The US is no place for ‘dreamers’

Another milestone in America’s retreat from global leadership passed Monday when the Trump administration announced that it will cap refugee admissions next year at 30,000, by far the lowest ceiling since the current program was established in 1980. The total is just over a third of the number admitted in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration.
Judging from the current year, even that paltry goal may overstate actual admissions, as officials use bureaucratic means to cripple the program.
In announcing this abdication, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it should not be misread as “the sole barometer of America’s commitment to vulnerable people around the world.”
That’s a fair point. A “barometer” would include a raft of other programs and initiatives the administration has used to intimidate, deter, remove, oppress and, in some cases, terrify other groups of vulnerable migrants, including many who aspire to enter this country or who are already here: Thousands of Central American parents and children forcibly separated as a means of dissuading their compatriots who might follow. More than 400,000 Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and others who lived and worked lawfully in the United States for many years before the administration announced it would terminate their legal status, insisting it was safe for them to go home. Some 700,000 “dreamers” — mostly teens and 20-somethings reared and educated in this country — whose lawful status the administration has struggled mightily to revoke.
Mr. Pompeo raised the specter of a terrorist threat as a rationale for slashing refugee admission, but he failed to mention that none of the 3 million refugees who have entered this country over the past four decades has been arrested for committing a lethal act of terror in the United States.
In gutting the refugee program — slashing admission not just for foreign Muslims and Yazidis but also for Christians — the administration insisted it was focusing resources on asylum seekers, who are already in the United States. That appears to be true — some officers previously deployed to screen refugees have been shifted to process asylum cases. Simultaneously, however, the administration has ensured that fewer migrants are likely to succeed with their asylum claims as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s ruling that victims of gang and domestic violence no longer qualify.
Fact-twisting has been central to the administration’s crusade against refugees. It has portrayed the program as a security risk even as vetting is tighter than ever. It tried to suppress a government report that found that refugees’ economic benefit exceeded their cost by $63 billion over the past decade.
Since 1980, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the United States has admitted an average of 80,000 refugees annually. This year, the number is likely to be a little more than 20,000. That guts U.S. diplomatic leverage to encourage other countries into accepting larger portions of the world’s 25 million refugees and diminishes America’s moral power and prestige. Day by day, the shining city on a hill that President Ronald Reagan held up as an exemplar, and that so many foreigners once admired, shines a little less brightly.
— The Washington Post