Jeff Sessions: Obama Administration's Plan to Import 110,000 Refugees 'Extreme,' 'Reckless'

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions harshly criticized the outgoing Obama administration’s to dump an additional 25,000 refugees onto American streets in the fiscal year of 2017, calling the plan a “complete betrayal” and the increase “reckless.”

“The common sense concerns of the American people are simply ignored as the Administration expands its reckless and extreme policies,” the conservative senator said.

Obama wants to settle a total of 110,000 refugees in the U.S. next year, a significant increase from 85,000 the previous year. Nearly two-thirds of Americans don’t want the U.S. government to ship refugees from overseas into their country, according to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll.

“The Administration’s claim that the program costs roughly $1.5 billion drastically understates the true costs of initial resettlement,” Sessions, who chairs the Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest, said in a statement. “It does not include costs for programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, or Supplemental Security Income, among others.”

Ninety-one percent of Middle Eastern refugees go on food stamps, according to Office of Refugee Resettlement, and 68.3 percent need cash assistance from taxpayers. 73.1 percent depend on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance.

“In addition to the very serious national security implications and the initial resettlement costs, admitting 110,000 refugees will result in an enormous long-term financial burden on the taxpayers. Robert Rector, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has estimated that the total lifetime cost of admitting 10,000 refugees — which includes all costs at the federal, state, and local level—is $6.5 billion,” Sessions said. “Using Mr. Rector’s numbers as a baseline, admitting the 110,000 refugees that the Obama Administration proposes to admit beginning on October 1 will result in a total lifetime cost to the taxpayers of $71.5 billion. This would be added every year that these levels are continued.”

It’s far more cost-effective and safer to establish safe zones in the Middle East for the predominately Muslim refugees, the statement read.

As the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies’ executive director Mark Krikorian testified before Congress, the cost over a period of five years for resettling a single Middle Eastern refugee in the U.S. is “conservatively estimated” at $64,000. But providing for a Middle Eastern within the Middle East over the same period of time would cost approximately $5,300, according to the United Nations. “The image I like to think about when considering this is: imagine you have 12 drowning people. What are you going to do?” Kirkorian asked Congress. “Do you send them a one-man yacht that’s a very nice, beautiful yacht but holds only one person or do you throw them 12 life preservers?”

Forcing tens of thousands of unassimilable, dependent foreigners onto American communities against their explicit wishes. “The American people do not support these radical plans, which amount to a complete betrayal from their leaders in Washington,” Sessions said.

But Obama’s plans depend on the GOP-controlled Congress funding them, as refugee resettlement watchdog Ann Corcoran told Breitbart News on Wednesday.

“Obama is irrelevant here,” she said. “Obama would be all too happy if we looked like Europe. The only surprise with the announcement for 110,000 is that he didn’t go for the whole 200,000 as he exits the White House. I expect many of his friends at the UN next week won’t be happy that he didn’t go all the way. What matters now is how much funding the Republican Congress will give him.”