic.
I published this mostly for their handy graph below (and because I want you to know about another well-funded swamp creature working against President Trump).
Here is just a bit of what Wikipedia says about the Niskanen Centerthat spun off from the Cato Institute when the Koch Brothers took control of Cato.
The Niskanen Center is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates environmentalism, immigration reform, civil liberties, and strengthening social insurance based on market principles. The center is named after William A. Niskanen, an economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan. The Center states that its “main audience is Washington insiders,” and characterizes itself as a moderate think tank.
In a puff-piece story from Idaho about how the state celebrated World Refugee Day, a refugee from the DR Congo trumpets his support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Every corner we look, they are there,” Wangoi said, referring to “people with racism and hatred in their hearts.”
You know this is insane! Are we importing more angry Africans?
According to the Refugee Processing Center, the US State Department and its contractors have ‘welcomed’ 61,000 refugees (as of yesterday!) from the DR Congo since President Obama said we were admitting 50,000 over 5 years.
The UN has sent 61,000 as of yesterday and that is only the Africans from the DR Congo.
Screenshot of RPC data: 61,000 potentially angry Congolese admitted to the US in last seven years!
The DR Congolese are still coming in in large numbers during the Trump Administration. The only states that did not receive DR Congolese are West Virginia and Wyoming.
Here is the story from Idaho that has me steamed this morning!
Idaho refugees celebrate virtual World Refugee Day
This year, the World Refugee Day celebration was held virtually on Saturday, in an effort to protect the Treasure Valley community from the spread of COVID-19. The change was to protect the community and also the refugees who work in health care, on the front lines battling the pandemic’s spread in the valley.
The refugee speakers and performers were asked to submit videos of themselves to celebration organizers, who then compiled them into one presentation.
[….]
Georgette Siqueiros, community engagement coordinator for IRC Boise, said the World Refugee Day committee had been planning for how to organize the virtual celebration for several weeks ahead of the event.
Georgette Siqueiros works for “moneybags Miliband” of the International Rescue Committee
The video featured seven community speakers and several performances from refugee performance groups.
Siqueiros said the goal of the event was to celebrate the refugee community and the refugees who are in the health care industry and to acknowledge the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Patrick Wangoi, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, spoke in the virtual celebration about the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and his experience with racism in Boise.
Did Wangoi report the incident to the police—white guys, confederate flag, pick up truck. Hmmmm?
“Every corner we look, they are there,” Wangoi said, referring to “people with racism and hatred in their hearts.”
“Their message is, ‘You are not wanted,’” he said. “They wish every black person would disappear.”
Wangoi recalled an incident when he was followed by a group of white teenagers carrying confederate flags in their pickup truck.
He said the group stood outside his house for more than an hour.
“I wonder, if those young boys had a gun, where would I be today?” Wangoi said.
Wangoi ended his video with a call to action for people to be anti-racist.
If you are interested, look around on the internet and you will see that Wangoi is a refugee star in Boise and has done very well for a supposedly discriminated-against black man.
Undoing this damage will be a heavy lift for whoever next occupies the Oval Office, but there is some cause for optimism.
According to the Refugee Processing Center, the US State Department and its contractors have ‘welcomed’ 61,000 refugees (as of yesterday!) from the DR Congo since
