Trump Challenges Hillary Clinton: Stop Your Support for Refugee Program, Give the Money to Inner City Kids

Donald Trump is calling on Hillary Clinton “to replace her support for increased refugee admissions… with a new job program for our inner cities.”

Clinton “wants a 500% increase in Syrian refugees to come into our country,” Trump said at Friday’s Faith and Freedom Summit.

Clinton’s plan to resettle 65,000 Syrian migrants would cost U.S. taxpayers over $42 billion over the course of the migrants’ lifetimes, based on projections from Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector.

Trump said that rather than using taxpayer funds to import foreign migrants from terror-prone regions, Clinton should instead use the funds to help struggling Americans who are living in our inner cities.

“We have to take care of the people who are here,” Trump explained. “We have to temporarily stop this whole thing with what’s going on with refugees, where we don’t know where they come from… We have to take a rest. We have to take a time out. We have to use the money to take care of our poorest Americans and work with them, so they can come out of this horrible situation that they’re in.”

Clinton’s call for admitting 65,000 Syrian refugees comes on top of the roughly 40,000 refugees and asylees the U.S. already admits from the Muslim world each year—and this does not include the larger permanent resettlement program that occurs through green cards, which would bring total annual migration from the Muslim world to 182,000 a year under Clinton’s proposal.

At Friday’s summit, Trump called for “new immigration controls to keep us safe from radical Islamic terrorism.”

“Without documentation, we don’t know where they come from,” Trump said. “Hillary will bring hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of whom have hostile beliefs about people of different faiths and values, and some of whom absolutely and openly support terrorism in our country. We don’t need that. We have enough problems. We have enough problems right now. “

Trump explained that Clinton’s policies, including her support for open borders, will deliver a “crushing blow” to African American and Hispanic communities. He said:

Regulation, bureaucracy, government control and open borders have economically destroyed our inner cities. Her [Clinton’s] policies will be a crushing blow to all poor people in this country. Her education policies, her economic policies, her immigration policies and her trade policies will plunge our poor African American and Hispanic communities into turmoil and even worse, despair—believe me, you look at what’s going on. The Democrat party has run the school boards and the police department, and the city councils, and the mayors offices in most of our inner cities—almost all of our inner cities… they’ve horribly failed in almost every single community. In fact, you could almost say in every community. I’m going to turn things around.

“Together, friends, we will chart a new optimistic course for America,” Trump declared. “We will put America first. When you look at our deals—our military, our trade deals—we don’t put America first. I don’t think anybody negotiating these trade deals even knows anything about what they’re doing and I don’t think they care about America being first. I care and you care—and that’s the way it’s going to be.