The first move has everyone on the left up in arms. President Trump’s Determination on numbers in 2020 will be limited to 18,000 – the smallest number on record since the program was revamped in 1980.
Another, less publicized move that slipped under the radar of everyone not in the business of stealing money from Americans at gunpoint to give to refugees was President Trump issuing an executive order that will revolutionize America’s refugee resettlement program.
The “Executive Order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement” serves to give state and local governments a say in whether or not refugee agencies can resettle refugees in their communities.
Opposition to the current implementation of refugee resettlement has several facets.
The first is that while the Federal Government supplies much of the initial funding to provide for the needs of refugees, after a year, the burden then passes to State and Local governments who must meet the shortfall. And that shortfall is not insignificant. InvestmentWatch.com says that 91.4% of Moslem refugees receive food stamps and 68.3% receive cash benefits. State and local governments thus have a huge interest in who arrives in the areas they govern as refugees. An entirely new welfare culture is emerging.
A second facet is political. When large numbers of refugees are concentrated in an area, they can quickly take over the local political scene. Ilan Omar is not a Congresswoman from Minnesota because she was able to successfully convince three generations of Minnesotans to vote for her. Rather, she was elected because Bill Clinton and Barack Obama imported tens of thousands of Somalian voters into the Twin Cities area surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN in the 1990’s and 2010’s, respectively. The Democrats literally created a voting base by concentrating foreign interests inside a small geographic area.
Under President Trump’s executive order, concentration of refugees can be allowed if state and city government’s want it, but the love can also be more evenly spread if an area decides it has done its fair share.
From Section 2, Paragraph A of the order, we read “Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall develop and implement a process to determine whether the State and locality both consent, in writing, to the resettlement of refugees within the State and locality, before refugees are resettled within that State and locality under the Program. The Secretary of State shall publicly release any written consents of States and localities to resettlement of refugees”
Why is this important? This prevents back room immigration deals. Information must be publicly released by the Secretary of State. Memphis, for example, can’t hide a deal about refugee resettlement because it doesn’t control the flow of information – the Department of State is now required to release the information BEFORE refugees are settled into their area.
President Trump signed this order September 26, 2019. We are thankful he did.
Conservative Christians of Tennessee advocates a refugee policy that is based on charitable giving by Christians who assist refugees at the safest point possible relative to the point of conflict from which refugees have fled. This ensures that when conflicts are over, refugees return to their home countries to help rebuild them.
