One of the most harmful aspects of our nation’s current immigration policy is its manifold refugee resettlement programs, the disastrous consequences of which have been
amply documented on this website. That’s why the speech
Don Barnett, currently a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and expert on refugee resettlement in the United States, delivered to the Penn Club on Tuesday night is so crucial to understanding the scale of the problem faced by small towns and communities throughout America. A former employee of the United States Information Agency within the U.S. State Department, he spent an extensive part of his career working in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, which produced most of the refugees brought to the United States during the Cold War Era.
Today we have a much different approach to refugee resettlement that, as Barnett pointed out repeatedly during the course of his speech, is completely untethered to any concrete American foreign policy goal, and which is divorced from any traditional
definition of the term itself. Even as
President Obama promises to end the signature law that allowed hundreds of thousands of refuseniks and political and religious dissidents to emigrate from Russia and the former USSR, the amount of refugees being sent to America from the third world increases exponentially. As Barnett noted in his talk, and as even
open borders advocates readily concede, the United States accepts more than four times as many refugees as every other industrialized nation combined. This despite the ineluctable fact that the pool of genuine refugees has rapidly diminished since the conclusion of the Cold War, a reality that becomes fungible when the very definition of the word refugee is altered in order to encompass everyone who belongs to a specific persecuted religious, ethnic, or political group
or gender, even if the person being given permanent residency is currently living in his country of origin. Now even an IDP, or
internally displaced person, becomes a “refugee” eligible for possible resettlement in the United States...
