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Paul L. Williams, PhD
No Caps on Refugee Re-Settlements
December 18, 2010
According to the US Ambassador to Nepal, there are no caps on the number of
Bhutanese refugees to be resettled in the United States. The Bush Administration
agreed to accept 60,000 refugees from Bhutan over a five year period, but that
number now has been extended by the Obama Administration beyond limit. How many
Bhutanese will arrive here within the next five years is a matter of conjecture.
Similarly, 54,000 Iraqi refugees have been admitted to the United States since
2007, and an additional 6,651 Iraqis and their families have received "special
immigrant visas.” There remains no limit to the number of such visas that can be
issued. For this reason, only time will tell how many Iraqis will eventually
arrive with their families for resettlement in the US.
The same lack of limits for refugee resettlement applies to the Somalis who have
arrived here in droves during the past decade. Over 300,000 presently reside in
Minnesota – 70,000 in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Area.
In addition to the refugees, Third World residents qualify for immigrant visas,
diversity visas, student visas, work visas, fiancee/fiancé visas. The newly
arrived immigrants may apply for green cards for relatives through the Family
Reunification visas, and no restrictions are in place on the number of relatives
who may qualify for such cards.
Since the Third World is the Muslim world, a major sea-change has occurred
within the landscape of American life and religion. According to Cornell
University, there are eight to ten million Muslims residing in the United
States, compared to 6,400,000 Jews. What brought about such a transformation?
How did the Crescent Moon come to eclipse the Star of David within the land of
the free and the home of the brave? Why are mosques sprouting up like magic
mushrooms throughout city, village, and farm?
The great sea-change in this country was brought about the Celler-Hart Act of
1965, which abolished the national-origin quotas that had governed the process
of immigration and naturalization since 1924.
The Immigration Act of 1924 had limited the number of new immigrants to 2
percent of each nationality who lived in the country not in 1924 but in 1890.
The reliance of this legislation on the ethnic composition of the country before
the turn of the century guaranteed that the majority of new arrivals would be
from Northern Europe.
It is hard to conceive of an act of Congress that could be more culturally
biased and yet it received nearly unchallenged bipartisan support. Yet The New
York Times editorialized:
"The country has a right to say who shall and who shall not come in...The
basis of restriction must be chosen with a view not to the interest of any group
or groups in this country...but rather with a view to the country’s best
interests as a whole.” [1]
In 1952, The McCarran Walter Immigration Act affirmed the national-origins quota
system of 1924 and limited total annual immigration to one-sixth of one percent
of the population of the continental United States in 1920, or 175,455. The act
exempted spouses and children of US citizens and people born in the Western
Hemisphere from the quota.
But, in 1965, Senator Ted Kennedy and his colleagues, including President Lyndon
Johnson, viewed such legislation as pig-headed and prejudicial. Few elected
officials, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina – being one of the exceptions,
dared to disagree with them. Championing the Celler-Hart bill, which called for
the abolished all quotas, Kennedy, being far from prescient, said:
"Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S500 will not inundate America
with immigrants from any other country or area, or the most populated and
economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia...The charges I have mentioned
ae highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are
out of line with the obligation of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of
our heritage.” [2]
Forty years after Senator Kennedy made this pledge, Dean Steven Gillon of the
Honors College at Oklahoma University assessed the results of the 1965
Immigration Act by noting:
"The US added at least 40 million immigrants after 1965. Before 1965, 95
percent of the new immigrants had come from Europe. After 1965, 95 percent came
from the Third World. The 1965 act has transformed American society and had
consequences exactly the opposite of what we were promised.” [3]
In his speech before Congress, Senator Kennedy had said:
"Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.”
The level of immigration, he swore, would remain substantially same as it was in
1965 – 156,700. This, too, proved to be woefully incorrect. The present
immigrant rate exceeds 1.5 million annually. Noting this, Pat Buchanan writes:
"The 1965 Cedar-Hart bill was the greatest bait-and-switch in history.
Americans were promised one result, and got the opposite result that they had
been promised would never happen. They were misled. They were deceived. They
were swindled. They were told immigration levels would remain roughly the same
and the ethnic composition of their country would not change. What they got was
a Third World invasion that is converting America into another country." [4]
From 1965 to the present, more than half of all the immigrants to America from
the Middle East and Asia have been Muslim – many with radical ideologies. [5]
Want to save America?
Footnotes:
[1] New York Times editorial cited in Otis J. Graham, Unguarded Gates: A History
of America’s Immigration Crisis (Lanham, Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield, 2004),
p. 50.
[2] Senator Edward Kennedy, quoted in Patrick J. Buchanan’s State of Emergency
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), pp. 238-239.
[3] Steven Gillon quoted in Georgie Anne Geyer’s "Immigration: The Elephant in
America’s Room,” Universal Press Syndicate, October 2005,
www.uexpress.com
[4] Patrick J. Buchanan, p. 239.
[5] Jane I. Smith, "Patterns of Muslim Immigration,” International Information
Program, US Department of State, 2002. |
