They're getting the country they want
by digby
I guess this is the one area in which Trump is indeed being a classic isolationist:
ABC news reports:
In 2017, the U.S. resettled 33,000 refugees, a 66 percent drop from the 97,000 individuals it resettled in 2016. Non-U.S. countries resettled 69,000 refugees in the same year.
The study, which drew on data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and U.S. State Department data, charted the steep decline in resettlement following the Trump administration’s historically low cap of 50,000 refugees for the 2017 fiscal year.
In September, the administration announced it would lower the cap further to 45,000 refugees for this year. And, with three months left to the 2018 fiscal year, resettlement is unlikely to approach that ceiling; the U.S. has currently admitted just over 16,000 refugees.
Andrew Schoenholtz, a Georgetown law professor and Director of the Human Rights Institute and Center for Applied Legal Studies, told ABC News that members of the Trump cabinet, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his staff, have deliberately slowed the refugee vetting process in order to decrease intake.
“Even though they committed to 45,000, it’s been very clear all along that Steve Miller, who is one of Sessions’ people, wanted to have 20,000 or 22,000,” Schoenholtz said. “They’ve made the system as slow as it could possibly be.”
The number of Muslim refugees admitted to the U.S. has dropped substantially more than the number of refugees from other religious denominations. The decrease follows several changes to the U.S. immigration system, including a ban restricting travel from several majority-Muslim countries that was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii.
Trump and his henchmen are horrible, cruel people. The US is the richest country on earth and can easily absorb a hundred thousand refugees a year or more. There's room, there's a thriving economy and we need new people. And that's not to mention the fact that our policies are at least partially responsible for the fact that many of these people are refugees in the first place. The fact that we refuse to accept that climate change is real and commit to doing anything about it is going to create millions more as people are on the move to survive famine, wars and political displacement as a result.
But if what you wanted was an isolationism that says fuck everyone but Trump voters (who won't benefit from any of this either) then you can't be too unhappy with Trump's policies. Sure, hes building up the military and strong-arming other country's governments with threats unless they pay him protection money and do exactly what he says, so the idea that he is "withdrawing" from the world is incorrect.
But he is closing America's doors to foreigners and is working as hard as he can deport as many who are already here as he can. He's making America white again.
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