A State Department official dodged questions about the risk to Americans created by the agency’s decision to let U.S. residents select foreigners for the huge prize of refugee status, green cards, and then citizenship in just six years.
“Do you have any safeguards for Americans?” Breitbart News asked as Assistant Secretary of State Julieta Valls Noyes walked out of a very short June 19 briefing on the legally questionable “Welcome Corps” program.
She claimed there would be protections but exited without providing any details.
“This is one more way the administration is trying to make an end run around the immigration law,” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He added:
This is a way of blowing a hole in the immigration caps [roughly 1 million per year] that Congress has announced, and it’s a piece with mass parole and [non-enforcement of detention rules]. It just makes it that much more urgent that Congress — maybe the next Congress — is going to restrict the President’s discretion because presidents have shown they cannot be trusted with discretion in immigration.
The U.S. refugee program has a long history of quietly shifting opportunities and wealth from ordinary Americans to progressives, coastal investors, and selected foreigners.
For example, refugees have sold entry documents to foreigners, and corporations exploit low-wage refugees instead of spending funds to make workplaces safe and efficient. Progressive groups secretly lobby to steer cheap refugees and government spending to business groups, even though many millions of Americans work in low-wage jobs, and millions more have been pushed out of the labor market.
The program is being pitched as decent support for some families split during a backlogged refugee process. But the family splits have been caused by the administration’s focus on processing roughly 200,000 Afghans and Ukrainians.
In her very brief press conference, Noyes claimed:
Welcome Corps is the boldest innovation in the U.S. refugee resettlement in four decades, and it reflects the Biden administration’s commitment to expand community engagement as we rebuild our refugee program.
She justified the wealth-shifting program by citing the Cold War era “Nation of Immigrants” narrative:
My own parents arrived in this country as [Cuban] refugees … so I see this as an offshoot of the historic traditions in our country of welcoming newcomers … [to] a “Nation of immigrants.”
The Welcome Corps name is a match for the Welcome.US organization, which was formed in 2021 by wealthy Americans to encourage the inflow of more workers, consumers, and renters. The group’s council includes Sean Kennedy, a manager at the National Restaurant Association, billionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Dina Powell McCormick at Goldman Sachs, Brad Smith at President of Microsoft, Starbucks CEO John Culver, and Rebecca Blumenstein, a deputy managing editor at The New York Times.
A “senior State Department official” said their goal is to import 125,000 migrants per year, according to the transcript of a January 19 not-for-attribution briefing to a picked group of reporters.
The official explained the big policy shift in the Welcome Corps program:
In the second phase of the private sponsorship program, we are going to welcome referrals by private sponsors themselves, that they can indicate which refugees they would like to apply to sponsor … they can pair themselves up that way.
The official promised secure vetting of potential refugees seeking to get into the program:
[Eligible migrants include] Anyone who is already within the pipeline of cases referred for resettlement to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, regardless of the country that they come from. And there may be Ukrainians, there may be Afghans, but we certainly anticipate seeing people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or from Burma who would be the beneficiaries of this program. If there are people from North Korea within that pipeline, they certainly could benefit from being received and resettled in the United States through private sponsorship.
“None of the private sponsors would benefit financially in any way from resettling refugees,” the official said while answering just four questions.
But the U.N.’s selection process has a history of corruption because it allows foreign U.N. officials and foreign groups to provide — or sell — an immensely valuable gateway to the United States for migrants and all of their descendants
“I’m like the walking dead,” one Somali woman told NBC News in 2019 after her husband was allowed to settle in Minnesota in 2014:
Abdullahi said … she was left behind because of false information fed to the U.S. government by a UNHCR resettlement officer, David Momanyi, to whom her ex-husband paid a hefty bribe [to ensure she was left behind].
…
Her account is corroborated by a former U.N. contractor, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, who said he personally collected tens of thousands of dollars from refugees while acting as a middleman for Momanyi — and other UNHCR staffers — over several years. He said Abdullahi’s ex-husband paid almost $20,000 in multiple installments [to make sure his wife was left behind].
In separate interviews, more than a dozen other refugees said Momanyi was known for taking bribes. One described the Kenyan as “the architect of corruption.”
The corruption is official admitted. “Refugee status and resettlement places are valuable commodities, particularly in countries with acute poverty, where the temptation to make money by whatever means is strong,” said a 2008 U.N. document.
But Biden’s new program will allow U.S.-based groups to also pick people for refugee status.
“It also opens the door to more fraud,” said Nayla Rush, a Lebanon-born expert who works for the Center for Immigration Studies:
How are we going to combat fraud when we are handing [decisions] to private individuals and nonprofit organizations? … [Now] it’s the mostly local UNHCR staff who sell these spots. But you [let more groups] do it under the blessings of the U.S. government?”
The Welcome Corps program also allows the private groups — including recent migrants — to import favored refugees, not high-risk refugees, she said:
It is allowing green card holders, not just American citizens [to pick new refugees] … when we have been told by the U.N. and by the U.S. government for ages that these selection process [are intended to] resettle the most urgent cases. So having an individual sponsor sponsoring somebody just because they know them [contradicts the justification of aiding] real refugees who are in real danger.
U.S. officials diid not detail what would be done to prevent U.S. residents, employers, or pro-migration groups from profiting. However, the unnamed official insisted “there are many, many checkpoints, many, many failsafes, vetting – all that is part of this program to prevent any abuses.”
The reporters ignored the programs’ economic and civic impact on American citizens and instead declared their focus on the interests of migrants.
For example, Ted Hesson at Reuters, asked: “Is there a way that the State Department will be able to enforce that the refugees are getting adequate housing or are not being subjected to labor abuses when they’re brought into the U.S.?”
The Associated Press’s incumbent reporter, Matt Lee. rebuked Noyes for not importing more migrants, saying:
Why is it limited to groups of five or more [sponsors to import refugees]? Why can’t individuals … do this on their own? … This administration has tried to make up for the reduction in admissions under the previous [administration] but it has not yet even close.
Noyes responded with moralistic cliches:
Because it’s not about money, Matt. It’s about commitment. It’s about the community. It’s about bringing people together and forming a group so that the refugees have more than one person that they can refer to and work with.
The subsequent A.P. article on the program did not challenge Noyes’ claims, despite the vast evidence that escalating migration inflicts huge pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans.
Follow the Money
In 2022, Biden’s deputies admitted roughly 3 million legal, quasi-legal and illegal migrants — or roughly 3 migrants for every Americans who turned 18.
Administration officials are also expanding the cross-border flow by working with Mexico-based centers that help convert would-be illegal migrants into quasi-legal “parole migrants” that are not counted in the media-monitored “border encounter” reports each month.
Agency officials say they will use the Welcome Corps pipeline to help import 125,000 refugees per year. That huge inflow adds up to 1.25 million people per decade, not counting chain-migration.
The federal government has long operated an economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, and allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
One result is that a 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
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