What if I told you that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is completing the criminal conspiracy of Central American families to traffic their own teenage kids into this country and unite them with other illegal alien family members? What if I told you many of them have gone on to become gang members and fuel the drug crisis in the country? Now, what if I told you that the Senate voted this week on a bill to fully fund this agency without addressing the policy problem?
Last week, in a document submitted to a court babysitting our border “security,” government lawyers reported that as many as 350 illegal alien minors had parents who either affirmatively declined to be reunited with them or left the country without giving the government notice, as reported by Breitbart. This means that rather than two separate categories crossing the border – family units and unaccompanied alien children (UACs), they are usually the same demographic. All things equal, illegals would like to exploit our border to bring everyone in, but they don’t hesitate to either send their kids here alone or come with them and then leave them here to be resettled with other illegal relatives.
Shockingly, in the budget bill before Congress this week, legislators inserted a provision demanding that the government come up with a strategy to reunite illegal alien families rather than come up with a strategy to end their fleecing of America and endangerment of their own families. As I’ve noted before, almost none of these families are eligible for asylum, and almost none of the unaccompanied alien children are eligible for refugee resettlement status because most of them are self-trafficked by their own families, are not in the country alone, and are actually reunited with other illegal relatives – all of whom should be deported. Yet Congress is fully funding the Office of Refugee Resettlement in this “minibus” bill, even though Trump has cut the number of refugees from abroad.
There is no need for a separate refugee program in this era
Earlier this week, there was a lot of anxiety in the open-borders lobby after the Trump administration announced, pursuant to the annual determination of refugee caps, that it would accept no more than 30,000 refugees this year, down from a 45,000 cap last year. While the number is lower than it has been in recent years, let’s not forget that the entire program is nothing but a handout to private contractors and makes no sense either from an American standpoint or from a humanitarian standpoint.
Most of the refugees are from countries that are very different than America, and the people would do better resettling closer to their homes. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that we could resettle 12 times as many people closer to home with the amount of money we spend to bring them here, line the pockets of the contractors, and create Democrat voters. Moreover, as Mark Krikorian observed, the U.N. only considered 5,634 refugee applicants to be “emergency” or “urgent” for all of 2017. Our cap should be no higher than that.
But there is a broader point to be made. Open-borders advocates want to double-dip with refugee policies because they fail to acknowledge that we have so many other categories of immigration that are similar to refugees. In fact, most of our immigration system is built on chain migration, not skills, whereby existing immigrants, many of whom initially came here through refugee or similar programs, then bring in family members.
There are also thousands of “Special Immigrant Visas” who are brought in from Iraq and Afghanistan every year, many of whom present security risks. They are refugees in all but name only, but aren’t counted against the annual cap set by the president. We also bring in victims of crime under U visas and give de facto refugee treatment to paroled Cubans and Haitians and adjustment of status for Nicaraguans. Then there are the 50,000 brought in under the diversity lottery every year.
The Central American “asylum” invasion is worse than refugee policy
Which brings us back to the bogus asylum invasion at our border. Why should we take in any refugees from what has become Europe’s problem when we have our own “refugee” program for Central Americans flooding our border? And in the case of bogus asylum, it’s worse than refugees, because we don’t bring them in via a controlled process; they come here chaotically and unilaterally. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, individual asylum applications in the US rose by 27 percent in 2017, topping out at 331,700 new requests, which eclipses Germany’s 198,300. Those numbers are higher this year. More than 400,000 received work permits last year, which means they disappear into our population, even though almost none of them would qualify for asylum if placed before a judge immediately.
Hence, we already take in more refugees than anyone else.
As much as I disagree with the refugee program, I’d take a standard cap of 70,000 vetted refugees any day over the several hundred thousand young males from Central America and other family units coming here against our will and demanding asylum.
So why is Congress funding the ORR at record levels? Legislators are appropriating $1.9 billion (58 percent above the president’s request) with a 30,000-refugee cap, when in 2016 they appropriated $1.6 billion for 85,000. The answer is that instead of bringing in refugees through the traditional route, they are treating all the Central American teenagers like refugees. And those are not counted towards the annual cap. In addition, the minibus bill has a rider demanding that any member of Congress must be let into the detention facilities to interfere with the work of our border agents and intimidate them.
Appallingly, the Senate just voted this week for an $8.4 billion “opioid package” interfering in health care and prescriptions, when the entire problem is illicit drugs being brought in through the very asylum/UAC surge Congress now encourages rather than deters in this budget bill.
Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas, in a December 2013 order, charged that the Obama administration essentially “successfully complet[ed] the mission of the criminal conspiracy” of drug smugglers to smuggle people over the border on behalf of parents “at significant expense” to taxpayers. He observed that the DHS was taking actions that were “dangerous and unconscionable,” “subject to the whims of evil individuals,” resulting in the “absurd and illogical” outcome of helping “fund the illegal drug cartels which are a very real danger for both citizens of this country and Mexico.”
Hanen pointed out that “time and again, this court has been told by representatives of the government and the defense that cartels control the entire smuggling process.” He also observed that the cartels knew that teenagers would be treated leniently if caught with drugs. He therefore concluded that by dismantling immigration enforcement and promising amnesty, “the government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so.” In a footnote, Hanen ominously warned about the heroin smuggling that would likely follow, based on past history.
Yet a GOP Congress and administration are allowing all of this to continue unabated while claiming magnanimously to fight “the opioid crisis” and care about “uniting families.” Good night, Orwell. (For more from the author of “Here’s Why Lowering the Refugee Cap Won’t Make a Difference to Our Immigration Crisis” please click HERE)
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