WASHINGTON — Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (R) slammed the Obama administration’s policies for admitting refugees from the Middle East Thursday.
In a hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which Sessions chairs, an official from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service revealed that more than 90 percent of refugees who have requested asylum in the United States have received approval.
Sessions called the subcommittee hearing after the Obama administration announced it would admit approximately 85,000 refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries in the Middle East over the next two fiscal years.
During his opening statement, Sessions blasted what he views as the administration’s prioritization of the refugees over American citizens.
“The economic and physical security of the American people must never be a secondary consideration,” the Senator impressed. “With workers’ pay stagnant, our entitlement programs on the verge of insolvency, our law enforcement struggling to combat radicalization and increasing crime, and our schools and communities struggling to keep up, voters are rightly wondering about their government’s priorities.”
Related: Byrne has ‘tremendous security concerns’ with letting Syrian refugees into America
Mobile, Alabama, Senator Sessions’s hometown, will house approximately 130 of those refugees through a non-governmental organization’s partnership with the State Department.
“Once here with refugee status, these individuals can claim any job and collect any federal welfare benefit,” Sessions explained. “Recent statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement indicate that 75 percent of refugees receive food stamps and more than half receive free healthcare and cash welfare. For refugees from the Middle East, the numbers are even higher: more than 90% of recent Mideast refugees draw food stamps and about 70% receive free healthcare and cash welfare.”
Sessions and many of his colleagues have also expressed concerns over terrorists’ use of the refugee system to infiltrate the United States and its allies.
“Refugee resettlement also comes with security risks, as we have witnessed with the surge of ISIS recruitment among Somali-refugee communities in Minnesota,” said Sessions. “Anyone claiming to have a serious and honest discussion of refugee resettlement must ask the difficult questions about integration, assimilation and community safety.
“This is certainly true with respect to countries like Syria, where we have little to no information about who these people are, and no ability to determine whether they are radicalized now, or likely to radicalize after their arrival in the U.S. Indeed, the FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism has testified that the United States does not have ‘systems in places on the ground’ in Syria to collect enough information to properly screen refugees. Our Subcommittee is currently investigating the scores of examples of refugees and asylees who go on to commit acts of terror or become involved with terrorist organizations.”
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— Elizabeth BeShears (@LizEBeesh) January 21, 2015
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