By Linda Bentley | NOVEMBER 25, 2015
Resettling Syrian refugees in U.S. poses threat to Americans
‘I submit that it is wrong – morally wrong – to use those resources to resettle one refugee here when we could help 12 closer to their home’
WASHINGTON – On Nov. 19, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Executive Director Mark Krikorian testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security on the “Syrian Refugee Crisis and Its Impact on the Security of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”
Krikorian opened his testimony by saying, “A wise man once said, ‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.’ Halting refugee resettlement from the Middle East would be just such an act of statesmanship.”
Noting the United States government has no responsibility to anyone except its own citizens, Krikorian stated, “As individuals delegated by the citizenry to deal with the business of the state, the president and members of Congress must necessarily put the interests of the American people before the interests of foreigners.”
He said the United States has no responsibility to refugees but if we decide, as a matter of policy, to devote resources to humanitarian refugee protection, which Krikorian stated he personally supports, the decision-making should be based on two principles: “1) Such policies must not pose a threat to the American people, and 2) the funds taken from the people through taxes for this purpose must be used to the maximum humanitarian effect.”
Krikorian stated resettling Syrian refugees in the United States fails on both counts.
First off, he said screening cannot be done adequately.
While officials assure the American people that refugees are “subject to more intensive scrutiny than any other type of traveler to the United States to protect against threats to our national security,” Krikorian said despite various agencies doing the best to protect us from harm, the problem with trying to screen candidates for resettlement from Syria or any other failed state, such as Somalia, Libya, Yemen or Afghanistan is not a lack of resources or commitment.
He said, “The problem is that it cannot be done.”
Because our vetting process relies heavily toward electronic checks of databases with biographical information, photos and fingerprints, little information of this kind, which could potentially disqualify a candidate for resettlement, is available.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson stated, “[O]ne of the challenges that we’ll have is that we’re not going to know a whole lot about the individual refugees that come forward.”
Last month FBI Director James Comey told a Senate panel, “The only thing we can query is information that we have. So, if we have no information on someone, they've never crossed our radar screen, they've never been a ripple in the pond, there will be no record of them there and so it will be challenging.”
Unlike the United States, where information such as birth certificates, death records, driver’s licenses, school records, credit card charges, etc., Krikorian said such tracking is rare or nonexistent in much of the world even in the best of times.
And with the chaotic conditions in failed states, such as Syria, what little information trail that may have existed has since “gone up in smoke.”
Krikorian likened our screening of refugees to the joke where a drunk searches for his lost keys under the streetlight because that’s where the light is.
Along with the pervasive fraud in all immigration categories overseen by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Krikorian points out non-threatening refugees may also have fake documents.
He said, people fleeing one faction or another of Syria’s war may have had to lie about who they are to avoid capture or death.
However, he said, “[E]ven if we could identify every fake or altered document, how are we to distinguish the non-threatening document fraudster from the threatening one?”
Also, because of the disintegration of Syria, Libya and other failed states, Krikorian said that means legitimate blank passports and other documents are circulating widely as government offices have been overrun.
And, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Forensic Document Lab has genuine blanks of passports from almost every country for comparison, Krikorian said, “that expertise doesn't help when false identities are inserted into these legitimate documents.”
Immigration agent Dan Cadman stated, “In such circumstances, there is no one that U.S. officers can turn to in order to verify the identity of the person who presents these facially legitimate documents.”
Krikorian pointed out the vulnerability of documents highlighted in Europe earlier this year due to the preference given to Syrians, whereas thousands of non-Syrian illegal aliens have discarded their real passports and claimed to be Syrian, often presenting fraudulent documents.
He said experienced adjudicators can often “sniff out liars and cheats” during personal interviews. However, Krikorian cautioned that works best as a supplement to other forms of screening, not as a substitute.
Krikorian stated, “Finally, one would imagine that a strict vetting process would result in a relatively high rate of rejections. And yet, Barbara Strack, Chief of the USCIS Refugee Affairs Division, told the Senate hearing last month that more than 90 percent of Syrian candidates for resettlement were being approved. How stringent can the vetting of Syrian refugees really be when almost all of them are accepted?”
He also touched on the broader security problem created by refugee admissions, or large-scale immigration of any kind from societies with large numbers of terrorists, and said they “establish and constantly refresh insular communities that serve as cover and incubators for terrorism.”
Krikorian used the Somali community in Minneapolis as a prime example and said, “Established through refugee resettlement, and continually expanded and refreshed by more resettlement (nearly 9,000 Somali refugees were admitted last year) as well as follow-on chain migration, it has been the source of dozens of recruits for al Shabaab and ISIS, and dozens more supporters. Just this summer, a Somali graduate of a Minnesota high school died fighting for ISIS in Syria. As the Washington Times noted, the refugee resettlement program ‘is having the unintended consequence of creating an enclave of immigrants with high unemployment that is both stressing the state's safety net and creating a rich pool of potential recruiting targets for Islamist terror groups.’”
He said the combination of these two security vulnerabilities – the impossibility of vetting candidates for resettlement, plus the growth of domestic breeding grounds – is largely to blame for the FBI’s 900 or so active investigations into domestic extremists, the vast majority related to ISIS.
Krikorian noted all parts of the immigration system have been exploited by terrorists, not just the refugee program and provided examples.
He said it has been suggested resettling only Christians and other minorities from Syria, since we could be fairly certain they would not be affiliated with ISIS or al Qaeda.
Krikorian stated there currently appears to be a policy of discrimination against Christian refugees with Muslims overrepresented among the Syrians that have been resettled.
He speculated it could be due, in part, to the United Nations selecting the refugees for us from its camps and Christian refugees fear Muslims killing them in the camps.
Krikorian pointed to the incident in which Muslim passengers on a smuggling boat in the Mediterranean threw 12 passengers overboard to their deaths because they were Christians.
Citing problems with that approach, Krikorian asked, “How would we know if those claiming to be Christian really are?”
He said the second problem with admitting only religious minorities is that “resettlement of any faith is a highly inefficient means of protecting refugees.”
Krikorian stated, “Bringing refugees into our country makes us feel good about ourselves. Newspapers run heart-warming stories of overcoming adversity; churches embrace the objects of their charity; politicians wax nostalgic about their grandparents.”
But he said the goal of refugee assistance is not to make us feel good but to assist as many people as possible with resources available.
By resettling just a handful “to help us bask in our own righteousness,” Krikorian said it means we are sacrificing the much larger number who could have been helped with the same resources.
According to research conducted by CIS, it costs 12 times as much to resettle a refugee in the United States as it does to care for the same refugee in the neighboring countries of first asylum, such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
The five-year cost to American taxpayers for resettling a single Middle eastern refugee in the United States is estimated to be more than $64,000, compared to $5,300 that the U.N. estimates it costs to provide for that same refugee for five years in his native region.
Krikorian stated, “Given these limitations on resources, I submit that it is wrong – morally wrong – to use those resources to resettle one refugee here when we could help 12 closer to their home.”
He also stated the success of refugee protection means the refugees go home when the conflict ends and any scheme of refugee protection should be designed with eventual repatriation in mind.
