Even though el Presidente Trumpo’s travel bans that-are-definitely-not-Muslim-bans are still stuck in legal limbo, it appears that just through the sheer power of his orb-inspired personality that refugees are being turned away from Merica.
That’s the assessment from the Los Angeles Times:
The number of refugees admitted to the United States was cut by nearly half in the first three months of the Trump administration compared with the final three months of the Obama presidency, reflecting the new president’s skepticism toward immigration.
Government statistics released Friday showed that more than 25,000 refugees were permitted to enter and reside in the United States at the end of the Obama administration. In the initial months under President Trump, the number fell to 13,000.
The statistics were released by the Department of Homeland Security, based on information supplied by the State Department.
Countries of origin were largely unchanged. In both periods, two-thirds of the arrivals came from five countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Myanmar.
I’d like to see a comparison of the average over Obama’s two terms because that doesn’t indicate if the last three months of his stay at the Oval Office were representative.
Now I *could* point out that this doesn’t fulfill Trump’s promise to absolutely shut down all refugees with the Muslim ban that he talked about incessantly but now denies because it’s legally dubious. But I won’t do that.
This is a good time to point out that a lot of right-wing blogs take up Trump’s deceitful line that there is no vetting of refugees currently. That’s a load of BS. On average, it takes two years for a refugee to through the vetting process, but it riles up his followers when Trump lies about how supposedly easy it is to get into the U.S.
On the other hand, however, that doesn’t mean we’re doing everything we can to vet them for the sake of the safety of our citizens, or that we owe the world to take in any at all. I think Trump is right to say we have a lot of other options to help refugees without necessarily bringing them into our country, which is so foreign to them.