REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT OUT OF CONTROL
By Phil Kent

Announcement by the State Department that our country will admit approximately 1,350 Iraqi Palestinians – many of them well-treated guests under the late Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein and now unwelcome in post-Saddam Iraq – again focuses on our dysfunctional “refugee resettlement” program.

“It will be the largest-ever resettlement of Palestinian refugees into the U.S.— and welcome news to the Palestinians who fled to Iraq after 1948 but who have had a tough time since Mr. Hussein was deposed in 2003. Targeted by Iraqi Shiites, the mostly Sunni Palestinians have spent recent years in one of the roughest refugee camps, Al Waleed, near Iraq’s border with Syria,” reports The Christian Science Monitor.

So Americans must now witnessing Uncle Sap welcoming thugs from the Arab mean street – many of whom cheered and danced when Muslim terrorists hit the Twin Towers and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2003. There’s also a larger issue. Why can’t any of the Arab League’s 21 members admit their “brothers”? For that matter, why doesn’t the U.S.-funded, Sunni-led Palestinian Authority resettle them? Did the State Department even urge resettlement there?

During President George W. Bush’s second term, the number of Arab refugee entries dropped. In 2007, only 70,000 came to our shores (still too many). Under the Obama administration, the number will rise. The main reason? The United Nations now has more say in admitting refugees into the United States! That’s right— it is a total undermining of our sovereignty. Even though the U.S. has been the dubious world leader for three decades in Third World refugee resettlement, the federal government has delegated even more authority to refugee resettlement contractors and the United Nations to settle more aliens here.

In 2005, the number of legally-defined “refugees” in the world stood at 8.4 million—a 26-year low thanks in large measure to the end of the Cold War. But the UN has now created a new definition: “People of Concern.” They include those internally displaced within their own country. Including them, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, brings the number of UN clients potentially in need of resettlement to 20.8 million.

Incredible, too, is that most medical bars to immigration are waived for refugees. The Center notes that the U.S. public health service has committed to “curing” cause of TB among refugees selected for the program before carriers are admitted to the U.S. And, since the last days of the Clinton administration, a known AIDs carrier can now be admitted.

Furthermore – and get this!— the Vietnamese resettlement program, originally supposed to last for a couple years in the 1970s to help genuinely persecuted anti-Communists, continues unabated. Many Vietnamese are now simply coming here to live off the system and have babies who can be American citizens— and then they go back and forth as they please to Vietnam during good economic times.

More and more Democrats and Republicans in Congress are saying “no” to illegal immigration and additional foreign “guest” workers who take jobs from American citizens, especially during this deep economic recession. It’s past time these same lawmakers tell the Obama administration and the United Nations “no” by voting for a moratorium on any further refugee resettlement here.