GOP Rep. Jones Urges Quick Curbs on Obama’s Refugee Powers

Obama Sleeve AP

Rep. Walter Jones today called on Congress to formally curb President Barack Obama’s legally unlimited powers to invite foreign refugees and migrants into the United States.

“We need to determine how much this program is costing taxpayers, and we need to make sure the people we are letting in aren’t radical Islamic terrorists,” said Jones, a conservative elected from North Carolina.

“Until then, the program ought to be suspended,” Jones said.

“We are over 18 trillion dollars in debt [and] we don’t even have money to fix roads and schools for Americans who pay taxes and already live here,” Jones said.

“Instead of taking in thousands of immigrants and refugees from countries that breed radical Islamic terrorists, we should be focusing our efforts on urging stable Middle Eastern countries to allow refugees to resettle closer to their homeland,” he said.

The only practical way for the GOP to limit Obama’s authority is to include restrictions in the annual spending bills, due for completion this fall.

For example, the Congress can include limiting language in the appropriations bill that is used for the refugee program.

The program – which costs more than $2 billion — annually transports and settles roughly 70,000 migrants from foreign refugee camps into American towns. This can be extremely disruptive to the targeted communities’ neighborhoods, schools and workplaces. For example, Minneapolis is now home to roughly 20,000 self-segregated, government-dependent, Democratic-voting Somali Muslims, including a significant number of jihad volunteers.

Congress can also limit the president’s parole authority, which could be used to provide automatic and unrestricted entry for any or all Syrian migrants who fly into U.S. airports. If Congress bars any spending on parole activities, Obama won’t be able to order border officials to admit Syrian migrants.

Hundreds of thousands of Arab-speaking Syrians are now believed to be leaving their refuges in Turkey and Syria, and are trying to break through European border barriers to reach northern Europe’s wealthy, peaceful, welfare states.

Obama would likely oppose any GOP curbs on his refugee and parole-related spending in the 2016 funding bills.

But he could only stop the GOP’s appropriations curbs by rejecting the government-wide spending bills — and thus “shut down” the government. That would be very unpopular — and likely increase Americans’ growing skepticism about the costs and benefits of refugees, immigration, guest-workers and illegal immigration.

A new poll shows that the public would be strongly on the GOP’s side if it limited Obama’s power to import unskilled and hard-to-integrate refugees into the slow-growing, low-wage U.S. economy. The poll by YouGov showed that only 24 percent independents want the country to accept more Syrian refugees. Nineteen percent agreed with the current level and 28 percent calling for fewer acceptances.

Currently, Obama is allowing more than 250,000 Muslims to settle in the United States each year.

Jones’ statement said;

According to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), between 2008 and 2013 the United States admitted 115,617 refugees from the Middle East. Another 308,805 people from the Middle East were given green cards during that time, meaning a total of 424,422 immigrants from the Middle East settled in the United States in five years — nearly half a million.  Overall, according to the Migration Policy Institute, the U.S. has taken in “about 20 percent of the world’s international migrants, even as it represents less than 5 percent of the global population.

Also, recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies cited government data to show that roughly 90 percent of Middle East immigrants’ households are using government welfare programs.

Most Middle East immigrants have difficulty integrating into the United States’ open society, partly because they are poorly educated, but also because they are reluctant to give up their Islamic civic culture. In contrast, Christian immigrants from the Middle East have rapidly integrated into American society.

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