Fiscal year 2020 began on October first, but President Trump only signed the final determination two days ago.
The primary reason given for the lower than normal number is that there exists a massive backlog of asylum claims for those who are already in the country and are insisting they are refugees too!
Suffice it to say the wailing in the refugee industry has begun!
Their PR machines have been working overtime for 4 weeks in an attempt to get the President to change his mind on the 18,000 cap announced in the closing days of September.
Why?
Because refugees chosen by the UN and flown-in represent paying clients that keep the nine major contractors afloat. Asylum seekers, may eventually seek the ‘services’ of the contractors, but there is no per head grant money coming with them (at least not yet!).
If the ‘humanitarians’ are looking for immigrants to love and help, there are plenty of asylum seekers they could help with their own private charitable donations, right—not to mention poor and vulnerable Americans!
The United Nations quickly put out a statementsaying the UN High Commissioner for refugees is “troubled” by the final decision by the US government to admit ‘only’ 18,000 third world refugees over the next 11 months.
Inhumane Presidential Determination Banning Refugees is Signed
Historic low admissions goal will dismantle the life-saving refugee program and America’s legacy of welcome.
New York City–Last night President Trump signed his discriminatory and cruel Fiscal Year 2020 refugee admissions goalthat will cap admissions at 18,000 and limit arrivals based on category and country of origin. The signing of the presidential determination will now end the unprecedented moratorium on refugee arrivals that has blocked refugees from arriving in the United States since October 1st of this year.
CWS President and CEO Rev. John L. McCullough issued the following statement:
“President Trump has ripped our country’s welcome mat out from under the most at-risk refugees in the world, people we have pledged to protect. The dire consequences of this refugee ban will last for years if not decades to come as the refugee resettlement program is dismantled and our nation’s legacy of compassion and welcome is finally snuffed out.
Families who have waited years to be reunited have little hope of ever being together again. Refugee communities within the U.S. will lose their support systems as the infrastructure in place to support them disappears.
“While we are thankful that some refugees who have had their cases put on hold while we awaited this policy to be signed will now be able to arrive, the number of people who will find protection is tragically low and simply unacceptable. Thousands of lives are at stake. People of faith across the nation implore Congress to step in and block the destruction of the life-saving refugee resettlement program, and restore it to historic norms before it is too late.”
Thanks to a reader for sending me the State Department’s press announcementyesterday!
Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2020
President Trump signed the Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2020, following consultations with Congress conducted by the State Department, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Our Departments will work closely to implement the President’s program, which provides for the resettlement of up to 18,000 refugees in the United States this fiscal year.
America’s support for refugees and other displaced people extends well beyond our immigration system. It includes diplomatic efforts around the world to find solutions to crises, like our support for the legitimate government in Venezuela against Maduro’s tyranny. Addressing the core problems that drive refugees away from their homes helps more people more rapidly than resettling them in the United States.
Keep refugees close to home until they can return and rebuild their countries!
Our support for displaced people also takes the form humanitarian assistance, and in Fiscal Year 2019 the United States contributed nearly $9.3 billion to supporting crisis response globally, the largest contribution of any country in the world.Helping displaced people as close to their homes as possible better facilitates their eventual safe and voluntary return. Their efforts to rebuild their communities help restore affected areas to stability, which is always in America’s interest.
[….]
Indeed, the security and humanitarian crisis along our southern border has contributed to a burden on our immigration system that must be alleviated before we can again resettle large numbers of refugees. Therefore, prioritizing the cases of those already in our country is simply a matter of common sense.The diplomatic agreements the United States has reached with our Western Hemisphere neighbors to address illegal immigration and border security will allow us to refocus resources on reducing the current backlog of asylum cases that now encompasses more than an estimated one million individuals.
One thing that never made sense to me is the fact that supposedly the contractors are so worried about saving refugees and yet are at the border egging-on more economic migrants to come in illegally.
If your concern is truly for refugees and their well-being, it makes no sense that one would support importing competition for refugee admissions. But it makes all the sense in the world if your goal is to change America by changing the people and that begins with hauling in more future Democrat voters.
Get the report!
One of the most useful documents available on the program each year is the report to Congress that accompanies the Presidential Determination. For serious students of the US Refugee Admissions Program it is worth reading and saving.
I admit I haven’t read it all yet, but will! Here are a couple of charts that jumped out at me. They support the President’s assertion that asylum claims are swamping the system (many will turn out to be illegitimate).
(For newbies, asylum seekers get here on their own and say they will be persecuted if returned to their home country. They go through one of two legal processes and if determined to have a legitimate claim to refugee status they are given all the welfare goodies and services that refugees flown-in receive.)
Incredible! Look at the column on asylum grants!
And, then below see the charts on the backlog in the two systems available for migrants to claim asylum (to say they are refugees). Many of these migrants came across our southern border, applied for asylum and disappeared!
So what happened to considering the views of citizens when placing refugees?
I see no reference in either the statement from the White House on Friday or from Secretary Pompeo about local communities and state governments having any say in the placement of refugees as the President had announced on September 26th, see here.
Remember the story: concern was raised when three Afghan military trainees went AWOL in Massachusetts.
Maj. Jan Mohammad Arash, 48, Capt. Mohammad Nasir Askarzada, 18, and Capt. Noorullah Aminyar, 20. (not sure in which order!) http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/missing-afghan-soldiers-found-at-canadian-border-near-niagara-falls/question-4510091/
The first one to go before an immigration judge has been denied refugee protection in the US. He says he fears the Taliban. Well, he shouldn’t! According to Obama and his State Department the Taliban is not a terrorist group!
BUFFALO (AP) — An immigration judge denied asylum Friday for an Afghan military officer who sneaked away from a U.S. training exercise in Massachusetts to avoid returning to Afghanistan, where he said he had been threatened by the Taliban.
The judge ruled that Maj. Jan Arash did not qualify for certain protections because the Taliban is not a government, his lawyer said, nor had he proven that he would be persecuted, rather than legally prosecuted, by the Afghan government.
“If he gets deported and hung for desertion, that’s OK under the law,” attorney Matthew Borowski said.
“We have no choice but to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals,” the attorney said. The process could take several months.
In the meantime, Arash will continue to be held at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center, where the asylum case was heard.
Arash is one of three Afghan military officers who were detained in September after being denied entry into Canada, where they had planned to seek refugee status.
[….]
The three soldiers took a cab more than 500 miles from Massachusetts to the Canadian border in Niagara Falls while in the United States for a training exercise at Joint Base Cape Cod. In interviews with The Associated Press shortly after they were detained, they described being targeted by the Taliban because of their work with U.S. soldiers.
If granted asylum, Arash will be eligible for the Cadillac treatment all refugees receive—virtually all forms of welfare, healthcare, job counseling and training, etc. by one of the hundreds of federal contractors operating in over 180 cities in the US. He would be able to bring his family from Afghanistan to join him.
Here is Yahoo News filling us in on one of the latest projects of the Open Borders movement—getting Russian gays accepted in the US as refugees.
We have written about this ‘project’ previously here and here.
Aaron Morris, Legal Director Immigration Equality says his legal team has been very successful in getting grants of asylum for their Russian clients. Photo and bio: http://immigrationequality.org/our-staff/aaron-morris/
There are no firm statistics on the number of gay Russian asylum seekers; U.S. government agencies that handle applications do not report such details. However, the Department of Homeland Security’s latest figures show that overall applications for asylum by Russians totaled 969 in the 2014 fiscal year, up 34 percent from 2012.
To get an application approved, an asylum seeker must present a convincing case that he or she has a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country. Russia’s anti-gay policies and its record of anti-gay violence are factors that could strengthen an individual’s case.
[….]
Aaron Morris, Immigration Equality’s legal director, said most of the recent asylum inquiries came from gay men in their 20s and 30s who had been targeted by anti-gay attacks, while only a handful have come from gays or lesbians raising children.
We learn that in a small number of cities there are programs in place to help the Russian LGBT visa-holders submit their claims for asylum with lots of lawyers ready to help. However, since the asylum seekers can’t legally work, obtaining housing and other living expenses is a problem.
The article does mention that lobbying efforts are underway at the US State Department to get Russian gays and lesbians designated as a refugee class which would mean we would go fetch them and bring them to the US rather than the present situation where they must get themselves here and apply for asylum. If they were refugees chosen abroad, they would get all sorts of social services right off the bat.
Searching around the world wide web one can find much being done in Tanzania and Africa generally in the mental health field. http://www.gmhi.org/
An appeals court in Richmond, Virginia has granted asylum to a man who says his treatment for mental health problems in Tanzania amounted to persecution. The general understanding of what constitutes a legitimate claim for asylum usually contains these elements:
The refugee/asylum seeker must demonstrate a “well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
No doubt the applicant in this case was fearful, but his complaint does not fit the definition. There is, however, an ambitious movement afoot by immigration lawyers to expand the definition beyond its original intent. One could conclude from this case that anyone treated badly for myriad reasons in their home country was eligible for asylum if they could get themselves into the US in order to apply.
One thing that struck me in this news is that the man was denied in lower courts and the Court of Appeals split, so one of the judges wasn’t buying the story and there must be much more to this case then we are being told.
RICHMOND, Va., Jan. 22 (UPI) — A federal appellate court panel has ruled a bipolar man who said he was repeatedly tortured in Tanzania should qualify for asylum in the United States.
The Homeland Security Department tried to deport Tumaini Temu back to Tanzania in 2010, four years after his temporary visa expired. [For what reason did we originally grant him a temporary visa to get into the US?—ed]
Temu applied for asylum and claimed he was persecuted in his home country due to his mental illness, which is considered demon possession in Tanzania, Courthouse News Service reported.
An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals denied his application, but a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., reversed the decision on a split vote.
[….]
Temu came to the United States after his family rejected him, and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Get ready for a parade of crazy asylum-seeking Tanzanians in need of meds through Obamacare! And, just a reminder, once granted asylum these new “refugees” are given access to all of the social services (welfare programs) available to refugees.
Endnote: I just now searched around for more on the treatment of mental health problems in Tanzania and in Africa generally and note that there is much happening there, and throughout Africa, to help those with mental illnesses. We don’t need to be moving them to America!
See our Health issues category (here) for more on refugee mental health problems.
This is an update of a story we posted here,here, and here in August.
Skipping through the horror stories and dreadful photos to soften you up toward Mexican illegal aliens, here are some of the important bits of the article in the New York Daily News (hat tip: Ed).
We do have a heart—this situation is horrific for those caught in the trap of Mexican drug cartels.
But, the bottomline is that asylum protection was never intended to protect people from crimes that their own government should be protecting them from. Can you imagine how much worse our border would become (yes it could be worse!) if fleeing from drug cartels (or other such criminal activity) became a legitimate reason to grant asylum in the US.
Six paragraphs after the opening horror story we learn (emphasis mine):
According to U.S. Department of Homeland Security figures, more than 23,000 Mexicans sought political asylum in the first nine months of this year, quadruple the number of requests made in 2009. The spiraling number of pleas for entry is driven by the exponential growth of cartel terrorism against everyday villagers and townspeople, say immigrants and human rights groups.
Another horror story then this:
More than 90 percent of Mexican asylum requests are denied by immigration judgeswho must adhere to a strict legal standard in a process that may drag out for months and years. Applicants must show “credible fear” of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality or membership in a social group.
A pitch to fix our “dysfunctional immigration system?” Are we to find a way to bring this group of aliens to the US? To create some new category of protection? Is that what Nunez is saying? Or, has the New York Daily News reporter used Nunez’s words to imply that is what we should conclude?
Peter Nunez
Despite the extremely low percentage of approved asylum petitions, the issue has nonetheless become part of America’s divisive political discord on immigration issues.
“It’s another symptom of the dysfunctional immigration system we have,” said Peter Nunez,a former U.S. Attorney in San Diego and a high-ranking member of the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush.
“These people don’t have a legitimate claim,” he told The News. “They’re not being persecuted by their government. They should seek the help of authorities for public safety claims.”
What about claims that the government and law enforcement are corrupted by powerful, billion-dollar cartels?
“That doesn’t qualify them for refugee status,” Nunez said. “It’s not the American government’s role to do what the Mexican government cannot do.”
These reportedly high detention figures need to be investigated (especially as they are being quoted by Soros’s/Norquist’s pal Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum. I’m guessing the largest numbers are because the aliens have been determined to be a safety risk or are on their way to deportation.
After requesting asylum, most Mexicans are locked up in federal detention centers, where they wait for a court hearing in the backlogged system.
Some are held because they have criminal backgrounds ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. Others have no one to vouch for them in the U.S., and so remain in custody.
On any given day, there are 31,800 detainees in more than 257 federal centers across the country, held for a variety of immigration issues, according to recent figures from the National Immigration Forum, a Washington-based nonprofit group.
Funny that the NY Daily News doesn’t mention that Nunez is chairman of the board at the Center for Immigration Studies, a leading immigration control group, and is thus on our side of the great divide.
