Refugee fraud under the Obama Administration has become “easy to commit” according to Homeland Security officials in a new internal memo released late last week. The document, made public by the House Oversight Committee, says fraud in the US refugee program is “not easy to investigate”, too reliant on testimony alone, and therefore vulnerable to “manufactured histories”, “false statements” and “fictitious supporting-documents.” But the American public and even Congress likely don’t know the half of it.
A new Rasmussen telephone survey shows a large majority of voters have grown skeptical of admitting refugees from the Middle East and Africa. The results suggest that most Americans are now aware of the problems poor database-infrastructure in places like Syria and Somalia present for DHS adjudicators attempting to verify applicants’ backstories, affiliations, and identities. But the public is much less aware of how low our actual admission standards have also become. Over the years, the once-clear criteria for admission under our refugee laws have been blown out through agency “policy” interpretations, themselves driven by special interest groups advocating for their own ethnic communities. A tragic consequence has been displacement of true refugees by mere economic migrants, whose fraudulent entries provide a major loophole for clandestine resettlement by terrorists.
{mosads}Take President Obama’s recently expanded Central American Minors (CAM)-program. CAM recruits and flies young adults up to the age of 20 into the US from the region if they have contact with a parent or legal guardian residing here and can pass an in-country relocation interview. In documents obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), DHS basically admits that applicants using CAM would have no claim to refugee status under current law. In a progress report about the program, DHS explains, “The qualifying minors interviewed were all accompanied to the interview (in Central America) and cared for by caring adults in the home country and were being assisted financially by the parent in the United States.” But this is not even faintly compliant with the requirement, now more than 50 years old, that a refugee must have suffered direct persecution due to their race, religion, political opinion or directly related grounds. The IRLI documents also reveal that the majority of these refugee-grants are in cases where the applicant was only “harmed or threatened with significant harm due to their relationship to a family member.” But not only is this well outside the law, such a harm-standard is vague enough and low enough to cover millions around the world.
Compare this to admissions under the Syrian refugee program. Other documents IRLI’s obtained show that 83 percent of the those applicants claim persecution based on political opinion, specifically for being “anti-regime.” Persecution based on political opinion, not vague claims of domestic abuse, is what Congress envisaged when they passed the Refugee Act nearly 40 years ago. And if it wasn’t for the American public’s worries about the Administration’s inability to manage terrorist-infiltration from Syria, it is these types of persecuted victims we would be open to receiving.
If pseudo-“refugee” programs, like CAM, were to be challenged for giving priority to people claiming to suffer mere domestic abuse or poverty, no doubt the Obama Administration would make the argument that they’re merely following the standards set down over the years by our immigration courts. Open-borders attorneys have, in fact, lodged thousands of cases in recent years arguing that domestic violence and other hard-to-verify-cases deserve refugee-status under the law. It’s these debilitating expansions to what once was a purely humanitarian endeavor that cry out for Congress to reform and repair the Refugee Act.
A legislative fix would not only fight fraud, it could also promote fairness. A staggering 70 percent of all refugees worldwide referred from the United Nations go to the US (with most of the remainder going to Australia and Canada). Congress can comply with the public’s wishes while avoiding the emotional blackmail from open-borders-pushers by demanding greater equality and transparency in the refugee-referral process and by pushing for policies that help the world’s less fortunate where they are. It’s either that or the limits on America’s refugee system, and in turn the limits on our trust and generosity, will be pushed passed their breaking-point.
The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.