The crowd at the well-financed George Soros-backed Rally4Refugees in Washington, D.C on Sunday was estimated in the hundreds, about the same size as the pass-the-hat-funded Tea Party for Trump rally held that afternoon in St. Louis.
The low turnout at the Rally4Refugees was far below expectations of the organizers.
Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch attended the Rally4Refugees and provided this first-hand report:
I’m glad I dragged myself to Washington on a steaming Sunday morning because if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed that the big hoopla that led up to the so-called Rally4Refugees would fall so short of expectations:
Someone spent an awful lot of money for jumbotrons, tents, a big sound system, bottled water, porta pots, and African American clean-up crews (for a mostly white crowd) for what generously might be called a thousand people (at one point or another during the event). I’m terrible at estimating crowds, so it might have been 500 at the peak of the rally before noon.
Most attendees did not wear the recommended orange shirts so some of those watching the poets, singers and marching troops in orange life vests could have been tourists who took a few minutes from their visit to the Washington Monument to see what was going on.
Gateway Pundit reported later that day that “On Sunday local St. Louis grassroots activists held a Tea Party for Trump rally in Festus, Missouri. Despite the sweltering heat – 93 degrees, hot and humid as Hades – 400 to 500 patriots turned out for the event.”
As Breitbart News reported earlier, on Saturday a crowd of more than three hundred attended a Tea Party for Trump kickoff event in suburban Columbus, Ohio.
There were no jumbotrons or porta-potties at either Tea Party for Trump event, but there was a great deal of enthusiasm.
Refugee Resettlement Watch’s Corcoran says the comparable crowd sizes in spite of the vast differential in funding says a lot about public support for the immigration policies of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton.
“I’ve been writing about this at Refugee Resettlement Watch since 2007, and my recent road trip across the country to visit communities in Michigan, Colorado, the Dakotas and Nebraska hard hit by the influx of resettled refugees who are not assimilating well confirms it,” Corcoran tells Breitbart News.
“There is very little support locally in any of these communities for bringing these refugees in. It’s the large meatpacking companies who want the cheap labor of the refugees to bring the costs down in the processing plants in these local communities,” Corcoran adds.
“It’s all about the money,” she says.
“More profitability for the multi-national meatpacking companies and food processors, more federal revenue for the refugee resettlement agencies, the voluntary agencies, or VOLAGS, like the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and World Relief,” Corcoran notes.
“Meanwhile, federal, state, and local taxpayers are paying the bill to subsidize the medical and living expenses of refugees who are working at these low wages. And although some local U.S. born citizens are working in these plants there are so many fewer of them then during the time, before immigrant labor, when the salaries provided a good working wage for a family,” she adds.
“This is why, in my view, Donald Trump’s call to limit immigration to the United States, and especially unvetted refugees, is resonating with so many average every-day Americans. And it explains why on a tiny budget, crowd sizes at the Tea Party for Trump events over the weekend rivaled the crowd size at the extensively publicized pro-refugee Rally4Refugees in the nation’s capitol,” Corcoran concludes.
In contrast to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has clearly stated that she wants to increase immigration to the United States “with a pathway to full and equal citizenship,” and in particular, wants to increase the number of Syrian refugees who come to the United States from the 10,000 brought in by the Obama administration in Fiscal Year 2016, to more than 65,000 annually.
Even left-of-center Politifact conceded in June that Donald Trump was right when he charged that Hillary Clinton wants to increase Syrian refugee arrivals in the United States by 500 percent.
As Refugee Resettlement Watch’s Corcoran notes, the politically connected refugee resettlement industry will be lobbying Congress hard in September to increase its funding to over $2 billion in Fiscal Year 2017 so that it can bring in more than 200,000 refugees, asylees, and parolees from other countries for resettlement in the United States on “humanitarian” grounds.
Michael Patrick Leahy is a Founding Member of Tea Party for Trump and author of Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.
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