Somali community in Lewiston, Maine, one of many cities and towns where the U.S. State Department, working with the U.N., has sent large contingents of refugees.
WND, By Leo Hohmann On 07/31/2015:
A Texas congressman has introduced legislation that would halt the resettlement of United Nations-certified refugees in the U.S. pending a full study on the program’s impact on the nation’s economy and national security.
Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, introduced the Resettlement Accountability National Security Act, or HR 3314, which places an “immediate suspension on allowing immigrants into the United States under the refugee resettlement program, until the Government Accountability Office (GAO) completes a thorough examination of its costs on federal, state and local governments.”
According to U.S. government data, nearly 500,000 new immigrants have come to the U.S. under the resettlement program since President Obama took office – with the state of Texas and its taxpayers taking in more than any other state.
Since 2002, a total of 69,490 refugees from more than a dozen countries have been resettled in Texas. That does not include “secondary migration,” which involves refugees moving into Texas after first being resettled elsewhere.
Texas, California lead the way
The Lone Star State absorbed 7,214 refugees in fiscal 2014, followed by California with 6,108 and New York with 4,082. Michigan received 4,006 refugees and Florida 3,519 to round out the top five. Minnesota, when secondary migration is included, also makes the top five with more than 4,000 refugees arriving every year.
The refugees pour in from Iraq, Somalia, Burma, Bhutan, Cuba, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and even Syria, the world’s most active hotbed of jihadist activity.
And it’s not only major urban centers receiving refugees. Cities like Amarillo, Texas; Manchester, New Hampshire; Twin Falls, Idaho; Lewiston, Maine; Wichita, Kansas; and St. Cloud, Minnesota, have been slammed with thousands of refugees from the Third World over the past decade. Most arrive with no English or job skills, and the nine major resettlement agencies that get government cash to do the resettlement work typically only provide aid for three to five months. After that, the refugees are mainly the responsibility of state and local governments.
Almost all of America’s refugees are selected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
After they are assigned to the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are responsible for screening them for connections to foreign terrorist organizations. FBI Counter-terrorism Deputy Director Michael Steinbach testified before Congress in February that it is impossible to screen refugees from a “failed state” like Syria, where the U.S. has no boots on the ground and no access to reliable law enforcement data. Somalia has similarly devolved into chaos.
‘Economic and social costs’ wearing on communities
“It is extremely unsettling that the Obama administration would continue to expand the U.S. resettlement program at such an irresponsible pace in light of our economic and national security challenges,” said Babin in a statement on his website. “While this program may be warranted in certain situations, it is continuing at an unchecked pace. For the past decade, the U.S. has been admitting roughly 70,000 new refugees a year, with little understanding of the economic and social costs on our communities.”
The costs of the resettlement program have ballooned to $1 billion a year, according to the government, and that only covers the costs of grants used to administer the program. The $1 billion figure does not include the cost of social welfare programs that refugees immediately qualify for upon entry into the country.
“Our legislation institutes a common-sense pause in the program so that we can better understand the long-term and short-term costs that this program has on local governments, states and U.S. taxpayers,” Babin said. “It also gives us an opportunity to examine potential national security issues related to entry and resettlement, particularly as federal law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about home-grown terrorists.”
Resistance growing in South Carolina, Idaho, Minnesota
A public backlash against the refugee resettlement program has sprung up in recent months in several communities, including Spartanburg, South Carolina; Twin Falls, Idaho; and St. Cloud, Minnesota.
The refugee resettlement industry, which includes legions of immigrant rights advocates, lawyers and community organizing groups funded by George Soros, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, among others, churned out a document in 2013 on how to deal with so-called “pockets of resistance.”
The document, authored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the nine government contractors doing resettlement work, advised refugee advocates to research the backgrounds of local people who oppose resettlements and turn them over to the Southern Poverty Law Center for public shaming as “racists” and “anti-Muslim” bigots.
This strategy has already been employed to varying extents in Spartanburg, St. Cloud and Twin Falls as residents have become organized and started demanding answers about how many refugees will be arriving, from what countries, and what the social and economic impact will be on school systems, job markets, health care and housing.
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