Well, I sure would like to take a break, but our leaders just keep heaping the bad news on us. I address the Refugee Resettlement problem in this piece and the manner in which it affects the entire nation. I could have devoted my full attention to just Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee alone, but opted to exhibit the situation more comprehensively, so people would get a clear understanding of what is being done to them. ~ J.O.S.
Americans absolutely have the right to determine who, if anyone, enters the country, and it doesn’t violate any law or the Constitution to reject anyone claiming refugee status. So-called refugees do not have any automatic right to be granted entry, despite many leftist assertions to the contrary, and many of us are sick and tired of hearing our leaders’ cliched platitudes that suggest they have a “Big Heart”, much like Governor Bill Lee (R-TN), while they allow people into the country, who come to America to avoid fighting for their own countries; and, usually, of late, these refugees hold ideas and views so anti-American and so antithetical to the Constitution, that they eventually become a great disruptive factor to any community, as they work to undermine the nation.
On December 18th 2019, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced his decision to send a letter of consent to the Trump administration, in order to accept more refugees for resettlement next year. His decision coincides with those of other Republican governors who have also stated their intent to admit more refugees, such as Kim Reynolds of Iowa, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, Gary Herbert of Utah and Doug Burgum of North Dakota.
And of course, numerous Democratic led states, such as California, New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Virginia and others have already submitted letters of consent or are making preparations to do so. According to U.S. State Department arrival records, resettlement has occurred in the District of Columbia, every U.S. territory and state since 2003.
The state of Tennessee still has a high-profile Tenth Amendment lawsuit in the works, that Governor Lee has essentially undermined through his consent letter, effectively infuriating legislative leaders who had sued the federal government. The lawsuit questions the constitutionality of the refugee resettlement program.
House Speaker Cameron Sexton and Lt Governor Rand McNally (TN) issued a joint statement: “Our personal preference would have been to exercise the option to hit the pause button on accepting additional refugees in our state.”
While more than a third of Tennessee’s 95 counties are preparing to challenge any refugee resettlement, so too are other counties around America, from North Dakota to Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Indiana to Vermont, New Hampshire and Wyoming. Burleigh County North Dakota heard its chairman, Brian Bitner, voice citizens’ concerns, stating: “North Dakota is already the highest per capita state for refugee resettlement in terms of number of citizens, so in the absence of any sort of number, there’s no way we could know the cost to the state or the county, and I simply can’t support that.”
President Trump signed an executive order that allowed all fifty states to decide whether to accept refugees or not, in September of this year, and it requires a written letter of consent. This isn’t any guarantee that refugees won’t settle in an area that initially rejected the refugee resettlement program, since they can travel from state to state and county to county; and regardless of this, many Americans simply don’t want any more anti-American refugees, such as Somalia born Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), or Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — American born but raised to hate America by her “palestinian” Muslim mother, given entry to our nation, since they sound and act more like agents of Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hezbollah and Al Shabaab than someone interested in keeping America strong and free.
On August 26th 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar called for the government of Somalia to protect Hormuud Telecom Company, from United Nation peace-keepers, even though HTC has been financing the Al Shabaab terrorist organization for years. This link between Hormuud and Al Shabaab is well documented in the October 19th 2019 report compiled by the International Policy Group, entitled ‘Reaping the Whirlwind — Hormuud Entrepreneurs and the Resurgence of Al Shabaab’.
One should note that 45 Somali Muslims left their homes in Minneapolis to join the Somali based Al Shabaab Islamic terror group or ISIS, in 2007, as documented by FBI statistics. And as of 2018, a dozen more were arrested as they attempted to leave the U.S. for their expressed purpose of fighting for ISIS.
According to Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project, Representative Rashida Tlaib was photographed, in January 2019, with Abbas Hamideh, a Hezbollah supporter, and again in March with Nader Jalajel, a Palestinian activist who mourned the death of a Palestinian terrorist who had murdered a Jewish rabbi the previous year.
America has far too many natural born citizens who seemingly hate Her to be bringing in foreign nationals who hate America too, doesn’t She?
Refugees come from many countries across the globe, fleeing specific danger in their homelands, although the bulk of refugees have been from Iraq, Syria and Somalia since 2015; and a large number is comprised of people who simply wouldn’t fight for their war-torn countries. They come here too often simply from necessity, in their eyes, and safety, and not out of any sense of kindred spirit or love for the American way of life, our freedom and our liberty. And so, they set about life in their own tradition, with the same associated flaws that created the troubles in their country, regardless of its unseemly and foreign nature and cloistered within an American community.
Americans don’t want to see their neighborhoods permanently transformed into United Nations refugee camps filled with welfare dependents, as they now find in Minneapolis where the crime rate has soared exponentially, largely due to the rapid and massive influx of Somali Muslim refugees. According to Steven Camarota’s 2015 study [The High Cost of Resettling Muslim Refugees], it costs taxpayers $64,370 for each Muslim refugee, which is twelve times UN estimates to care for one refugee in surrounding Middle Eastern nations. Even worse, the crime rate rose by fifty-six percent in Minneapolis, between 2010 and 2018, due to criminal activity by Somali Muslim gangs.
For God’s sake, what is wrong with being a bit more discerning in regards of the refugees America accepts? Why can’t we accept more like Ayn Rand, staunch anti-communist defender of liberty, Dith Pran, Pulitzer prize winning photo-journalist and translator for U.S. Military Assistance Command [Cambodia] and Albert Einstein, a genius physicist and Nobel Laureate?
The United States granted an astronomical number of asylum requests in September 2019 to a combined 70,246 Afghan refugees and Special Immigration Visas [Afghan “allies”] and 161,665 Iraqi refugees and SIVs. The war in Iraq ended in 2011, so there really isn’t any excuse for U.S. taxpayers to be funding new lives in America for anyone from Iraq, other than the truly persecuted Christians who are still trapped in the region.
America spent enormous sums of money and lost thousands of fine men and women to give Iraqis a better path forward and a new chance to govern themselves as free men and women. Is there any good reason that justifies moving tens of thousands of Iraqis, or Syrians or Somalians for that matter, to any American town?
President Trump is only willing to give 18,000 refugees entry to America this year, which is the lowest number authorized since the program’s inception in 1980. In contrast, President Barack Obama was willing to accept 110,000 refugees in 2017.
Amid the current anti-open borders sentiment in America, the open borders crowd, the Leftists of America always seem to manage to move U.S. policy in the opposite direction, just as they are currently attempting through a lawsuit filed against President Trump’s executive order on November 21st 2019. Although public support for deceasing the numbers of legal immigration of all kinds is significant, the supporters are not well organized, unlike the Leftist coalition of ethnic churches and organizations that skillfully navigates the political arena in strong opposition to any proposal restricting any segment of legal immigration, including asylum seekers.
The lawsuit was filed in a Maryland federal court by lawyers representing the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and Church World Service. Shortly afterwards, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of LIRS, stated: “This executive order is unconstitutional and compassionless, and reflects a complete misunderstanding of the refugee resettlement process in this country.”
Over the past decade, Ann Corcoran, a refugee law and policy expert, has given America outstanding briefings on the issue. She outlines in great detail the ultimate conflict of interest, by which refugee contractors’ entire budgets grow commensurate to the number of refugees they resettle. The more communities they get on board with refugee resettlement, the more money they receive, and so their is nearly a knock down dragged out fight over all 3007 counties across America, with the goal of moving them to send letters of consent to the State Department.
Unbelievable as it seems, most Republican politicians are somewhat amenable to the one-sided pressure for all the wrong reasons, and in some cases, they are absolutely in the pockets of Open Borders Inc. And although conservatives have ceded a great deal of America to the Left, the refugee coalition has not ceded a single county; and so, thanks to many complacent and corrupt GOP politicians, refugee resettlement has thrived in the most conservative areas of the nation. The financial and cultural costs of refugee resettlement have been unacceptable and enormous.
Let’s face it – both Party’s WANT the FVA – Future Voters of America for a range of nefarious reasons – predominantly – votes and political profits for their donors (lobbyists)! ~ Ed.
On July 5th 2017, a report, entitled ‘The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program: A Roadmap for Reform‘, written by policy analysts Olivia Enos, David Inserra and Joshua Meservey noted that at least sixty-one people who came to the United States as refugees engaged in terrorist activities between 2002 and 2016. The report detailed scores of other refugees who lied or took part in terror plots, as part of a study aimed at reforming the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. The report concluded there was a need to place strict limits on refugee numbers and restrictions on the refugees themselves.
Surely every knowledgeable American understands full well that there isn’t any universal right to migrate, and resettlement isn’t the solution to mass displacement. Our policymakers have a duty and a responsibility to make certain our nation only accepts as many refugees as can be safely scrutinized, investigated and assimilated. More importantly, America is not obligated to resettle refugees, and the ones we do resettle, America does so from a humane perspective and in hopes that such actions will also benefit our national interests.
They’re HERE!
So, to all the naive shmucks and corrupt, complicit liars out in Fly-Over-Country, who are playing a dangerous game with American lives, place your “Big Heart” on full display, but ignoring a moral and constitutional duty to place American interests and American lives above those of foreign nationals’ needs is unconscionable and treasonous, at its best. Pressure Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates and Qatar to utilize their millions of dollars to resettle Muslim refugees in their own nations, as America works to facilitate the integration and assimilation of refugees it already has accepted, if and when such a feat is possible. Don’t let your “Big Heart” drive all common sense from between your ears, while your platitudes set the further destruction of America in motion, since the perpetrators of future Islamic terror attacks are already here:
…and as such, America would be most wise to, at the very least, halt any more Muslims from coming to America.
December 28, 2019
~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.