Trump to Cut Obama’s Refugee Inflow by At Least 80 Percent Next Year

President Trump is seeking to reduce former President Obama’s refugee inflow to the United States by at least 80 percent next year, a promise he made on the campaign trail in 2016.

In a State Department announcement on Thursday, officials said that the annual refugee resettlement ceiling would be lowered from its current 30,000 to 18,000 for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 — which runs from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2020. This is merely a numerical limit and not a goal federal officials are supposed to reach.

State Department officials said they expect to process more than 350,000 foreign nationals in new asylum cases next year; thus, a reduction in refugee resettlement offsets this historically high humanitarian immigration level.

“The proposed FY 2020 refugee ceiling, as outlined by the president, takes into account our existing and anticipated humanitarian workload on all fronts and fulfills our primary duty to protect and serve U.S. citizens,” Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli said in a statement.

The lowering of the refugee resettlement cap to a maximum of 18,000 admissions next year will be at least a 78 to 80 percent decrease of the inflow of refugees that Obama allowed into the country in his last full fiscal year.

For example, for FY 2016, Obama’s State Department admitted close to 85,000 refugees into the country.

Meanwhile, Trump’s State Department is set to admit less than 30,000 refugees this fiscal year, reducing the burden that the refugee resettlement program has placed on America’s working and middle class, as well as on small U.S. communities that have been forced to absorb enormous levels of refugees since 1980.

As Breitbart News has reported, the U.S. has permanently resettled more than 1.7 million foreign nationals and refugees through a variety of humanitarian programs — a foreign population larger than the size of Philadelphia, which has 1.5 million residents.

These 1.7 million foreign nationals and refugees do not include the roughly 445,000 foreign nationals who have been allowed to remain in the U.S. through the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.

Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to the latest research. Over the course of five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.