In its ongoing effort to replace the Statue of Liberty with a racist border wall as the symbol of the United States, The New York Times reports that the Trump administration commissioned a study from the Department of Health and Human Services “to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed” into the country next year. But when HHS’s study ended up undercutting the regime’s nativism by revealing that refugees actually contribute tens of billions more dollars than they cost, the research was allegedly scrapped. Whoops:
Advocates of the program inside and outside the administration say refugees are a major benefit to the United States, paying more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, and filling jobs in service industries that others will not. But research documenting their fiscal upside — prepared for a report mandated by Mr. Trump in a March presidential memorandum implementing his travel ban — never made its way to the White House. Some of those proponents believe the report was suppressed.
The internal study, which was completed in late July but never publicly released, found that refugees “contributed an estimated $269.1 billion in revenues to all levels of government” between 2005 and 2014 through the payment of federal, state and local taxes. “Overall, this report estimated that the net fiscal impact of refugees was positive over the 10-year period, at $63 billion.”
“The draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals.” White House spokesperson Raj Shah claimed fake news, dismissing the study’s leak as one “delivered by someone with an ideological agenda, not someone looking at hard data.” That’s rich, coming from a White House that gave us “alternative facts” and can’t even be truthful about Donald Trump’s inauguration size or the fact that he lost the popular vote by three million.
When it comes to “an idealogical agenda,” it shouldn’t be any shock to us that it was apparently the ghoulish Stephen Miller, Trump’s favorite hobgoblin speechwriter and former aide to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who “personally intervened … to ensure that only the costs ... not any fiscal benefit ... of the [refugee] program were considered,” the report alleges. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent:
Miller, naturally, is a key advocate for dramatically cutting refugee flows. The Trump administration is debating whether to cut those flows from around 110,000 per year to below 50,000, and Miller has reportedly pushed for the number to be reduced to as low as 15,000.
This must be viewed in its larger context, which is that virtually every major item in Trump’s immigration agenda has now been revealed to be thoroughly baseless. The rationale for Trump’s thinly veiled Muslim ban was blown apart by two leaked memos from inside the Department of Homeland Security — meaning this refugee analysis is not even the first time reports from inside the administration itself have been disregarded. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Trump’s decision to rescind protections for the “dreamers,” he offered as a policy rationale the notion that they are stealing jobs from Americans, but economists seriously contest this notion.
If the administration is looking into who exactly is bankrupting certain offices and agencies of the federal government, say, the United States Secret Service, it’s certainly not refugees, immigrants, or DACA recipients who are to blame.