Interview with Anne Richard (Asst. Sec. of State) is Revealing!

Refugee Resettlement Watch
April 16, 2016

We learn that Irish immigrants at one time were as dangerous for America as Islamic terrorists and that refugee kids are cute!

I just want to give you two quotes from the woman who is at the top of the food chain when it comes to bringing third worlders to your towns.

Anne Richard is the Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration. She is one of several government employees involved with refugee resettlement who move in and out of government as employees first of federal contractors. (She was previously a VP at the International Rescue Committee.)

This is an interview with NPR where she knows her emotion-driven audience:

First, while responding to questions about terrorists getting in to the US as Syrian refugees, she equates the situation now with when the Irish came to America in large numbers (an aside: always remember that when the great waves of Irish came, they could not access welfare!).

Here she suggests that fear of them at the time is on the same level as our fear of ISIS today.

RICHARD: No, I think we’re trying to put together the best program possible. What I worry about the political discussion is it endangers this American tradition. And we have seen in the past that, you know, the Irish were too dangerous to bring in because they were going to be drunkards and hotheaded and backward.

And, further along in the interview, she demonstrates that she is driven by emotion (or at least trained to use that appeal)!

To me, to us, this is about being clear-eyed about the economic and social welfare of our communities.  This is about public policy decision-making.  This is about the costs to our economy. This is about whether there are unemployed Americans seeking work.

This is not about whether immigrants are nice people or their kids are cute!  

One of their favorite tricks (watch for it in your community) when you question the wisdom of inviting large numbers of impoverished people to your town, is that they want to drag out the poor refugees/immigrants as pawns to parade them before you in order to pull on your heart strings.

Here is Richard’s revealing comment to NPR:

RICHARD: Well, I meet a lot of refugees. And I find that when people meet refugees, they get it. They get the fact that these are families and that these are people who are really struggling and that they are resilient because they’ve already survived getting out of their countries. And so I think that Americans need to see more of the faces of refugees like I have. When you meet the individuals, the families, they have kids that are cute. They have grandparents who are wise. They have parents who are caring and want to help everybody.

I am sure all of those things are true, but they still don’t stack up to a clear-eyed economic analysis about whether mass migration of very needy people is good for American wise grandparents, caring parents, and cute children!

One more thought (I’m laughing when I think of it!):  Imagine the next time there is a refugee-promoting meeting in your town, and you bring out some impoverished senior citizens, some out of work vets, a few disabled Americans in need of subsidized housing and some poor/hungry American children to demonstrate your point.  Can you imagine the howls of outrage on the other side that we might play their same game!