US Refugee Program a Chaotic Mess as Afghans Flood the Zone

So good ol’ Joe isn’t going to be able to reach his 125,000 refugee admissions ceiling the way things are going.  (Most of the arriving Afghans are not legitimate refugees.)

A couple of weeks ago I checked the numbers at the severely limited Refugee Processing Center data base and noted that in the first month of the new fiscal year (October), Biden had admitted only 400 refugees from parts of the world other than Afghanistan.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not crying about that paltry number, but I am really amazed by the dearth of criticism from the contractors and their leftist media chorus.  Oh, they are critical, but the tone of their criticism is muted apparently to protect their man in the White House, you know, the guy who got 81 million votes!

Muslim Afghans crowd out other refugees

However, I suspect there is one group of Americans who are jumping for joy and that would be CAIR members and other Islamists because the refugee program is not admitting a wide variety of ‘persecuted’ other religions, namely Christians, as the Afghans (demanding stuff) are virtually all Muslims.

(See the Center for Immigration Studies 2021 Refugee Resettlement Roundup and note that we are no longer permitted to see data on the religions of refugees.  We can’t entirely blame Biden for that since it was the Trump administration that closed much of the data base to the public.)

So, I didn’t get around to writing my post on the Biden refugee slowdown, but Vox did and I am posting it here because I doubt many of you bother reading Vox.  I don’t either, but it appeared in my alerts, so here it is below.

First, however, you might be amused to see what Vox said about me in 2017:

For a good laugh! Vox calls my 2015 Youtube video a "bizarro rant" and makes my day

Why Biden is struggling to revive the US refugee program

After the US refugee program hit historic lows during Donald Trump’s administration, President Joe Biden attempted to revive the program by raising the annual cap on admissions to 125,000.

Despite these efforts, the US is still not taking in more refugees.

Tens of thousands of Afghans have arrived in the US since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The urgent need — and the lasting damage done by the Trump administration — has overtaxed a refugee program that has slowed to a crawl in recent months.

In fiscal year 2021, which ended in September, the US resettled the lowest number of refugees in the history of its refugee program. Recently, the State Department reported the US resettled just 401 refugees in October, down from 3,774 the month before, one month after Biden’s new cap went into effect.

A State Department spokesperson told Vox that the agency had temporarily halted refugee admissions as of October 29 through January 11, 2022, with some exceptions.

At the current pace, the US won’t come within striking distance of the 125,000 cap by the end of the fiscal year — and, given the State Department’s new refugee guidance, it’s unlikely that refugee agencies will be able to expand capacity to ramp up that pace soon.

There are legitimate reasons why the recent resettlement numbers are so low. The US government and refugee agencies have been primarily focused on resettling Afghans who fled their home country amid the US withdrawal. And the entire refugee apparatus — from the federal officials who assess refugee claims to the agencies that help with resettlement — shrank significantly during the Trump administration due to severe funding cuts.  [Nah!  I told you here that they all didn’t take a financial “beating.” —ed]

About 70,000 Afghans have been admitted to the US on “parole,” a temporary form of humanitarian relief that allows them to apply for work permits and shields them from deportation for a period of two years.  [Then what???—ed]

Keep reading and look around at news stories (my inbox is full of them) on the refugee program and how the Afghan flood has created chaos especially as housing is limited, jobs are limited and welfare is limited and the contractors are scrambling to cope with the chaos Biden (their man) has handed them.

For new readers, here are the contractors that monopolize all refugee resettlement in America:

Refugee Resettlement Contractor: We took a “beating” under Trump!

Darn! It is comments like that which will force me out of semi-retirement because no one in the media ever calls them on this crap!

Thanks to a reader for sending me this news from CNN that appeared in a few media outlets around the country, here at CBS 58 in Milwaukee.

But, before I give you the money quote, pay attention to this story.  The refugee contractors have long wanted to see a private refugee sponsorship program set up as a way to increase the numbers of ‘refugees’ admitted to the US.

The private sponsors would be in addition to their paid work as government resettlement contractors.

The massive number of Biden’s Afghans cannot be accommodated under the present system so this trial run at finding private sponsors for thousands of families outside the present system could be just the ticket they have long hankered for.

HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield

Note too that Afghans could be placed anywhere, and that the long understood one hundred mile radius of an approved refugee resettlement site will no longer apply.

Anyway, here is what Mark Hetfield  of HIAS, Inc (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) says and continues to say about how the Trump administration decimated the contractor system.

It just is not true!

 

But after four years of historic low arrivals under the Trump administration, agencies had to close some of their offices around the country, limiting where refugees can be relocated — a significant hurdle at a time when housing options are already hard to come by.

“We just didn’t have the capacity after the beating we took under the Trump administration,” said Mark Hetfield, the president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society did NOT take a beating under Trump as you can see from data at USA Spending!

In fact, Trump upped their income from early years of the Obama Administration.

 

First year under Obama:

First year under Trump:

 

Last full Trump year:

You could actually say that Trump nearly doubled the federal dole to HIAS from Obama’s early years.

But, now, they are in the money as Biden has gifted them just about $50 million of your tax dollars for their charitable (ha!) good works.

Apparently salaries did not suffer under Trump either!

From HIAS 2020 Form 990 (a Trump year!):