That is the question the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Mark Krikorian, asked in a piece on the Kentucky Iraqi alleged terrorist arrest yesterday.  As Iraq becomes safer, we take more and more refugees!  Does that make sense?

The bigger question is why are we taking refugees from Iraq at all? Resettlement to the United States should be used only as the absolute last resort for people who will surely be killed if they stay where they are and who have nowhere else — nowhere whatsoever — to go. There are lots of Arab countries where Iraqis have been going for some time, notably Syria and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia’s a big, empty place right next door. The State Department sort of followed that policy for the first few years of our Mesopotamian adventure, with fewer that 200 Iraqi refugees admitted in FY 2006 and about 1,600 in FY 2007. But the following year the number ballooned to nearly 14,000, and it’s been more than 18,000 for each of the past two years. So, as things have gotten less dangerous in Iraq, we’ve begun importing more refugees.

Just a reminder!  There is the war model we learned about when a 1999 National War College report was declassified. It’s analogous to never letting a good crisis go to waste.  Never let a good war go to waste—use it to bring more immigrants to America while getting paid for it!

So do we all!

Update June 2nd:  AP has more on the fingerprint screw-up, here.

The Volokh Conspiracy is a blog comprised of mostly law professors and they are asking some very good questions about how the Iraqi refugees accused of terrorism in Kentucky managed to slip through the cracks.   Read our two posts this morning here and here first.

Questions about Iraqi arrests and domestic terrorism:

The most important is: What went wrong in the vetting of these two refugee applicants? Were there clues in the terrorist-refugees’ background that we failed to pick up on? Did they use forged documents to win refugee status? Were they aided by Iraqi terror groups to enter the United States? And why did the DHS fingerprint program fail? The FBI was able to match one refugee’s latent fingerprints to DOD’s records from a 2005 IED bombing, but it did that in 2011, as part of a criminal investigation. Why didn’t DHS find the same latent fingerprints in 2009, before it admitted the terrorist-refugee? Did DOD withhold the prints from DHS on “privacy” and other legal grounds? Or did the matching process simply fail for technical reasons? Has the Iraq refugee program been suspended or revised in light of the ability of terrorists to scam it?

And here I was very glad (not in the sense of happy!) to see the testimony of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on May 12th (linked in here) in which they are asking for more Iraqis (and Rohingyas too) to be resettled!   We have a whole category (with 97 posts!) on Burmese Muslims known as Rohingyas which we initially refused to resettle because of possible terror links, but it sure looks like the US State Department has the door wide open now and the Bishops are lobbying for more!

These are vital questions, because we continue to admit large numbers of Iraqis as refugees (the Conference of Catholic Bishops says this year’s target is another 18,000 Iraqi admissions to the US — a number that it thinks is too low but one that would increase the total number of Iraqi refugees in this country by 40%). And, as the LA Times notes, “FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a House hearing in February that he had information that Al Qaeda in Iraq may have used the [US refugee program’s] weaknesses to send operatives to the U.S.” What are we doing to fix those weaknesses? And if we can’t fix them, why are we continuing to make a priority of Iraqi refugee admissions?

Enterprising reporters could start with asking those questions of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) one of the leading contractors pushing the Iraqi refugee resettlement.  Apparently the IRC latched onto a model described in a declassified 1999 National War College Report on the Bosnian War using the war as an excuse to get more supposed “refugees” into the US.   In 1999 their cash flow was running low so they needed more bodies to resettle (your tax dollars pay the contractors by the head to resettle refugees).

Oh, and one more hint for enterprising reporters (if you are out there!), ask Samantha Power in the White House.  Obama made her Iraqi refugee czar when he took office!

I almost forgot, in 2009 John Podesta’s Center for American Progress was telling Obama to airlift 100,000 Iraqis to the US, here.   It’s the same old George Soros groupies!