By J.M. Phelps (One News Now)
A well-respected expert on refugee resettlement is offering a few warnings about President Joe Biden’s plan for admitting tens of thousands of refugees into the U.S.
Earlier this month, President Biden signed an executive order to expand the admission of refugees into the United States. One News Now spoke to Ann Corcoran, longtime editor of Refugee Resettlement Watch, about the president’s recent order that calls for international collaboration to address a “global refugee crisis.”
“The Biden-Harris administration has signaled they are going to ‘welcome’ 125,000 refugees to the U.S. in fiscal year 2022,” she explains. For the remainder of FY 2021 – which ends on September 30 – up to 62,500 will be admitted.
“That would be more than [Barack] Obama ever admitted in any year of his presidency,” adds Corcoran, who has been blogging about refugee resettlement since 2007.
In his promise to keep America first, former President Donald Trump set the cap for FY 2021 at 15,000 refugees. Shockingly, says Corcoran, the Biden-Harris administration has lifted the restrictions Trump had placed on refugees from terrorist-harboring countries – and has begun the process of eliminating what the former president referred to as “extreme vetting.”
“There are people fleeing all sorts of awful situations, but technically only those who can prove they are being persecuted fall under the protection of the refugee act signed into law in 1980 by Jimmy Carter,” she notes.
Interestingly, she says, most people consider fleeing from conflict, crime, and war to be sufficient for declaring oneself a refugee; but from a legal perspective, this is not the criteria supposed to be used in determining such admissibility.
“Needless to say,” she points out, “refugee advocates want the public to think they are sufficient reasons and they have been stretching the definitions [of refugees] with impunity.”
The blogger contends that Biden’s gutting of Trump’s previous restraints on the refugee program is dangerous. According to Corcoran, the screening process is being weakened and could increase the potential for a criminal element. However, she argues, “the biggest danger to the country is that refugees in large numbers will compete with low-skilled Americans who are in need of work and others who are in need of social services, [like] veterans, handicapped and otherwise challenged Americans like those in need of assistance with housing.”
She then asks: “Why is it America’s duty to take extremely large numbers of refugees into the country when [people of America are] struggling with joblessness, hunger and homelessness?”
“There is no doubt that flooding the country with low-skilled workers in need of entry-level jobs will further depress wages,” Corcoran continues, predicting that the country will have to find more money at the local and state levels for refugees’ welfare needs, including the cost of medical treatment and education for children.
She notes: “Often not considered [in the resettlement of refugees] are the cultural stresses and strains placed on unsuspecting communities when large numbers of certain ethnic groups are placed almost overnight into already troubled low-income and minority communities.”
Corcoran also reveals that “many uninformed Americans somehow think that refugees come to the U.S. and stay only until whatever the crisis was in their home country is resolved.” But that’s not the case. Refugees admitted under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program typically remain in the country permanently and will likely move through the process toward citizenship.
She corrects another misconception: that the refugee program is purely humanitarian in nature. “That is a myth, [because] much of the drive for the program comes from business interests always on the hunt for cheap, reliable labor,” she explains.
The word “humanitarian” appears 11 times in Biden’s February 4 executive order.
“More so now than ever, as the Democrat Socialists control all of Washington,” Corcoran encourages people to “fight back in their communities by getting patriots elected to local office and speaking out against the Leftist agenda.”
J.M. Phelps is a counter-terrorism specialist, suicide bombing expert, and freelance journalist, focusing on national security for OneNewsNow. He is also editor and publisher of the website Lantern of Liberty.
Originally published by One News Now on Thursday, February 25, 2021.
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