Even Trump Wants to ‘Welcome’ Tens of Thousands of Refugees—the Afghans!

First, let me say, I haven’t been doing my usual extensive reading of refugee news (I am taking a break, or was taking a break!), so you won’t be getting any deep analysis, but I can’t ignore the breaking news.

I guess Trump didn’t absorb a word of what Hungary’s Viktor Orbán told him about migration jihad!

On top of the hundreds of thousands streaming into America across our borders now we will have the airlift of Afghanistan to America put on steroids, or at least that is what Biden is signaling.

They are truly changing America by changing the people and it couldn’t be more clear than right now.   

As for Trump, sometimes he doesn’t know when to shut up!

From Forbes:

Trump Endorses Prioritizing Afghan Refugees Amid Series Of Attacks On Biden

Former President Donald Trump on Monday endorsed the idea of taking in Afghan refugees who assisted the U.S. military and are now under threat as the Taliban takes control of the country, a departure from his long held stance on refugees that appears primarily aimed at attacking President Joe Biden.

[….]

The U.S. reportedly aims to relocate as many as 30,000 Afghans who are in the special immigrant visa application process, a small portion of the estimated 88,000 seeking entry, though the State and Defense Departments said Sunday they have evacuated fewer than 2,000 thus far.

[….]

Trump’s stance on the Afghan refugees represents a break with some of his closest allies, like former aide Stephen Miller, who, echoing Trump’s long-held anti-immigrant views, has spoken out against taking in Afghan refugees.

Here is Miller’s tweet.  He is right and Trump is wrong!

 

Refugee Contractors Heads Explode, Bash Biden

Meanwhile the Washington Post is reporting (via Religion News Service) that the State Department’s refugee resettlement contractors (paid by taxpayers on a per refugee client basis) are steaming mad over the debacle in Afghanistan.

They say Biden has moved too slowly to bring tens of thousands of Muslims out of Afghanistan to be placed in a town near you. (Like in Wisconsin where a Jewish resettlement contractor is jazzed to welcome Afghans.)

And, yes, they could very well end up in a town near you because housing is limited as America is being overrun.

From the Wapo:

Refugee aid groups criticize Biden for stumbles in evacuating ‘desperate’ Afghans

WASHINGTON (RNS) — As most Americans absorbed the shock of the Taliban’s full takeover of Afghanistan over the weekend, officials at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service followed the rapidly deteriorating situation with resignation, knowing it could have gone differently.

[….]

In May, leaders at LIRS, one of several faith-based agencies contracted with the U.S. government to resettle refugees in the United States, sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting it remove Afghan civilians (and their families) who have worked with the U.S. before its planned troop withdrawal.

Anyone familiar with the “bureaucratic maze” that is the country’s Special Immigrant Visa process knew the State Department visa office wouldn’t be agile enough to respond to the urgent need for evacuations, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of LIRS.

“We’ve been screaming from the rooftops for months now that we need to get these allies to Guam or another U.S. territory,” Vignarajah said.

[….]

In June, most of those organizations — including LIRS, World Relief, Church World Service, the Episcopal Church (which resettles refugees through Episcopal Migration Ministries) and HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) — urged President Joe Biden to implement plans to evacuate Afghan translators, soldiers, cultural advisers, embassy clerks and others who have worked with American armed forces, media or nonprofits and allies and to authorize as many SIVs as necessary to make that possible.

Keep reading, see what Mark Hetfield of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society says about the Biden administration and know that just in the last few days Hetfield was telling his people to press Secretary of State Antony Blinken to set the ceiling for refugees for the coming fiscal year at 125,000.

That would be 125,000 over and above the Special Immigrant Visas flown in from Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand coming across our borders.

The 125,000 would come from other Muslim countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Apropos of nothing…  Here is Hoochie Coochie Blinken—the man who helped bring us the Afghan disaster and will decide who your new neighbors will be!

God help us!

See my “trending” post….

Austria’s Afghan Refugee Problem: Will it be Our Problem Soon?

Advocates Admit Trump Refugee Level Likely for Remainder of FY2021, but…..

…..they expect Biden to be ready to roll with 125,000 impoverished third worlders moving to America permanently beginning on October first.

 

“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew.”

(Having figured out their messaging on the mess they have made angering their friends, Sec. of State Blinken blames it on President Trump)

 

The Associated Press makes every effort to gloss over the recent controversy about the refugee ceiling that put Biden and his administration in the dog house with refugee resettlement industry “advocates.”

Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken were at odds according to White House leakers. Blinken wanted to bring ’em in faster than Biden did.

They complain that the mean orange guy really screwed up the refugee program with demands for more robust vetting of refugees to weed out those with terror connections, or those lying about family members—a rampant form of fraud in refugee resettlement.  How dare he!

And, adding insult to injury, the nine contractors*** had to shrink their staffs during the Trump years because your tax dollars flowing into their coffers were cut by a few million bucks.

But all of that is going away thanks to Biden who recently dropped Trump’s plan for additional information to be required of ‘new Americans’ arriving as refugees and is going full-bore open borders—125,000 beginning October first.

From AP:

Refugees arriving in US unlikely to exceed cap set by Trump

SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Joe Biden, under political pressure, agreed to admit four times as many refugees this budget year as his predecessor did, but resettlement agencies concede the number actually allowed into the U.S. will be closer to the record-low cap of 15,000 set by former President Donald Trump.

Refugee advocates say they are grateful for the increase because it’s symbolically important to show the world the United States is back as a humanitarian leader at a time when the number of refugees worldwide is the highest since World War II. But they’re frustrated, too, because more refugees could have been admitted if Biden hadn’t dragged his feet.

Evangelicals led by Jenny Yang lobbying against Trump in 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/20/14580938/evangelicals-jenny-yang-refugees-gop-republican-immigrants

“About 10,000 to 15,000 is what we’re expecting,” said Jenny Yang of World Relief, adding that Biden’s inaction for months after taking office in January was “definitely problematic.”

“That delay meant not being able to process refugee applications for four months. We weren’t able to rebuild for four months, so it really was unfortunate,” Yang said.

As he looked to the midterm elections, supposedly Biden (rightly) feared that the public wouldn’t tolerate a huge refugee flow while the border was in crisis.

“To be clear: The asylum process at the southern border and the refugee process are completely separate immigration systems. Conflating the two constitutes caving to the politics of fear,” said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This is important, Blumenthal is right, do not conflate the US Refugee Admissions Program with the illegal aliens invading the southern border.

The 125,000 refugees proposed for FY2022 are in addition to the hundreds of thousands of supposed asylum seekers flooding into the country. 

The AP continues…..

Weeks later, on May 3, Biden raised the cap.

So far this year only about 2,500 refugees have arrived, with less than five months left before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

More than 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved to come to the United States, but thousands were disqualified under the narrow eligibility criteria Trump established in October when he set the low cap.

Blumenthal wants more refugees for Connecticut.  Here he is in 2015 with the Director of CAIR CT arguing for LESS security screening for Syrian refugees. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/10/07/update-who-was-that-man-over-senator-blumenthals-left-shoulder/

[….]

Before the Trump administration’s drastic cuts, the United States had admitted more refugees each year than all other countries combined under a program now 41 years old. 

It is Trump’s fault!

But a senior official familiar with Blinken’s thinking said it quickly became clear that the State Department offices responsible for refugee resettlement had been so gutted that they wouldn’t be able to process and absorb that number of refugees.

Biden’s got leakers….

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, described the situation as “aspiration meeting reality” and said Blinken reluctantly concluded that 62,500 wouldn’t be possible in the short term.

“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew,” Blinken told reporters this month.

The Trump bashers give short shrift to the China Virus as one explanation for the slowdown in their goals to change America as refugee travel was slowed worldwide.

Due to travel restrictions in and out of refugee processing sites worldwide, the U.S. suspended refugee arrivals from March 19 to July 29 of last year except for emergency cases. Only 11,800 refugees were admitted in the 2020 fiscal year, the lowest number in the history of the program.

[….]

The “sad truth” Biden warned when he finally set the target at 62,500 is that goal won’t be achieved.

Instead, the administration and advocates are working to fix the program by 2022 when Biden has promised to raise the ceiling to 125,000.

LOL! He dares not do otherwise now that he has experienced the wrath of the “advocates”—refugee placement contractors.

More here.

If Chairman Joe does admit 125,000 refugees in the coming fiscal year, it would be the highest admission number in the last 30 years.

Joe Biden Plans to Admit the Most Refugees in any One Year Since 1992

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients.  See Winchester, VA.

Foreigners First! is their motto!

NYT: Biden Himself Blocked Increased Refugee Admissions for the Year

Holy cow!  This story at the New York Times yesterday was revealing and that was because, first and foremost, it says to me that there is discord, and there are leakers willing to leak about that discord, inside the Biden/Harris administration!

The entire issue of refugee resettlement had gone into sleep-mode in recent months, so I’m surprised that the topic is now front and center, not so much because of refugee numbers per se, but because it is giving us a window into an extremely dysfunctional (back stabbing) administration.

Is Biden a racist?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am happy with the foot-dragging and flip-flopping, and I am happy to see so many Open borders pushers with their undies in a wad, but it is disquieting to see such an erratic decision-making process.

Not to mention, if Biden’s rationale is that he doesn’t want to piss-off more voters (or members of Congress) on immigration issues before the mid-term elections, that ship has sailed.

Everyone already knows he has unleashed the invasion.

We are being overrun by illegal aliens and the average American isn’t sitting out there saying, well, we can cut him some slack because at least he isn’t bringing in tens of thousands of legal refugees from across the entire globe.

See my post yesterday about how the border and the refugee admissions program have long ago been “conflated” in peoples’ minds.

Psaki Clears Up Refugee Admissions Confusion (NOT!)

 

Here is a bit of what the New York Times is saying in what is likely the first, hopefully not the last, reporting on the bloom-off-the-rose for Biden.  It is long, and likely only the wonkiest of refugee wonks will read it all.

Forgive me for my fixation on this, but I have never seen anything quite like this mess in all the years I’ve been writing about the US Refugee Program, and I especially love to see the Lefties at each others’ throats!

 

An Early Promise Broken: Inside Biden’s Reversal on Refugees

What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to President Biden.

(If Biden brings in fewer refugees than Trump did in a year, will they call Biden a “racist?”  Just wondering!)

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden.

Ha! Is it Blinken’s team doing the leaking?

In the meeting, on March 3, Mr. Blinken implored the president to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration and to allow tens of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing war, poverty and natural disasters into the United States, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

But Mr. Biden, already under intense political pressure because of the surge of migrant children at the border with Mexico, was unmoved. The attitude of the president during the meeting, according to one person to whom the conversation was later described, was, essentially: Why are you bothering me with this?

What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to the new occupant of the White House, according to an account of his decision making from more than a dozen Biden administration officials, refugee resettlement officials and others.

Mr. Biden was eager for the praise that would come from vastly increasing Mr. Trump’s record-low limit, people familiar with his thinking said, and he decided to increase the cap even earlier than the usual start of the fiscal year, Oct. 1.

If Chief of Staff Ron Klain thinks holding refugee numbers down will bring some bipartisanship in Congress and brownie points for the midterm elections, he has very seriously miscalculated.

But only weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, immigration and the border had already become major distractions from his efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and to persuade Congress to invest trillions of dollars into the economy — issues championed by aides like Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, as more central to his presidency.

[….]

The exchange on March 3 took place shortly after Mr. Biden had dispatched Mr. Blinken and two other cabinet secretaries to formally tell Congress that he would increase refugee admissions during the next six months to 62,500 people from the annual 15,000-person limit set by Mr. Trump.

Instead, the president undercut his emissaries and left hundreds of refugees in limbo for weeks.

For the next month and a half, Mr. Biden’s aides stalled, repeatedly telling reporters and refugee advocacy groups that the president still intended to follow through.

[….]

On Feb. 12, the president delivered on the specific commitment to Congress, pledging to resettle 62,500 refugees fleeing war and persecution at home. Mr. Blinken delivered the message to lawmakers along with Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, and Norris Cochran, the acting health secretary at the time.

Hetfield is surely the leader of the pack as he stirs the political pot and I’m guessing the ringleader in guiding the NYT reporters with the help of his sources in the State Department.

“They went there and presented a really thoughtful plan, and we were so thrilled,” said Mark J. Hetfield, the chief executive of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a resettlement agency.

“And then,” Mr. Hetfield said, “it just evaporated overnight.”

[….]

As the weeks stretched into months, it became clear that Mr. Biden’s presidency would not be the panacea some had thought.

 

The biggest knife-cut of all!  Biden wanted to stick with Stephen Miller‘s cap!

Instead of making good on his promise to significantly expand refugee entry into the United States, Mr. Biden was sticking to the cap engineered by Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.

“This reflects Team Biden’s awareness that the border flood will cause record midterm losses,” Mr. Miller tweeted, adding that if it were still up to him, “Refugee cap should be reduced to ZERO.”

The idea that Mr. Miller and Mr. Biden were in agreement about anything was anathema to most of the president’s supporters, many of whom flew into a rage.

[….]

By Friday evening, the White House was in full damage-control mode.

Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, held an emergency conference call with refugee advocates at 7:30 p.m., emphasizing that the administration would work to welcome in the refugees with haste.

That is enough to show you what a hash the administration has made of the refugee admissions program and immigration in general!

Continue reading here.

Is Biden a closet racist? 

I’ve wondered for over a decade why Biden’s Delaware never welcomed refugees in any numbers. 

Only a handful have ever been placed there and no one seems to know why.  It isn’t because it is a small state, because Rhode Island is smaller and has welcomed thousands more than Biden’s home state.

See my post from January 2020.

According to the US State Department data base at the Refugee Processing CenterDelaware has only ‘welcomed’ 171 refugees since the beginning of fiscal year 2003. (Data before 2003 is not easy to access.)

Well it is a small state you say!

It is twice the size of Rhode Island which took in 3,122 poor third worlders in the same time period.

Secretary of State Dodges and Weaves on Refugee Cap Kerfuffle

“President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity.”

(Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus)

 

Big mistake—they let Biden talk to the media!

You surely know by now that Chairman Joe blabbed to the media over the weekend that the reason he hasn’t moved on flying more of the third world to America via the US Refugee Admissions Program he helped create in 1979 is because the Administration has a crisis at the border and can’t do two things at once.

The primary agency of the federal government for refugee admission decisions is the US State Department.  Here we see that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is trying to clean things up, but he doesn’t seem to understand that he already approved the 62,500 cap increase for this fiscal year in February and it was sent to the Hill by the President via the State Department for consultation as the law requires.

The only thing missing to start the flow for these last two months was Biden’s signature.

As I mentioned on Saturday, Biden and Harris have made such a hash of the refugee program (okay by me!) that it begs the question—what else are they screwing up?

From ABC News:

Blinken defends Biden’s refugee cap, Afghanistan withdrawal in exclusive interview

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Biden administration amid a barrage of criticism from Democratic lawmakers and refugee advocates for maintaining a Trump-era limit on refugee admissions for now.

While President Joe Biden pledged to admit 125,000 refugees in the new fiscal year next fall, Blinken wouldn’t commit to a number, telling ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz, “Look, the president’s been clear about where he wants to go, but we have to be, you know, focused on what we’re able to do when we’re able to do it.”

That wait-and-see language from Blinken and the White House, citing the “decimated” state of the refugee resettlement program, enraged several prominent Democrats, as well as refugee resettlement agencies (aka the contractors***) who said they are ready to accept Biden’s pledge of 62,500 for the rest of this fiscal year.

Jayapal represents Seattle.

“President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity. We cannot turn our back on refugees around the world, including hundreds of refugees who have already been cleared for resettlement, have sold their belongings, and are ready to board flights,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.

Big mistake: saying they would keep anything Trump ever did!

As a result, after the White House had announced Friday that Biden would keep former President Donald Trump’s historic low cap of 15,000 refugees, the administration backtracked and said it would raise the cap next month.

“We’re able to start to bring people in who’ve been in the pipeline and who weren’t able to come in. That is starting today, and we’re going to revisit it in the middle of May,” Blinken said.

Some 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved for resettlement in the U.S., according to the International Rescue Committee, a resettlement agency.

Handy fall back!  Blame it all on Trump!

With Biden’s order, those resettlements can begin again, but they will be limited, with the administration saying Friday it would set a “final, increased refugee cap” next month after a few weeks of arrivals and blamed the Trump administration for leaving the program “broken,” in Blinken’s words.

[….]

Refugee resettlement agencies agreed that Trump left the nation’s program in tatters through funding cuts and onerous vetting measures, but they’ve said they could scale up quickly to meet Biden’s original target of 62,500, if the administration helped provide resources.

“Provide resources” is code for send more of your tax dollars to the contractors!

Instead, Biden on Saturday blamed the historic number of migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border for keeping the refugee cap low for now — a reason Blinken didn’t cite.

More here.

And, in the meantime, the World Socialist Web Site says they are all weaving and dodging because Biden is trying to appease the ultra-right!  Huh!

Biden seeks to appease ultra-right with refugee policy

Let me ask you:  are any of you right-wingers appeased by the delay in resettlement as the border is being overrun?

Again, this was an amusing unforced error on the part of the disorganized administration since the cap is just that, a cap, a ceiling, that they could have left at 62,500 while knowing they weren’t going to get anywhere near that number before the fiscal year ends on September 30th.  I am not complaining, just noting the rookie political blunder.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Americans Last! is their motto!

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the contractors’ lobbying push that actually begins today on the Hill.