Democrat Joe Biden’s plan to surge refugee resettlement by over 700 percent to the United States is “what America needs to heal” after four years of President Trump, an MSNBC columnist writes.
In a piece titled “Biden’s refugee plan is what America needs to heal from Trump,” MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown writes that Americans “need to make space” for a surge in refugees that the former vice president has promised to bring to the U.S. Brown writes:
Massively increasing the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. has the benefit, then, of doing exactly that — marking an end to the U.S. government’s hostility to immigrants under Trump and showing the world our renewed place in the global community. It also happens to be the right thing to do and entirely fitting with Biden’s beliefs.
The years through 2016 have shown that the maximum numbers of refugees welcomed into the country wax and wane as attitudes in the U.S. shifted. But part of the transformation the U.S. needs to recover from the Trump era requires a renewed commitment to making amends for a history of American exclusion and embracing the country’s immigrant heritage more fully than ever. The time to make those changes is now, no matter how hard they may seem. [Emphasis added]
…
As the Biden administration does the work of building this country into a place where the laws equally apply to everyone, where health care is a given, where we halt the warming of the planet, we need to make space for the people who’ve dreamed of a place where all that and more is possible. [Emphasis addd]
Biden’s plan to overhaul the nation’s immigration system includes a reversal of Trump’s reforms to the State Department’s refugee resettlement program — a boon for the business lobby that has fought against any reforms to immigration reduction, knowing it forces their industries to mechanize or hire American.
Trump, this year, reduced the annual cap on refugees to 15,000 admissions for Fiscal Year 2021. The cap is merely a numerical limit and not a goal federal officials are supposed to reach.
The reduction of refugees is the lowest level of resettlement since the program’s inception in 1980, accounting for an 80 percent reduction compared to the Obama-Biden years. Likewise, Trump has sought to allow states and localities to have a say in whether or not they want to resettle refugees in their communities.
On the other hand, Biden has vowed to increase the refugee resettlement program by 700 percent, setting the annual cap at 125,000, with plans to raise that cap every year for at least four years.
Over the last 19 years, more than 985,000 refugees have been admitted to the country. This is a number more than double that of residents living in Miami, Florida, and would be the equivalent of adding the population of Pensacola, Florida, to the country every year.
Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to the latest research. Over the course of five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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