Sunday, March 8, 2020

Return to Real Charity for Refugees

Leah Millis/Reuters
In the past, refugees were, like all immigrants, expected not to become dependent on taxpayer largesse. Any support they needed came from individuals or private groups — sacrificial charity, given voluntarily, most often by religious organizations.
Government funding of refugee resettlement started in a very small way in 1948, when the federal government for the first time paid for the trans-Atlantic travel costs of a certain number of displaced persons from Europe — but private charities were still required to take things from there and to ensure the refugees didn’t become public charges. In the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the government for the first time paid charities directly to resettle those refugees, at $40 a head.
From tiny acorns grow mighty oaks.
A recent study by several of my colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies found that the lifetime cost (taxes paid minus services used) to taxpayers of resettling a refugee is $60,000, with those entering as adults costing twice that. Part of this is the $2,175 per head payment by the State Department to its resettlement contractors — Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and other ostensibly private organizations that are now primarily funded by taxpayer money. Also driving this is the fact that refugees, unlike other immigrants, have immediate access to welfare, which they make extensive and long-term use of because of their typically very low levels of education and, in many cases, a complete unfamiliarity with modern, urban society.
Read the rest from Mark Krikorian HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.


No comments: