How Are They Getting In?
Delivered to the New English Review Symposium May 30th, 2009.
Part I: Waving Terror Through – the Visa Waiver Program
Nationals from 35 countries ( Western Europe including Malta and some not so Western countries such as Brunei, Latvia, Hungary and others) can enter the U.S. without a visa on the Visa Waiver Program.
Today, roughly one half of temporary visitors to the U.S. come in under the relatively new Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The streamlined visitor entry program became permanent in 2000 just in time for 9/11. In fact, Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted 9/11 conspirator, would-be VWP entrant.
In a review of the program when it was in pilot prior to 2000, INS inspectors That’s for sure – there is no U.S. consular interview or pre-inspection for travelers from VWP countries. Their first encounter with U.S. officials is on U.S. soil where they are pretty much waived through if they have a passport from a VWP country. After all, these are mostly Western countries with which we have relaxed travel reciprocity agreements. But wait, the current issue of the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal notes in an article (The Role Of Immigration In A Coordinated National Security Policy, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Vol 21:383 2007 by Donald Kerwin and Margaret D. Stock) [] that a “A recent quantitative study of more than 300 Islamic terrorists found that forty-one percent were nationals ofWestern countries…”
No surprise, the article finds that “Terrorists both live in VWP countries and can be expected to use stolen passports from VWP countries.”.
Belgium recently had the highest rate of stolen passports in the world. Part of a Belgian passport’s value on the black market is as an entrée to the U.S. on the VWP.
Though the USA PATRIOT Act now requires participating countries to issue machine-readable passports which include biometric identifiers and and other recent U.S. law requires these countries to track and report lost or stolen passports, don’t expect major changes soon since the VWP supposedly provides economic benefits to the U.S. and convenience to U.S. travelers.
The Law Journal reports:
An April 2004 report by the DHS Inspector General criticized: (1) the program’s uncertain leadership; (2) its failure to perform mandatory reviews of participating countries; (3) its failure to collect information on the use of fraudulent passports in the program; (4) inadequate training on passport fraud for inspectors at ports-of-entry; and (5) the ability of VWP participants to avoid the US-VISIT entry/exit system. The program remains the U.S. immigration system’s area of greatest vulnerability. (Italics added)
When Donald Kerwin, the is alarmed, the situation is truly dire.Part II: The Refugee Resettlement Program
One of the main avenues of immigration into the U.S. of radical Muslims is the U.S. refugee program, a program which at one time was aligned with the national interest and which at one time was a true charitable endeavor characterized by responsibility and accountability.
The refugee program of today is a result of the 1980 refugee act, sponsored by among others, Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.
First a quick definition:
The 1980 refugee act anticipated about 50,000 refugees per year and about 1,000 asylum grants per year.
As the Cold War came to a close, the focus of the refugee program shifted from groups fleeing our cold war adversaries to those trying to escape crises in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
This shift from 2 main sources – the East Bloc and Southeast East Asia to literally dozens of other sources in the developing world was underway when the 911 attacks occurred.
Chinese nationals now head up the list of asylees. (Recently, as high as 9,000 per year.) And for each of the successful 9,000 who obtained asylum at least 2-3 failed in their bid, but stayed in the country illegally anyway.
People have successfully obtained asylum in the U.S. based upon domestic abuse from their family at home, FGM and even because of the lack of services for the disabled in the country they left.
Throughout the 80’s and especially the 90’s, most refugees to the U.S. were not really refugees in any common sense definition of the term – remember it was mostly driven by cold war needs and the Vietnam war and I should add domestic political constituencies.
The Lautenberg Amendment is still re-authorized every year and has recently been extended to cover Iranian minorities with its blanket group based presumption of persecution.
Because Lautenberg was not re-evaluated for post cold war realities there have been almost comical side effects: one of the larger refugee groups coming in to the U.S. today is made up of Russian Evangelicals. They are not persecuted in Russia and most have not encountered so much as a slur in their native land. No organizations, U.N. or otherwise, considers them to be refugees, yet they continue to get automatic refugee status by the U.S. .
The Soviets and Cubans and very likely Vietnamese dumped their criminals into the refugee flow to the U.S. Some notorious Russian organized crime figures came over with automatic refugee status, chronicled by the late Robert Friedman.
One of the most important driving forces in the U.S. refugee program is profit. And again the beneficiaries are from all areas of contemporary American society and from all points along the political spectrum.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a big booster of expanded refugee admission.
Refugee resettlement is very profitable to the organizations involved in it.
With the 1980 Refugee Act and related legislation, the charities morphed into federal contractors with tremendous profit incentives to grow the program.
Matching Grant Program. To get the $2,000, LIRS needs only provide $200 in actual money plus 800 dollars worth of donated clothes and furniture.
Washington area headquarters are paid by the U.S. government.
Again, remember the refugees they sponsor are eligible for all forms of welfare within 1 month of arrival.
Another dynamic that has to be noted is that recently arrived refugees are employed or are now running some of the approximately 400 non-governmental organizations resettling refugees to the U.S.. Of course they advocate for their group to come over who in turn find government supported jobs in which they can advocate for more entrants.
As with other government-dependent industries there is a revolving door between the refugee industry and the federal government which pays its bills. It has become a self-perpetuating mechanism with all of the usual problems that come with government dependant programs.
Until the 80’s, the program was limited by the responsibilities and capacity of the organizations involved to absorb the refugees. Now that they are contractors, not charities, these controls are no longer in place.
One particularly troubling development is that the contractors are gaining broad influence over refugee policy.
That is, they are traveling the globe looking for groups to bring over. There are obvious conflict of interest questions around giving power to pick refugees for resettlement to a refugee resettlement contractor which makes its money on a per refugee basis, especially if that contractor is essentially an exclusive ethnic club which some of the lower-level affiliates are.
A New Era of Refugee Resettlement at FrontPageMag.com.
All refugee flows will have long-term demographic consequences on the U.S.
I have tried to get the exact count of Muslim refugees in recent years. The U.S. is on track to take about 80,00 refugees this year and an additional 20,000 asylees.
Even HIAS (the Hebrew immigrant aid society) now sponsors Muslim refugees. I asked HIAS what the percentage of Muslims is among the refugees they bring over and was told by the spokesman in N.Y. that “due to the sensitive nature of the information” they could not tell me.
This from a recent US government report:
The temptations in this field have also sometimes resulted in damaging corruption or manipulation on the part of certain UNHCR officials or others in a responsible role, who find they can extract large bribes or other personal favors for moving certain cases to the head of the resettlement line.
Next month, Family reunification will resume for the entire program.
But the relationship of original anchor family will not be tested and the reality of polygamy will frustrate attempts to control program growth.
According to the State Department paper cited earlier, the State Department’s refugee bureau must “develop a sense of mission about adding one or two new [refugee] groups to the [U.S. refugee] pipeline development process each month and think of itself as the component in the decision making system that gives the benefit of the doubt to resettlement”
In other words the State Department must become the principle backer of the U.S. refugee resettlement NGO’s and must more actively promote resettlement to the U.S. rather than treat resettlement as a last resort after other approaches – return home or integration into the host society or a neighboring country – have failed.
Their plan is to define refugee groups very narrowly thereby keeping the groups small. This is impossible. Once a group is designated as a refugee group, its numbers start expanding. The chance for a generous reception in the West is just too tempting and once here they join the expanding contractor/advocacy community. That is the dynamic we must consider and accept with every decision made about admitting more refugees.
No refugee flow to the U.S. has ever stopped with the originally designated group and, in fact, the small-groups model is likely to set off multiple self-propagating flows, some of which have the potential to reach the size of the Cold War flows from southeast Asia and the former USSR.
This new direction in refugee resettlement has set off wildly escalating expectations around the world and could expand the program to record high levels.
But In contrast to the national media, which has ignored this story, independent local papers have provided considerable reporting on issues arising with refugee resettlement. Most of these issues revolve around the cost of social services and the collision of cultures as small towns attempt to accommodate demands for things like Islamic ritual foot baths and needs of primitive tribes people who may not be familiar with even the most basic modern amenities. TB and to some degree HIV (barred for normal immigrants, but not for refugees) are huge concerns. Last year a Tyson worker, a Somali refugee, died from TB.
Since the refugee inflow has changed to a much more diverse third world population which is being distributed ever more broadly across the country, it is now much more visible to the average American.
Google up “Emporia Kansas Somali refugee”, “Shelbyville Tennessee Somali refugee”, “Nashville Tennessee refugee”, “Sedalia, Mo.”, “Hagerstown MD, refugee” to see colorful local reporting on the issue and very busy citizen blogs.
I suggest U.S. resources would be much more effectively used helping refugees on the ground where they are. Some estimates are that 500 refugees can be helped overseas for each refugee brought here.
Yet the NGO’s have vigorously resisted even temporary “re-programming” of their grant money to overseas assistance because it would cut into their profits.
See the report “Out of Africa, Somali Bantu and the Paradigm Shift in Refugee Resettlement”.
Refugee sponsorship should more closely model America’s traditional welcome to refugees by requiring more of the sponsors. The sponsors must not walk away from their clients. As sponsoring groups become more involved with refugees, prospects for assimilation will improve.
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