President Trump should set the refugee cap for 2020 at ZERO

If over one million people are coming straight to our border this year, much of it fueled by quasi-asylum policies, why should we willingly bring in more people through a separate refugee program? The president should pose that question to the American people and then should announce a cap of zero for annual refugee intake in fiscal year 2020.

The Refugee Act of 1980 [8 U.S.C. §1157(a)(2)] grants the president the sole authority to set the annual cap for refugee intake. He only needs to “consult” with the Senate and House Judiciary committees, but they have no veto power over his decision without changing the law. Thus, there is nothing stopping the president from setting the cap at zero when the State Department sends the annual written report to Congress roughly two months from now.

To his credit, the president did reduce the cap to 45,000 in FY 2018 and 30,000 in FY 2019. So far, for the first three quarters of this fiscal year, 21,604 refugees have been processed. That is a sharp drop from the standard 70,000 cap for most of the past few decades and from the 110,000 cap Obama set in his final year in office. However, with everything going on at the border, it is simply indefensible to bring in more refugees when our system can’t handle the quasi-asylum invasion at our border. Dropping the number of refugees by 80,000 or so is nothing when we have one million people coming to our border.

Whether you believe in holding the line at the border or in processing more catch-and-release for amnesty at the border, either way, we need every resource we have among immigration officers trained in asylum adjudication and processing to deal with the border. Every employee of USCIS needs to be working on clearing the existing backlog in the system being driven by the border invasion. While 30,000 refugees doesn’t sound like a lot based on historical trends, all those employees who would be diverted to that process next year should be marshalled to combat the border crisis.

The refugee program is broken beyond repair anyway, and any sane government official would admit that it should be suspended while we deal with our broken border. We spend 12 times as much money resettling migrants in America as it would cost to resettle them in their own regions. Moreover, as Christians and Jews in the Middle East are becoming extinct, much of the resettlement program has become a fundamental transformation of America by bringing in thousands of non-assimilating Muslims engaged in protracted sectarian civil wars. The cost to Americans in terms of welfare, security, and culture is staggering — and it all enriches self-promoting and parasitic refugee contractors.

Moreover, it’s important to remember that much of the border crisis is already straining the refugee resettlement program under the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The thousands of Central American children smuggled in by illegal alien families are all being processed and resettled just like the refugees we choose to admit from other parts of the world. It’s unfair for the agency and its advocates to double-dip. If we are experiencing record resettlement of Central American kids, which is bankrupting the agency, then there is no reason to electively add more to the program.

Finally, there is also another refugee program not subject to the annual caps, the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, which has continued to grow under the Trump administration. It seems like the only purpose of our military remaining in Afghanistan is to bring in families of those who supposedly helped us in the dubious mission, which runs completely counter to the entire purpose of the War on Terror and the impetus for 9/11 (protecting America from dangerous immigrants). Since Trump took office, the State Department has admitted over 30,000 SIVs from Afghanistan and close to 10,000 from Iraq.

Bottom line? There’s no reason to have a separate refugee program when our entire border and immigration system has become one mass fraudulent refugee system.

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