2020 Democrats’ Home Towns Resettled Only 0.22% of All Refugees in Last Decade

The four leading 2020 Democrats have demanded more refugee resettlement in American communities, but their own home towns have taken little-to-no refugees over the last decade.

Former Vice President Joe Biden of Delaware, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg have each vowed to massively increase the flow of refugees from abroad into the United States if elected.

Their homes in each of their states, where they have residences, have largely passed the burden of refugee resettlement onto neighboring states and communities.

For example, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — where Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, have a vacation home — has resettled zero refugees between 2009 and 2019. Delaware, in fact, has resettled only 82 refugees since 2009, a figure that makes it one of the least likely states in the nation to resettle refugees.

In Wilmington, Delaware, where Biden’s primary residence sits, less than 50 refugees have been resettled in the last decade.

Likewise, Warren’s home residence of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has resettled less than 50 refugees over the last decade, even as she has called for a more than 700 percent increase in refugee resettlement — a policy that would likely have no impact on where she lives.

South Bend, where Buttigieg has lived his entire life, has resettled only about 106 refugees between 2009 and 2019, even though neighboring Indiana towns have had to absorb more than 19,800 refugees in that same time period.

Burlington, Vermont, where one of Sanders’s three homes resides, has resettled less than half of the 3,087 refugees that have been admitted to the state since 2009 despite being the state’s largest city. This indicates that close to 2,000 refugees have had to be absorbed in small Vermont towns outside of where Sanders lives over the last decade.

The small town of North Hero, Vermont, where Sanders’s lakefront vacation home resides, has taken zero refugees between 2009 and 2019.

Overall, the home regions of Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg resettled 1,464 refugees since 2009 — just 0.22 percent of the total number of refugees, more than 655,000, that were settled.

There are nine refugee contractors that resettle all refugees for the State Department every year. These refugee contractors have a vested interest in ensuring as many refugees are resettled across the U.S. because their annual federally funded budgets are contingent on the number of refugees they resettle. Those refugee contractors include:

Church World Service (CWS), Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC), Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM), Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), International Rescue Committee (IRC), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS), U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and World Relief Corporation (WR).

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.