Oh gosh! This issue doesn’t seem to go away. Regular readers know that a rumor got started some weeks back about Obama’s use of ERMA funds ($20 million) for Gaza relief. The rumor, in a nutshell, is that the money was for transporting a 100,000 Palestinians to the US. I first reported on the ERMA funds here, and Judy did an excellent job of tracking the full story down here. For more on ERMA generally, go here and scroll down the table of contents.
There are no plans at this time to bring thousands of Palestinian “refugees” to the US. As a matter of fact, as Judy has pointed out here and here, the reason that 50 years later the Palestinians are kept as refugees is to fuel the never-ending Arab hatred toward Israel. The Arab countries could have long ago brought peace to the Middle East by absorbing their fellow Arabs, the Palestinians. They don’t want to, and if we started moving Palestinians in large numbers to the West, they would scream bloody murder.
However, I wouldn’t stake my reputation on what the Obama Administration might try to do. We could read tomorrow that they are going to do that and I would have to eat my words!
That said, there are a few Palestinians getting into the US. We have not taken Palestinians in the refugee program prior to 2008. However, 9 Palestinians are in the database (unpublished) for Refugee Admissions for 2008. That is out of over 60,000 refugees resettled from around the world.
Also, in a very curious situation that I reported on January 15th of this year, we were bringing Palestinians to the US presumably for a short period of time during the latest war there. These Palestinians are babies and children who are US citizens! Their parents are not, and CAIR is helping them. I speculated that these children may have somehow been born in the US and are thus so-called ‘anchor babies’ So this is something to keep a close eye on.
In a case where we could potentially bring Palestinians to the US, the Palestinians have been living in Iraq and are now in camps along the Iraq/Syria border. There is quite a lobbying campaign going on to resettle them in the West. A recent report on this group is here. Notice that they are speaking the truth and condemning Arab countries for not helping them and keeping them and all Palestinians in limbo.
That’s all I know of, so far. But, I wanted to be sure our readers knew there are some Palestinians (a small number) coming as refugees and there is a potential for those Iraqi Palestinians I mentioned to be resettled here, they number in the hundreds, at most a thousand or two.