President Trump should set the refugee cap for 2020 at ZERO

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If over one million people are coming straight to our border this year, much of it fueled by quasi-asylum policies, why should we willingly bring in more people through a separate refugee program? The president should pose that question to the American people and then should announce a cap of zero for annual refugee intake in fiscal year 2020.

The Refugee Act of 1980 [8 U.S.C. §1157(a)(2)] grants the president the sole authority to set the annual cap for refugee intake. He only needs to “consult” with the Senate and House Judiciary committees, but they have no veto power over his decision without changing the law. Thus, there is nothing stopping the president from setting the cap at zero when the State Department sends the annual written report to Congress roughly two months from now.

To his credit, the president did reduce the cap to 45,000 in FY 2018 and 30,000 in FY 2019. So far, for the first three quarters of this fiscal year, 21,604 refugees have been processed. That is a sharp drop from the standard 70,000 cap for most of the past few decades and from the 110,000 cap Obama set in his final year in office. However, with everything going on at the border, it is simply indefensible to bring in more refugees when our system can’t handle the quasi-asylum invasion at our border. Dropping the number of refugees by 80,000 or so is nothing when we have one million people coming to our border.

Whether you believe in holding the line at the border or in processing more catch-and-release for amnesty at the border, either way, we need every resource we have among immigration officers trained in asylum adjudication and processing to deal with the border. Every employee of USCIS needs to be working on clearing the existing backlog in the system being driven by the border invasion. While 30,000 refugees doesn’t sound like a lot based on historical trends, all those employees who would be diverted to that process next year should be marshalled to combat the border crisis.

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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