“Do what I say, not as I do,” could be the mantra for Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar when it comes to resettling more than 500 percent more refugees under her proposal since virtually none of them would end up in her neighborhood, according to a report.
And one of her motives is to support the big businesses that handle resettlement, according to reports.
The Democratic U.S. senator from Minnesota wants to skyrocket the number of refugees taken in every year from President Trump’s cap of 18,000 to the Obama-era level of at least 110,000, Breitbart reported.
While Minneapolis has resettled thousands of refugees since 2009, almost none live in Marcy-Holmes, where Klobuchar owns a home with her husband.
Nearly 85 percent of all residents in Klobuchar’s neighborhood are native-born American citizens and of the less than ten percent of foreign-born residents, half arrived from China, India, Korea, Germany, Thailand, and Malaysia — countries from where only five refugees have been resettled in Minnesota in the last decade and none of whom have been resettled in Minneapolis much less Klobuchar’s neighborhood.
Klobuchar is not the only Democratic presidential candidate to call for drastically flooding America with refugees.
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg recently called for an increase from 18,000 to at least 110,000 each year, calling for America to “restore” itself as the world leader in resettling refugees, The Ohio Star reported.
Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of the Big Apple, wants to go big with refugee resettlement, calling for a 694 percent increase to 125,000 refugees each year, The Tennessee Star reported.
Klobuchar was one of 10 Democratic senators last November who met with the Trump administration to express concern that cutting the cap to 18,000 could hurt the resettlement agencies that place the refugees, the StarTribune reported.
Indeed, fewer refugees mean fewer taxpayer dollars going to resettlement agencies, which are businesses, even when they are called “non-profits.”
Refugee contractors are dependent on taxpayer funding to operate their resettlement activities, as reported by The Tennessee Star. Because the contractors are paid a fee for each refugee they resettle, increasing the number of refugees automatically increases the agency’s cash flow. For example, in 2011, when Catholic Charities of West Tennessee resettled a Somali mother and her eleven children in Memphis, the agency was paid a fee for twelve refugees.
A 2012 U.S. General Accounting Office report confirmed that this payment structure incentivizes resettlement contractors “to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease,” The Star said.
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Jason M. Reynolds has more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist at outlets of all sizes.
Photo “Amy Klobuchar” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
