I think it has dawned on them that the Supreme Court, in writing refugee law, has just exploded the decades-long concept that a ceiling is a CEILING. Here they predict that it will be a refugee free-for-all for months to come. Effectively they are saying there is NO ceiling (no longer even Obama’s 110,000) in place at least until October!
I was interested to see that Eric Schwartz is back…..
From Bloomberg:
The refugee ban will actually add more refugees.
Schwartz was Obama’s first Asst. Sec.of State for PRM (Anne Richard’s predecessor). He is now head honcho of this pro-refugee lobbying group. RI is not a resettlement contractor. https://www.refugeesinternational.org/people/
Trump used his power to reduce refugee entries for the current fiscal year to 50,000 from the target of 110,000 set by President Barack Obama. But the number of refugees who enter the U.S. is likely to end up higher. Under the Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling, refugees who have “bona fide” ties to the country may be admitted, and they don’t count as part of the cap.
Immigration advocates say that more than half of all refugees admitted each year have such ties. So even though the U.S is just days away from hitting the 50,000 figure, many more refugees may be entering the country while the 120-day ban is in effect.
“In all likelihood, I would expect we would end up with more than 50,000 this year,” said Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International and former assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. “Once we get to 50,000 there will inevitably be some number of refugees that meet the ‘bona-fide’ test and if the administration monkeys around with that by trying to slow down approvals, then they’ll be in violation of the court decision.”
More here. So you can tell where they are going with this…
We haven’t written much about Refugees Internationalin the last few years (ever since Ken Bacon of Clinton/Lewinsky/Linda Tripp fame died while heading this organization).
We have written several important posts on Soros groupie Schwartz, see here.
This post is filed in my new category, ‘Supreme Court’which will include all posts related to the decision handed down last week.
Normally an article about a Refugee lobbying group in Washington coming out to a rural area to show a “climate refugee” film wouldn’t be of much interest. However, this one caught my eye because the film was being promoted in Wyoming.
New readers need to know that Wyoming is the only state in the union that does not participate in refugee resettlement; and I have no idea how they got out of it in the first place. My suspicions have always centered around the fact that former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson argued against the bill when it was first introduced by Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden in 1979 and perhaps he was able to keep his home state free of the costly-to-taxpayers program.
Refugees may arrive as secondary migrants to Wyoming, but I suspect the number is very small. That is why it was amusing to me to see the rich people in Jackson Hole being ‘educated’ by Refugees International. Refugees International (RI) is NOT a resettlement agency/contractor, yet they travel around the world looking at refugees, writing reports and mucking around in the refugee lobbying scene in Washington. Perhaps they are involved with intelligence gathering (don’t laugh, some of these NGOs have a good cover for doing just that!).
Linda Tripp sued Kenneth Bacon and won.
We wrote about RI a lot a few years ago when they were headed by the now deceased Ken Bacon. ‘Old heads’ will remember that Bacon’s claim to fame was that he illegally released Linda Tripp’s personnel file at the Pentagon in 1998 during Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
This brings me to the article that caught my eye at Public News Service where we are told RI board memberand Jackson resident, Tatiana Maxwell, showed the film and talked to the press. (Emphasis below is mine)
JACKSON, Wyo. – There’s a warning about a new kind of refugee crisis – one connected to a changing climate. Stories about how climate-related disasters are displacing people around the world are featured in a new film that was shown in Jackson on Sunday. The documentary comes from Refugees International, a nonprofit that works to end displacement crises worldwide.
Refugees International board member Tatiana Maxwell lives in Wyoming, which she admits feels far away from the natural disasters documented by the film – disasters increasing in force and frequency around the world.
“Wyoming has had its own share of refugees coming from different places,” she said. “There will be 250 million people who are going to have to find someplace else to live by 2050.
Really? Wyoming has had its own share??? And, then this, we are going to clear out West Africa and bring them to the rich communities in the west—like Jackson Hole? Not! Just a reminder Kennedy didn’t bring them to Hyannis either, and Biden’s Delaware gets only a tiny handful of refugees!
“This is affecting 20 million people, for instance, in West Africa,” she said. “It’s highly unlikely they’re going to be able to continue to live there. They don’t want to move, but it’s become increasingly impossible for them to live there.”
[….]
Maxwell added that their goal is to make sure people have safe places to live, not to debate the politics of climate change.
So who is Tatiana Maxwell? I didn’t find much, but she and her husband Paul (it appears he may be an energy company executive) are big donors to RI (here).
Their very own special refugee—-the American Taliban!
Do you remember not long after 911, a Taliban spokesman was traveling America to defend the Taliban in Afghanistan? He became known as the American Taliban and got a slot at Yale! His name is Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi and he was here as a representative of Mullah Omar. I don’t know what happened to him after his highly publicized admission to Yale, but guess who helped fund him—Paul and Tatiana Maxwell of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
How is it that people like Hashemi ‘find their way’ to elite neighborhoods?
See this very informative piece from 2006 at Greater Yellowstone entitled ‘Taliban in Jackson Hole’. Author Daryl Hunter is not very kind to Maxwell. Hashemi may be one of the few “refugees” to pass through Wyoming in many years!
By now most Americans have heard about Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Taliban’s former ambassador-at-large, who is now attending Yale, his education funded by the International Education Foundation, which was created for Hashemi by Jackson Hole residents Mike Hoover, an adventure film maker, Paul and Tatiana Maxwell, and Jackson Attorney Bob Schuster.
Hunter reports that John Fund wrote about Hashemi’s special treatment by Yale:
In his article “Jihadi Turns Bulldog,” printed in the Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal, John Fund wrote about how, during Hashemi’s spring 2001 Taliban public relations blitz, Hashemi visited the Wall Street Journal and told Fund that Osama bin Laden was a “guest” of his government and it hadn’t been proven that bin Laden was linked to any terrorist acts. Hashemi said that if the embassy bombings were terrorist acts, then so was the Clinton administration’s cruise missiles attack in his country in an attempt to kill bin Laden. “You killed 19 innocent people.”
“I felt I had looked into the face of evil,” Fund wrote after Rahmatullah defended the Taliban’s treatment of women and said he hadn’t seen any evidence that their “guest” Osama bin Laden was a terrorist.
In the spring of 2004, Hoover proposed to Hashemi the possibility of attending college in the United States. Hashemi jumped at the opportunity to leave Pakistan to attend school in the U.S.
The Times reported that Bob Schuster, a Yale alum, “called the [Yale] provost’s office to ask how an ex-Taliban envoy with a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree might go about applying to one of the world’s top universities.” Richard Shaw, dean at Yale, was intrigued and suggested that Rahmatullah come to New Haven for an interview. Shaw said the admissions office once had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status. “We lost him to Harvard,” he says in the Times. “I didn’t want that to happen again.”
[….]
Fund summarizes: “I don’t believe Mr. Rahmatullah had direct knowledge of the 9/11 plot, and I don’t think he has ever killed anyone. I can appreciate that he is trying to rebuild his life. But he willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. That he was 22 at the time is little of an excuse. There are many poor, bright students American and foreign alike who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them? That’s a question Yale alumni should ask when their alma mater comes looking for contributions.”
There is a lot more, especially read about the author’s speculation about how it is that western women could possibly support anything the Taliban does in light of how they treat women in Afghanistan which really is the whole point Hunter makes in his piece.
See our Climate Refugees category for more on how the Left is pushing this newest excuse to open borders worldwide.
Normally an article about a Refugee lobbying group in Washington coming out to a rural area to show a “climate refugee” film wouldn’t be of much interest. However, this one caught my eye because the film was being promoted in Wyoming.
