President Donald Trump honored a deal, he called it dumb, that Barack Obama made with the Australian government just before leaving office in 2016. The deal was that the US would ‘welcome’ illegal aliens that have been held in Australian offshore detention camps.
The APis reporting that the US part of the deal is almost done and by spring 1,100 of the detained, mostly Muslim men, will be settled in unknown towns and cities in the US.
But, a deal implies we get something from it, right?
Supposedly Australia is taking asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador who have made their way to Costa Rica. Costa Rica! Why are they our problem???
Here is the rub, I could only find a story or two from 2017 about 30 Central Americans being flown from Costa Rica to Australia. There might be more somewhere, but the media isn’t reporting it.
So we are getting over a thousand, mostly single men, and Australia gets a handful of ‘refugees’ that were already safe in Costa Rica!
Australia: Most of 1,100 refugees in US deal have resettled
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The United States is expected to have resettled more than 1,100 refugees by early next year under a deal President Donald Trump reluctantly honored with Australia, an Australian official said on Monday.
“New Americans” waiting for their ticket to your town!
President Barack Obama’s administration struck a deal in 2016 to accept up to 1,250 refugees from Iran, Bangladesh, Somalia and Myanmar whom Australia had banished to Pacific island camps.
Trump condemned the deal as “dumb” but agreed to honor the U.S. commitment, subject to “extreme vetting” of the refugees.
The United States has resettled 870 refugees since October 2017 and around 250 more have received provisional approval to make new homes in the United States, Home Affairs Department deputy secretary Marc Ablong told an Australian Senate committee.
While resettlement had been disrupted in recent months by the pandemic, Ablong said Australia expected the last of the refugees accepted by the United States to be resettled by March or April.
The resettlement deal “is operating very effectively to date,” Ablong said.
[….]
New Zealand’s offer to take 150 refugees a year has been refused while the United States continues to accept them.
[….]
Some see the U.S. resettlement deal as repayment for Australia agreeing to accept Honduran and Salvadoran refugees under a U.S.-led resettlement program from a camp in Costa Rica.
Other than an article or so in 2017, I have never seen the media report exactly how many Central Americans were sent to Australia from Costa Rica to ‘honor’ our part of the deal.
But, I repeat, why are Central Americans who are safe in a safe country, Costa Rica, our problem in the first place?
