The upshot is the Obama administration is opening the border to huge numbers of backward Third Worlders who will need lots of government freebies to survive and will gratefully vote Democrat in the future.
One of the experts testifying at the hearing was Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, and she appeared Friday on Fox News with Neil Cavuto:
VAUGHAN: What the administration is doing is two things: first, in order to justify admitting huge numbers of folks from Central America, a lot of them are kids, they’ve basically unilaterally changed the definition of who is a refugee to cover people who live in very violent places where maybe a criminal organization goes around threatening people or if women suffered domestic violence at the hands of their husbands. They’re even saying female single heads of households can qualify the same as somebody who is persecuted for their religious beliefs and allowing them to come into the country and immediately qualify for the huge array of services and benefits. . .
CAVUTO: Once granted refugee status, an individual has open access to federal welfare, to your point, work permits, ability to receive green cards, citizenship. What the administration’s doing here is it stated that extends parole to such individuals in the United States as well, further contravening law — is that true?
VAUGHAN: That’s the other thing. Yes, if someone doesn’t meet even their expanded definition of a refugee, what they would like to do for many of the Central Americans and they’ve already done it in the case of Haitians say, we’re going to admit you under a status called parole, or actually let them enter as parolees, and just say even though you came under parole, we’re going to say you’re a refugee to get all of these services at the expense of the federal government and also state taxpayers who have to pick up the tab for lots of resettlement services that are provided. The huge expansion of these programs is going to get enormously costly for the communities where these folks resettle because they tend to cluster in different places around the country and it becomes a big burden and a distortion in the job market and in all sorts of other ways.
We as a country want to be generous to real refugees and when it’s appropriate to allow some people to come here to be resettled, but the Obama administration is basically going out and recruiting people in parts of the world that you know have more difficult circumstances and say come on in and we’ll support you, completely at odds with this idea that eventually immigrants would be self-sufficient. Instead they’re becoming dependent on the government.
CAVUTO: Yeah, and we certainly widened the pool in a definition of who’s eligible as a result.
VAUGHAN: At this point, it could be anybody in the world if you extend it that way.
