Amy Klobuchar Vows to Resettle 500 Percent More Refugees, Though Few Are Likely to End Up in Her Neighborhood

Editor’s Note: The headline of this article has been updated for clarity. Klobuchar has not taken a public position on whether refugees will be resettled in her own neighborhood. 

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is vowing to increase the number of refugees resettled in the United States by more than 500 percent if elected president, almost none of whom would likely be resettled in her neighborhood.

This year, President Trump lowered the annual refugee resettlement cap to its lowest ever at about 18,000 total admissions. This is merely a numerical limit and not a goal to be reached by the State Department.

Klobuchar has vowed to increase refugee resettlement back to Obama levels, admitting at least 110,000 refugees in the U.S. in her first year in office. As president, Klobuchar would “direct the State Department to restore the refugee admissions cap to at least its pre-Trump administration level,” according to her campaign.

Returning to Obama-level refugee admissions would be a more than 500 percent increase in refugee resettlement to the U.S. compared to Trump’s level of refugee resettlement.

Though thousands of American communities would be inundated with a refugee flow, Klobuchar’s neighborhood of Marcy-Holmes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, would likely have to absorb close to none of those refugees.

While Minneapolis has resettled thousands of refugees since 2009, almost none live in Marcy-Holmes, where Klobuchar owns a home with her husband.

Nearly 85 percent of all residents in Klobuchar’s neighborhood are native-born American citizens and of the less than ten percent of foreign-born residents, half arrived from China, India, Korea, Germany, Thailand, and Malaysia — countries from where only five refugees have been resettled in Minnesota in the last decade and none of whom have been resettled in Minneapolis much less Klobuchar’s neighborhood.

In 2015, at the height of the migrant crisis spurred by conflict in Syria and Libya, Klobuchar pushed an effort to bring 65,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S., the overwhelming majority of which would have undergone lax vetting procedures.

Overall, less than 30 of the 17,564 Syrian refugees resettled in the last two years of the Obama administration arrived in Minneapolis. None were resettled in Klobuchar’s neighborhood.

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