A group of over 30 Senate Democrats is pushing Joe Biden to drastically increase the number of refugees allowed into the country this year and next, a follow-up to backlash the Democrat White House received from his own party for not changing the Trump-era refugee cap.
In a letter circulated this week, 34 Democrats called on Biden to raise the cap to 62,500 for the current fiscal year and then more than double it to 125,000 for fiscal 2022, which begins October 1.
“The United States must reject the previous Administration’s cruel legacy of anti-refugee policies and return to our longstanding bipartisan tradition of providing safety to the world’s most vulnerable refugees,” the senators wrote.
“Under the previous Administration, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) suffered from four consecutive years of dramatic decreases in refugee resettlement, resulting in reduced capacity in our refugee resettlement infrastructure,” the letter added.
The group was led by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and included Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.
While Biden vowed on the campaign trail to set refugee levels at those being demanded by the lawmakers, he recently backtracked, announcing this week that he would keep in place the Trump administration’s historically low cap of 15,000 refugees for this year. But the vociferous disapproval from his own party suggests he may raise the cap before the May 15 deadline to change it.
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Biden is reportedly considering raising the number of refugees admissible to the country to about 62,500, although White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it would be “challenging” to do so.
Democrats are eager to bring more government-dependent foreigners into the country at the same time they say Americans are economically suffering due to the coronavirus (although it was politicians who created the economic difficulties to begin with by shutting businesses down).
The Biden White House has notably departed from the Trump administration’s stance on immigration. Part of Biden’s immigration plan, as introduced in the Senate by Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), would extend legal status to illegal aliens who were already deported, allowing them to return to the United States to apply for amnesty.
This would be done through Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-issued waivers given to illegal aliens deported since January 2017. In other words, Biden and Democrats want to undo the deportations carried out by the Trump administration.
Biden also ended President Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the Remain in Mexico policy, under which migrants arriving at the southern border had to wait in Mexico while applying for asylum.
Biden’s DHS announced in February that those who had been removed to Mexico under Trump’s policy could begin to enter the United States. DHS began by opening three ports of entry and processing up to 300 people per day.
This prompted Texas to sue to seek to reinstate the policy. “The result of this arbitrary and capricious decision has been a huge surge of Central American migrants, including thousands of unaccompanied minors, passing through Mexico in order to advance meritless asylum claims at the U.S. border,” Texas wrote in its suit.
Raising the refugee cap would have the same long-term effect as the uncontrolled mass migration at the southern border — demographically displacing the American people with a large foreign population that loyally votes for Democrats (and, thus, socialist policies).
This is part of a larger move by Biden and congressional Democrats to expand their electoral power, and thereby erase opposition to their agenda.
It’s why they are so vehemently trying to turn Washington, D.C. into a state. It’s why they want to pack the Supreme Court.
The former effort would provide Democrats with much-needed votes in a closely divided Congress. The latter would give Joe Biden the ability to appoint a fresh set of activist, leftist justices in order to override the (ostensibly) conservative ones Trump appointed while in office.
As with so much of the Left’s agenda, the refugee issue has nothing to do with the heart-tugging, humanitarian aims its proponents espouse, but with gaining greater political power.
As always happens in totalitarian regimes, once power is acquired, the rulers are free to do away with the benevolent veneer.
