Report: Trump to cut refugee influx by 80 percent

FPI / September 27, 2019

President Donald Trump will fulfill a 2016 campaign promise by cutting the inflow of refugees by 80 percent in 2020, the State Department said on Sept. 26.

The Trump administration will lower the refugee resettlement cap to a maximum of 18,000 admissions next year, which the State Department said will be at least a 78 to 80 percent decrease compared to the last full fiscal year of the Obama administration.

In Fiscal Year 2016, President Barack Obama’s State Department resettled close to 85,000 refugees into the United States.

“The proposed FY 2020 refugee ceiling, as outlined by the president, takes into account our existing and anticipated humanitarian workload on all fronts and fulfills our primary duty to protect and serve U.S. citizens,” Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli said in a statement.

The State Department said Trump’s goal this year of admitting less than 30,000 refugees is reducing the burden that the resettlement program has placed on America’s working and middle class, as well as on small U.S. communities that have been forced to absorb large numbers of refugees since 1980.

According to a Breitbart News report, the U.S. has permanently resettled more than 1.7 million foreign nationals and refugees through a variety of humanitarian programs — a foreign population larger than the size of Philadelphia, which has 1.5 million residents.

“These 1.7 million foreign nationals and refugees do not include the roughly 445,000 foreign nationals who have been allowed to remain in the U.S. through the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program,” Breitbart News noted.

Research shows American taxpayers are on the hook for nearly $9 billion every five years to resettle refugees, Breitbart reported in 2018. An estimated 16 percent of the refugees who are admitted need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.

Free Press International