Lux Lucet

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“An Ohio State University student posted a rant shortly before he plowed a car into a campus crowd and stabbed people with a butcher knife in an ambush that ended when a police officer shot him dead, a law enforcement official said.” Thus read the headline on the NBC News website on November 28, 2016.

That same day, CBS ran a story titled “What’s known about the OSU attack suspect Abdul Razak Ali Artan”. According to the article, “A Somali-born Ohio State University student plowed his car into a group of pedestrians on campus and then got out and began stabbing people with a butcher knife Monday before he was shot to death by a police officer.”

As it turned out, the November terrorist attack at OSU was a relatively minor example of what has become an all too common pattern of violence by Muslim immigrants and refugees throughout the US and Europe. In the case of the Ohio State attack, the only death was that of the attacker himself. But sadly, this is not always the case.

The Ohio State attack makes a good lead in to the discussion of what I have termed the “refugee racket” for several reasons.

First, it strikes close to home. OSU is located in Columbus, Ohio, about 90 miles up the highway from where I live. It’s bad enough to read about Islamic violence in faraway places. But it hits home all the more when it’s in your backyard.

Second, the attack fits a larger pattern of refugee violence in the West.

Third, there is a direct connection between the OSU attacker and Catholic Charities, by far the largest taxpayer funded refugee resettlement organization in the US.

Refugee Defined

Although it is common to speak of refugees and immigrants in the same sentence, and many of the same problems that plague Western nations’ immigration policies are also common to their refugee policies, these are separate categories of persons and the distinctions should be kept in mind.

An immigrant is a person of foreign origin who comes to a new country for the purpose of becoming a citizen.

On the other hand, the basic definition of a refugee according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is a person located outside the US who “demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.” The ultimate goal of a refugee is to be repatriated when the threat of persecution has come to an end.

An asylum seeker is very similar to a refugee, the difference being that an asylee is one who is already located in the US, as opposed to a refugee who makes application for refugee status while outside the US.

The Current Refugee System is a Racket

Perhaps the most succinct definition of the term “racket” comes from the pen of General Smedley D. Butler in his book War Is a Racket. Wrote Butler, “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. On a small ‘inside’ group knows the what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

In Butler’s case he was talking about war, which all too often is exactly what the former Marine Corps general said it was. But his words apply with equal force to the refugee policy of the US and other Western nations. In public, those who promote the current US refugee policy appeal to people’s compassion. In private, many of these same people have very different motives.

For example, on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website, the page for its Migration & Refugee Services office states its mission as, “Grounded by our belief in Jesus Christ and Catholic teaching, Migration and Refugee Services (MRS) fulfills the commitment of the U.S. Catholic bishops to protect the life and dignity of the human person. We serve and advocate for refugees, asylees, migrants, unaccompanied children, and victims of human trafficking.”

This sound very noble, but what the USCCB doesn’t tell you is that refugees are a very profitable big business for them, and one that is funded by the US taxpayer.

In her book Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America, Ann Corcoran notes that the Refugee Act of 1980 ushered in a major change in American refugee policy. “In the years leading up to the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, the US took in over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees who were cared for by churches and other civic groups throughout America on a family-by family-church-by-church basis. There was no complex system for resettlement yet established and few if any resettlement contractors as we know them today were hired as federal contractors” (46). But following the 1980 legislation, “so-called ‘religious charity’ groups…now monopolize all refugee resettlement in America” (47).

There are nine federal contractors who are in charge of refugee resettlement in the US. These contractors are known as VOLAGs, short for Voluntary Agencies. As Ann Corcoran notes, in light of the fact that the nine VOLAGs are largely funded by the US taxpayer, it is something of a joke to call them “Voluntary Agencies”. But then this misnomer is consistent with the idea that current US and Western refugee policy is, in fact, a racket that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

The nine VOLAGs are:

1. Church World Services
   
2. Ethiopian Community Development Council
   
3. Episcopal Migration Ministries
   
4. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
   
5. International Rescue Committee
   
6. US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
   
7. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services
   
8. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
   
9. World Relief Corporation
   

With a total 2012 revenue of $70,975,237, 98% of which comes from the US taxpayer, the USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services is by far the largest of the nine VOLAGs.

One important point to remember about the USCCB and the other VOLAGs is that they are paid on a per-capita basis. That is to say, they more refugees they resettle, they more they are paid.

Worth noting is that the Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Somoli refugee mentioned at the beginning of this post, was settled in the US by none other than the USCCB through Catholic Charities of Dallas.

Any mention of the current US refugee system as a racket should include a discussion of the overall cost of the program. According to Refugee Resettlement Watch, the minimum figure is $1 billion but may run as much as $10 billion annually.

The Refugee Welfare Racket

One important distinguishing feature of the American refugee program is the welfare benefits that accrue to the individual refugees. In short, refugees are eligible for the full panoply of the US welfare state once they are settled in the US

The USCCB has even created a helpful webpage showing the various benefits in the form of cash assistance, medical assistance and social services available to refugees. The benefits include eligibility for SNAP (formerly food stamps).

The food stamp program is no small thing either. According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 91.4% of Middle Eastern refugees accepted between 2008 and 2013 received food stamps. A further 73.1 percent were on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance and 68.3 percent were on cash welfare.

Some with a smattering of knowledge of the Bible might reflexively defend this as an example fulfilling the Biblical commandment to care for the stranger among us. But this represents a misreading of Scripture. The Bible nowhere calls for publically funded welfare. The Biblical model for charity is private individuals giving of their own resources, not government taking money by force from one person and transferring to another. In fact, when governments do this, they sin by overstepping the bounds of their rightful authority.

In Scripture, the purpose of the government is to punish evildoers and praise what is good. Governments have no authority to take money from their citizens and give it to others. Whether the recipient is another citizen or a refugee makes no difference. It is an immoral act of theft, the violation of the eighth commandment.

The UN Refugee Resettlement Racket

Another aspect of the current refugee system that qualifies it as a racket is that it is a top down, globalist system administered by the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR). The current UNHCT, Filippo Grandi of Italy, is relatively new on the job, having taken over this role in 2016.

In what would come as a surprise to many, refugees are selected by the UNHCR and assigned to particular countries. Yes, you read that right. The US doesn’t pick its refugees, they are assigned by the UN.

Here’s a recent summary analysis of the latest report released by the UNHCR.

Summary and Conclusion

The current refugee policies of the US and other Western nations are not what they seem to be. While they are presented to the public as humanitarian programs, they are, in truth, another example of big government run amok.

Under the current refugee system, taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for the mass importation of refugees, some of whom pose an actual threat to their well-being.

And not only that, the entire refugee resettlement system is controlled by globalist interests in the UN, with the globalist Roman Catholic Church-State as major player as well.

It should not need to be said, but it does anyway, that there is little or nothing Christian about the current refugee system.

In the Christian system of thought, acts of charity, including supplying the needs of refugees, are to be done by private individuals out of their resources. Government “charity”, in which the power of the state is used to forcibly extract money from one person and give it to another, is not charity at all, but rather theft.

The current refugee system in the West, based as it is on governmental theft and globalism, is destructive both to the social fabric of the receiving nations and to the individual refugees themselves.