09/30/2016
From: Benjamin
I watched the Senate Hearing Oversight of the Administration’s FY 2017 Refugee Resettlement Program, of the Immigration and the National Interest Subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions. It was infuriating.
While Sen. Jeff Sessions opened with a predictably compassionate yet pragmatic statement on the current migrant crisis, he was followed by Sen. Dick Durbin whose opening statement relied, equally predictably, on sentiment and clichés, out of which the most absurd claim was undoubtedly that America’s national security depended on admitting more migrants.
All three witnesses — one from the State Department, one from USCIS, and one the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement — were mouthpieces for the Obama administration and merely provided positive spin for the increase, as well as reassurance that current vetting of migrants was adequate. The director of the ORR, Robert Carey, was perhaps the most infuriating as he went through a plethora of (no doubt costly) programs tailored specifically for migrants, such as helping them find employment (in a country where close to 95 million Americans are out of the labor force), providing English as a second language, providing interpreters, providing therapy for traumatized migrants, and so on.
All emphasis in witness testimony was placed on the advantages for migrants, and none offered on the disadvantage to Americans; or if the Obama administration had given any consideration to whether Americans ever wanted this (a point which the valiant Jeff Sessions was quick to emphasize).
Sen. Durbin was able to extract the usual boilerplate from the USCIS official that every migrant was scrupulously vetted, that no stone was left unturned. (Such positive assurances were eerily reminiscent of the boilerplate surrounding Obama’s much-touted Iran deal, which were transparently false at the time and have since proven so to those desperate to believe the assurances at the time.)
The other Democratic senators followed suit. Not one expressed skepticism. Only sanctimony. Sen. Franken (formerly a comedian, so-called) did make the excellent point that asking migrants if they're Muslim or not was a flawed tactic since the migrant could simply lie.
An excellent point! Of course, Franken only made it to suggest that there should be no religious test on migrants, thereby enabling a free-for-all. (Naturally, the correct solution to the predicament of lying migrants is simply to not let them into the United States.)
So perhaps the lesson to learn from this, if it hasn’t been learned already, is to value the assurances of Democrats regarding national security (and everything else, for that matter) at zero. Sen. Klobuchar touted the benefit of migrants to add to a depleted workforce in Minnesota. With nearly 95 million Americans out of the labor force, how does it make sense that Minnesota would need to resort to migrant workers? So it seems that employers, and therefore politicians, in Minnesota are pleased with this displacement of Americans.
Predictably, the Republicans were the only skeptical ones in the hearing. Sen. Cruz with his customary line of precise and repeated questioning was able to get the USCIS employee to admit that many migrants are allowed into the US based merely on an interview. [Leaked memo: Refugees vet themselves, WND, September 28, 2016].
Sen. Sessions forcibly concluded that Obama’s increase in migrants was evidence of a "determination to promote an agenda without listening to the American people,"
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