The White House Wants to Cut the Number of Refugees America Takes In Even Further

For reasons that can only be described as pure sadism, the White House thinks we’re still bringing in too many refugees—45,000, in a country of well over 325 million people, and over 3.5 million square miles of land area—and would like us to take fewer.

After a report last month by the Daily Beast that a significant reduction in refugee admission was under consideration, the New York Times reports that the Trump administration is considering cutting the refugee cap it set in 2017 even further, from 45,000 to 25,000. As the Times notes, that’s a more than 40% cut from this year’s limit, but still not as low as the number advocated by Stephen Miller, just 15,000 people.

What’s actually happening is closer to what Miller wants, reports the Times:

Proponents of scaling back the refugee program argue that they are merely acknowledging that the government does not have the capacity to vet and admit the numbers of refugees it has in the past.

They point to this year’s low numbers — the State Department said 16,230 had been resettled as of the end of June, putting the program on pace to admit only around 21,000 this year — as evidence, although those figures followed a year in which refugee admissions were frozen for months on end while officials conducted reviews that Mr. Trump ordered.

For comparison, Germany—a country roughly a quarter the size of America’s population, and a fraction of its space—took in over 186,000 asylum seekers in 2017, and that was a down year. The Times cited an anonymous White House official as saying a “migration crisis” was taking over the country, which of course is a blatant lie, and said that the administration wanted to focus on only the worst cases where an asylum seeker claims a “credible fear” of going home, which is also a blatant lie.

“The issue is not either the need internationally or ability to process these refugees, it’s the administration’s will,” Mary Giovagnoli, director of Refugee Council USA, told the Times. “There’s a continued concentration of power in the hands of folks who don’t support a robust refugee program.”

According to the Times, the fate of this plan comes down to Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State and that shining beacon of freedom and equality, who’s being advised on the issue by two aides who are reportedly close to Miller. That should go well.