The continued admittance of tens of thousands of refugees annually is one of the least accountable venues of immigration. The program soldiers on under the control of the State Department and is largely protected from citizen criticism by a thick shell of bureaucracy.
So it was a welcome surprise to learn in April that the State Department had organized a meeting on May 1 where public opinion could be expressed on the topic. Not that the concerned citizenry was the desired group of attendees; no, the well-paid “experts” of the Refugee Industrial Complex were the target audience. The meeting is an annual affair held mostly to hear the gimme list from the federal contractors whose paychecks depend on a steady or growing stream of refugees needing to be resettled every year.
Still, word got out, and the excellent blog RefugeeResettlementWatch.wordpress.com posted a notice of how to attend or send a paper. Quite a few people did. Blogger Ann Corcoran remarked, “Much to my surprise, critics of the program sent more comments, by far! than the professional resettlers looking for more business with the government.”
Sweet! The Internet is so helpful for organizing Americans to take on the distant and disinterested government.
That’s the good news. The bad news is the secretive nature of the get-together. Electronic recording devices were prohibited, lest discouraging words be heard. So the only record we little citizens have is what commenters sent to RefugeeResettlementWatch (RRW) on their own, presumably from learning of the event from RRW in the first place.
A few of these citizen comments are included here in the Social Contract. More may be found on RRW.
There is so much wrong with the U.S. refugee system that it’s hard to know where to start. The program is supposed to rescue people from suffering, but it has deposited extra misery on American communities that are already struggling to provide for their own people. (See my memo about hundreds of Burmese refugees with possibly brain-damaged children dumped on depressed Oakland, California.)
The refugee program is made to sound noble and humanitarian on the surface, but what happens is that a trade is going on: the U.S. agrees to accept some members of an unwanted tribe and, in return, the government in question does something that Washington desires.
As a result, Washington takes on the interior tribal problems of countries around the world. This nation has become the dumping ground for people inconveniently located, where majority populations don’t want them, such as Nepalis in Bhutan, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and Somalis in Kenya, to name a few. The State Department may believe that removing troublesome diversity from foreign nations is helpful in diplomacy, but the agency is not entitled to crush American communities by its wheeling and dealing.
There is apparently no “Off” switch in Washington for these expensive schemes that harm Americans financially and worsen cultural discord. Towns like Lewiston, Maine, have been changed irrevocably from pleasant American communities to diversity-riven shells of their former selves. Lewiston, a former factory town of 35,000, became a landing zone for thousands of Somali refugees who have been the embodiment of “culture clash” with their stubborn disinterest in assimilation.
Some of the most dangerous people come through the refugee door, from garden-variety criminals to anti-Western jihadists. A graduate of a Minneapolis high school, refugee Shirwa Ahmad returned to Somalia to become a suicide bomber, and he succeeded by killing 30 in Mogadishu. Not all Muslims take their angry urges out of the country, however. In 2007, an 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim refugee, Sulejman Talovic, killed six people in a Salt Lake shopping mall shooting spree in before he was shot by an off-duty policeman.
Another aspect is how the resettlement industry has served to obliterate the line separating church and state. Religious charities like the Catholics and Lutherans receive billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to perform refugee do-goodery. For example, a Catholic Charities online publication revealed that in 2009, 67 percent of its income came from the government. The cost of the church’s “good works” is partially paid by the taxpayer, not the collection plate. That 67 percent of $4.3 billion works out to more than $2.8 billion taken from citizens who may not agree with the church’s active advocacy, which includes mass amnesty for millions of foreign lawbreakers who would be helped by a “path to citizenship.” Not all of the billions of dollars go to refugee resettlement, but a portion does.
Refugees and other rescued people are often troubled and psychologically damaged. One telling example was the “Lost Boys” of Sudan who were celebrated by the media as an inspiring story of human courage because of their trekking over 1,000 miles in Africa to escape civil war at home. But in 2008, the Arizona Republic reported, “An estimated 80 to 90 percent of Lost Boys suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which can lead to substance abuse, depression, domestic violence and even death, according to David Berceli, a trauma-recovery expert.” Many refugees need psychological treatment, but stressed budgets in the resettled communities have little cash for such expenses when schools are being closed and police laid off (like Oakland).
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Plus, the more diverse the refugees, the more they require expensive expert help, provided by or siphoned through the resettlement organizations (aka job security). So the resettlement professionals appear to prefer backwards people, the sort who have never seen a light switch before. The resettlement workers promote extreme diversity and welcome cultures that commonly practice polygamy, honor killing, bride kidnapping, animal sacrifice, child marriage, female genital mutilation, and other repellent customs.
Finally, refugees are desired by businesses trying to avoid illegal aliens but still looking for exploitable and cheap workers. Why is this continuing when 23 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed? The refugee scam needs to be ended, like so much of the rest of the waste, fraud, and abuse that are sapping the nation.