Having read several articles in the past few days about the pending White House decision on the number of refugees that will be allowed to come into the country annually, one thing is clear: White House policy adviser Stephen Miller is apparently doing as much as he can to push that number to historic lows and has allegedly tried to spike a report showing that refugees offer a net positive economic impact.
Vanity Fair notes in a recent article that every year on October 1, the president of the United States is required to set the number of refugees that will be allowed into the country for the fiscal year, as decreed by the Refugee Act of 1980.
“Given that the current president is Donald Trump, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that his administration is currently considering slashing the limit to its lowest level since the Refugee Act was created,” writes Bess Levin.
According to reports, “certain members of Team Trump want the number to be fewer than 50,000, which would be less than half of the 110,000 refugees Barack Obama said should be admitted in 2016. It probably also won’t come as much of a shock to learn that in making this argument, certain members of the administration are choosing to actively ignore the government’s own cost-benefit analysis of refugees,” writes Levin.
Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum reports that as part of his executive order banning refugees, Donald Trump ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to produce a report about the economic impact of refugees.
“The answer, according to HHS, is that refugees contributed $269 billion in tax revenue and used $206 billion in services, for a net positive impact of $63 billion over the past decade,” writes Drum.
But when the final report was released, “it presented only half the story,” Drum reports.
In a Sept. 20 editorial, the Washington Post, citing a New York Times article, said that the administration “sent the report back for a redo, insisting that any mention of revenue be dropped. The Department of Health and Human Services obliged in a final, three-page report this month, which concluded that per-person departmental program costs for refugees were $3,300, compared with a per-person cost of $2,500 for the U.S. population as a whole.”
Miller “is leading the charge to slash the number of refugees admitted in the fiscal year starting in October, below even the cap of 50,000 that Mr. Trump imposed this year — itself the lowest number in more than 30 years,” the Post said.
The New York Times “reported Tuesday that Miller has advocated for around 25,000 refugees, and that the Department of Homeland Security proposed a cap of 40,000,” the Atlantic reported.
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 