Several experts on the federal refugee resettlement program say Hillary Clinton plans on welcoming far more than 65,000 Syrian refugees to the United States annually if she is elected President.
“I firmly believe Hillary Clinton has a plan to flood the United States with Muslim refugees but is concealing it from voters prior to November’s election,” Ann Corcoran, a prominent critic of the federal refugee resettlement program, tells Breitbart News.
In September 2015 Hillary Clinton told CBS News she wants to bring 65,000 Syrian refugees to the United States annually. In the ensuing year, she has stood by that proposed policy, one that her Republican rival for the Presidency, Donald Trump, vigorously opposes.
More than 45 percent of the refugees resettled in the United States in FY 2016, 38,556 out of 84,995, were Muslim, according to the Department of State’s interactive website. Of the 12,587 Syrian refugees who were resettled in the United States in FY 2016, more than 99 percent, 12,487, were Muslim.
“The Democrats have rejected patriotic assimilation in favor of aggressive multi-culturalism masquerading as ‘integration,’” John Fonte wrote recently at National Review.
Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she supports and will expand President Obama’s immigration policies. These policies are by now well known: executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants (and eventual citizenship); the end (for practical purposes) of border-visa enforcement; large increases in low-skilled immigration (through “comprehensive immigration reform”); and increased numbers of un-vetted Syrian refugees and young Central American immigrants.
Though Clinton has publicly called for increasing the number of Syrian refugees allowed to enter the United States from the 12,587 who entered in FY 2016, she has not specifically commented publicly on President Obama’s proposal to increase the total number of refugees coming in to the United States in FY 2017 from 85,000 to 110,000 per year.
Corcoran, who founded the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog in 2007, says:
If Clinton is elected, she will certainly bring in at least 200,000 refugees in her first year, the majority of whom will be from Muslim dominated countries. She is on record as supporting an increase in the number of Syrian refugees allowed in to the United States from the 10,000 targeted by the Obama administration in FY 2016 to 65,000 per year. In addition to these 65,000 Syrian refugees, another 135,000, perhaps more are likely to come in to the U.S. under Clinton in FY 2017.
Don Barnett, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, agrees with Corcoran’s assessment.
“I suspect Hillary Clinton will join liberal congressmen who are demanding that 200,000 refugees be resettled to the U.S. annually,” he tells Breitbart News.
“Secretary Clinton won’t make a public statement about the number of refugees she plans to bring in to the United States in FY 2017 because if she told the truth about her plans to bring in 200,000 to 250,000 refugees in FY 2017 if elected, she would almost certainly lose the election,” Refugee Resettlement Watch’s Corcoran adds.
“I actually think the number could be higher than 200,000 annually because the Refugee Act of 1980 allows the President to go back to the well for “emergency” numbers over and above the annual determination,” an attorney familiar with the refugee resettlement program tells Breitbart News:
I think there is extremely high incentive for the resettlement agencies to go along with any number (and they have pushed for even higher numbers in FY17 than what Obama asked for) because it is more money in their pockets. It’s important to remember that this is an industry first and foremost meaning that the more taxpayer money that flows to the local affiliates, the more they can expand their operations and staffs. It is equally important to remember that the refugee component is only a small part of the other categories of humanitarian entrants that taken together are a very very high number of individuals.
Corcoran also says:
Hilllary Clinton is clearly hiding her real plans from the American people. If she wins the election, she will claim a mandate on this issue where the majority of Americans oppose her plans, and will not only flood the country with refugees from countries that hate us, she will never build a border wall and with the help of a weak Congress, grant citizenship to the more than 11 million illegal aliens already in the country.
“Voters strongly oppose President Obama’s plan to bring 110,000 Middle Eastern and African refugees to this country next year, up from 85,000 this year, and view that decision as an increased danger to U.S. national security,” a recent Rasmussen poll concluded:
Seventy-four percent of likely voters oppose increasing the number of refugees from 85,000 in FY 2016 to the 110,000 President Obama has proposed for FY 2017. Only 18 percent of likely voters approve of the proposed increase, or think it is too little.
Barnett of CIS offers one reason for Clinton’s reticence to be up front about her plans to bring in refugees.
“The Clintons have experience with refugees and politics. Bill Clinton’s only electoral loss was the Arkansas gubernatorial election of 1980, which may have been affected by the placement of Mariel boatlift refugees in Arkansas,” he notes.
“If elected, Hillary Clinton will likely bring in at least 200,000 refugees in FY 2018, as well, though she’s not publicly stating that,” Barnett tells Breitbart News.
Breitbart News asked the Clinton campaign four specific questions about her refugee resettlement policies if elected, but has not yet received a response:
1. Does Secretary Clinton support President’ Obama’s proposal to bring 110,000 refugees into the U.S. in FY 2017 under the federal refugee resettlement program?
2. Secretary Clinton has already proposed increasing the number of Syrian refugees allowed to enter the U.S. annually to 65,000. Under President Obama’s proposed ceiling of 110,000 refugees for FY 2017, this would reduce the number of refugees from countries other than Syria to 55,000. In FY 2016, 72,500 refugees entered the U.S. from countries other than Syria, while 12,500 entered from Syria.
If elected President, would Secretary Clinton use the executive authority of the office of the President to increase the number of refugees entering the U.S. in FY 2017 beyond the 110,000 proposed by the Obama administration so as to not reduce the number of refugees coming from countries other than Syria?
3. If elected President, what number of refugees would President Clinton allow entry in the U.S. in FY 2017?
4. The Refugee Council USA has proposed increasing the number of refugees coming to the U.S. through the traditional refugee resettlement program in FY 2017 to 140,000, while allowing 60,000 refugees to enter the country through non-traditional but legal means, for a total of 200,000 refugees in FY 2017. If elected President, would Secretary Clinton implement the Refugee Council USA’s proposals and allow 200,000 refugees to enter the U.S. in FY 2017?
The Obama administration and the resettlement agencies, non-profit “voluntary agencies” (VOLAGs), that receive more than $1 billion annually from the federal government brought refugees into the country during September, the last month of FY 2016, at a run rate that would bring in well over 110,000 refugees on an annualized basis. There is little indication they intend to slow that pace during the ten weeks funded in this interim budget.
In fact, there is every indication that the Obama administration, with the ideological support of the Hillary Clinton campaign team, along with their allies in the politically powerful refugee resettlement industry, continue to aggressively increase both the number of refugees they are bringing in to the United States and the number of locations where those refugees are being resettled.
Many former Clinton and Obama administration refugee officials are now executives with the “non-profits” who form Refugee Council USA ,the lobbying arm of the refugee resettlement industry. Its members include the nine largest VOLAGs (Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Ethiopian Community Development Council, HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration And Refugee Service, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration & Refugee Services, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, World Relief), as well as more than a dozen related organizations.
Both Refugee Council USA and InterAction, an organization of U.S. based international non-profits, told Congress in a statement this August they want 200,000 refugees resettled in the U.S. in FY 2017.
Lavinia Limon , who currently heads up the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), one of the top nine VOLAGs as well as a huge recipient of federal funds, is a champion of the “aggressive multi-culturalism” Clinton/Obama policy that rejects traditional American assimilation policy. She began implementation of that “aggressive multi-culturalism” policy immediately after being named ORR director in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, as Breitbart reported previously:
[S]ince 1975, she’s been using the government-supplied flood of unskilled and culturally distant migrants to convert Americans’ neighborhoods into “new American communities.” Most of the targeted neighborhoods are in politically weak towns far from wealthy districts, who are protected from migrant inflows by influential politicians.
Limón is part of a circle of Democratic progressive politicians who believe Americans’ government should not favor Americans over foreigners, and that all humans — Americans and Afghans, Christians and Muslims, skilled and unskilled, healthy and diseased — should be welcomed in the United States. She is allied with various business groups — plus their GOP supporters — who use each annual inflow of migrant workers as replacements for prior years’ migrants, many of whom flee to better and safer jobs.
She was named director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) by President Bill Clinton in 1993, where she worked for Donna Shalala, who was Secretary of Health and Human Services. These days, Shalala is the current president of the Clinton Foundation.
Before she left ORR in 2001, Limón funded a 48-page report that published in 2004 by the Migration Policy Institute. That report, titled, “Building the New American Community: Newcomer Integration and Inclusion Experiences in Non-Traditional Gateway Cities.” is the how-to plan used by migration activists to transform small cities into refugee homes by partnering with local institutions, such as the Chamber of Commerce and community/technical colleges.
Secretary Clinton’s defenders in the mainstream media have used her failure to publicly specify the number of refugees she will bring in the United States in FY 2017 that reasonable estimates of her plans made by her opponents are “false.”
On September 20 in High Point, North Carolina, GOP nominee Donald Trump, citing a Senate study, said: “Altogether, Hillary Clinton’s plan would bring in 620,000 refugees in her first term, alone, with no effective way to screen or vet them. Her plan would cost $400 billion in terms of lifetime welfare and entitlement costs.”
Politifact says that “Clinton has not said she would bring anywhere near that number; that’s an extrapolation put together by the Trump campaign,” even though it acknowledged, “We asked Clinton’s campaign how many refugees her administration would admit in the future and how much it would cost, but a spokesman said they had no new details.”
But the 620,000 estimate does not come from the Trump campaign. Instead, it comes from a statement released by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL):
Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has announced her desire to admit at least 65,000 refugees from Syria – on top of the existing refugee flow already entering the United States. What Clinton has not explained, however, is that in addition to the clear national security implications related to accepting more refugees, there are massive financial costs that would be borne by federal, state, and local governments.
Assuming Clinton’s desire to bring in 65,000 Syrian refugees is in addition to the Obama Administration’s current goal of admitting 10,000 this fiscal year (out of 85,000 total refugees), that would amount to an increase of 55,000 refugees. 55,000 on top of 85,000 totals 140,000 refugees. The Obama Administration’s target for FY 2017 is actually 100,000 refugees, meaning that adding 55,000 refugees to that would result in 155,000 refugees each year. Due to statutory flaws in our Refugee Admissions Program, the number could be as high as Hillary Clinton desires. Assuming her goal is to admit 155,000 refugees each year during a hypothetical first term in office, a Clinton Administration would admit at least 620,000 refugees in just four years – a population roughly the size of Baltimore.
Submit testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which is holding hearings on the issue this week, here.
Refugee Resettlement Watch’s Corcoran recently asked rhetorically, “Will refugee flood gates open even wider if Hillary elected on November 8th?”
“Yes, I believe they will,” she wrote, noting that the Refugee Act of 1980 has an emergency provision Clinton is likely to exercise:
There is a very clear provision, which I don’t think has been used (the large crush of Vietnamese came before the Refugee Act of 1980 became law), but I think Hillary will use it. By defeating Donald Trump, she will feel she has a mandate to open our borders. There definitely won’t be a border fence built and I predict she will use every lawful means available to admit as many migrants as she can, including the emergency provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980.
Could she add her 65,000 Syrians to the 110,000 refugees Obama proposed for FY2017, or could she go even higher? Yes, she could knowing that the Congress, even if Republicans still hold the majority, is weak and will be further demoralized by her win. . .
Hillary could easily bump our numbers up to a quarter of a million! (That would be in addition to the masses of asylum seekers—-phony refugees—now streaming across our southern border.)
This past fall, the State Department Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, Anne C. Richard, a former executive with the International Rescue Committee, a leading VOLAG, who was appointed to her current position by then-Secretary of State Clinton in 2012, said that with their FY 2016 appropriation authorizing 85,000 resettled refugees, they could resettle 100,000 refugees if called on.
“We have evidence that Hillary Clinton’s old friends at the Department of State have readied nearly 50 new resettlement sites in 49 states which would only be necessary if they were planning for a massive increase in refugee numbers beginning on Clinton’s inauguration day,” Refugee Resettlement Watch’s Corcoran tells Breitbart News.