From Radio Derb, Now the political Left in civilized nations is bringing in savages and lunatics to colonize us.

John Derbyshire June 3, 2011

07 — Iraqi refugees. If there's anything more insane than U.S. education policy, it's U.S. policy on resettlement of refugees.

Refugee resettlement, which most Americans probably think of as an expression of our nation's charitable goodness, is in fact an almighty racket, out of which a great many people are making fat salaries — people in the contracting agencies like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration and Refugee Services, which is almost completely funded with tax dollars (94 percent in 2009, according to their annual report), along with open-borders lobbies like the Migration Policy Institute, funded by George Soros and other of the usual suspects, and of course immigration lawyers. If you want to find out about the refugee-resettlement racket, a very useful and informative source is the blog Refugee Resettlement Watch.

For the kind of weirdness you encounter when you look into this scam, consider refugees from Iraq. Iraq's been comparatively peaceful this past couple of years — compared, I mean, with what it was like five or six years ago. You'd think, therefore, that the number of refugees we're taking in would have fallen off.

That would be to reckon without the looking-glass-world insanity of U.S. refugee resettlement policy. In Fiscal Year 2006 we took in fewer than 200 Iraqi refugees. In 2007 the number went up to 1,600. Then suddenly in 2008 it ballooned to nearly 14,000, and for 2009 and 2010 it's been more than 18,000 each year. The more peaceful things get in Iraq, the more Iraqi refugees we take.

I got those numbers from a piece by our own Mark Krikorian on the Center for Immigration Studies website. Mark asks why are we taking refugees from Iraq at all. Quote from him: "Resettlement to the United States should be used only as the absolute last resort for people who will surely be killed if they stay where they are and who have nowhere else … to go. There are lots of Arab countries where Iraqis have been going for some time, notably Syria and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia's a big, empty place right next door." End quote.

Oh well, at least these Iraqi refugees are properly vetted for terrorist sympathies, right? [Laughter.] News item: Two Iraqis, both admitted as refugees two years ago, have been arrested in Bowling Green, Kentucky for conspiring to ship sniper rifles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and money to Al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. These guys hadn't been running falafel stands back in the home country, either: they were full-time terrorists. One of them had his fingerprints on a security database in Iraq, the fingerprints having been lifted from an unexploded IED. They got resettled as refugees anyway. In Kentucky — whose state legislators, if they have a brain between them, will now pull Kentucky out of all federally-subsidized refugee resettlement programs.

It used to be that the civilized nations went out and colonized backward parts of the world. Now the political Left in civilized nations is bringing in savages and lunatics to colonize us. "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad."

08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Item: I passed some remarks about Hispanics back there somewhere, then some remarks about Mexicans. Listeners sometimes chide me for using the two terms interchangably. Well, why wouldn't I? Here's another titbit from the Pew Hispanic Research Center, one of the more useful sites on the web for raw data. This report is dated May 26, and it breaks down the U.S.A. Hispanic population by country of origin. Mexico is way, way, way out ahead with almost 32 million. Next is Puerto Rico, which is not actually a country, with a mere 4.6 million. Behind that is Cuba, which is a country, 1.8 million, which is to say one-eighteenth of the Mexican number. Overall Mexicans are 71 percent of the total. So loosely saying "Mexican" when you mean "Hispanic" is inaccurate, but not that inaccurate.

I always do! But I'm from Los Angeles where Mexicans are over 90+% of the Hispanic universe and growing.