President Joe Biden’s State Department is launching a “Welcome Corps” program that will ask Americans and green card holders to help resettle refugees across the United States.
Last year, the Biden administration announced a massive increase in the annual number of refugees it would try to resettle across American communities. Though the cap is merely a numerical limit and not a goal to be reached, top officials have suggested they are looking to resettle about 125,000 refugees in Fiscal Year 2023.
Biden’s refugee cap is eight times the 15,000 cap set by former President Trump.
As part of the administration’s goal to drastically increase refugee resettlement, the State Department has launched the “Welcome Corps” program that effectively allows Americans and green card holders to sponsor refugees for resettlement in the United States.
This year, alone, the State Department is looking to have at least 10,000 Americans help resettle about 5,000 refugees through the program.
By summer, State Department officials said they hope to turn refugee resettlement into a quasi chain migration effort where Americans and green card holders can sponsor refugees that they choose to come to the United States.
Chain migration is the process where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. on green cards. More than 7 in 10 legal immigrants arriving in the U.S. today do so solely because they have relatives already living in the country.
Designation as a refugee is a sought-after privilege mostly because it allows those admitted to eventually adjust their immigration status to secure green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship where they can then go on to sponsor more foreign relatives for green cards.
Over the last 20 years, nearly one million refugees have been resettled in the country. This is more than double the number of residents living in Miami, Florida, and is the equivalent of annually adding the population of Pensacola, Florida, to the country.
Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to research, and each refugee costs taxpayers about $133,000 over the course of their lifetime. Within 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. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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