March 29, 2024

Here Comes the Obama/UN Refugee “Surge” — Rebranded as “Safe Alternative Pathways”

Here Comes the Obama/UN Refugee “Surge” — Rebranded as “Safe Alternative Pathways”Across the United States, designated “Welcoming Communities” have begun receiving — or soon will be recipients of — Syrian “refugees” chosen by the United Nations and supposedly vetted by U.S. agencies. But only months ago top officials of these same agencies stated it would be impossible to vet the enormous pool of refugee applicants for terrorist and criminal backgrounds, or even to prove that they are from Syria, considering the chaos in the Middle East and lack of documentation among the migrant. Nevertheless, while in Germany last September, Secretary of State John Kerry promised the United States would take “a minimum of 10,000 Syrian refugees,” and would bump up total annual U.S. refugee admission to 100,000 — or more.

Even prior to that pledge, at a 2014 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Kerry’s Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard told the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond.” However, the shocking experience of Europe’s refugee “surge” last year — with more than 1.5 million migrants from Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Afghanistan, and elsewhere flooding in — and the chaos, turmoil, welfare costs, and the crime that followed, caused sufficient alarm in the U.S. to force President Obama to back off, temporarily. Now the administration’s “surge” is back, but it has been rebranded as “safe alternative pathways,” per the marketing folks at UNHCR and the State Department.

New Plan of Attack: Expand Beyond “Refugees” to Give Visas to Other Categories

Because the governors of 27 states and a large portion of the American public have voiced opposition to Obama refugee resettlement “surge” plan, the UNHCR and various globalist think tanks have been teaming up with the State Department to hatch new ways of sliding more migrants in as students, temporary workers, and through expanding the always-effective “family reunification” program.

Nyla Rush of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) exposed this new scheme in an April 25 blog entitled, “’Alternative Safe Pathways’ for Syrian Refugees — Resettlement in Disguise?” “In a panel discussion on ‘The Global Refugee Crisis: Moral Dimensions and Practical Solutions’ organized by the Brookings Institution earlier this year,” Rush noted “Beth Ferris, Research Professor at Georgetown University and adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on humanitarian refugee policy, talked about the need to find different solutions to the ongoing humanitarian Syrian crisis. The refugee resettlement program was no longer sufficient to admit Syrian refugees she said; ‘alternative safe pathways’ are needed.”

Professor Beth Ferris told the Brookings conference that the refugee crisis is expected to go on for the next 10-15 years and the United States needs to be taking in 200,000 refugees per year — or 2-3 million. And she explained how officials could “tweak” our immigration policies to accomplish this more quickly. According to Professor Ferris:

Refugees and government officials are expecting this crisis to last 10 or 15 years. It’s time that we no longer work as business as usual…. UNHCR next month [March 2016] is convening a meeting to look at what are being called “alternative safe pathways” for Syrian refugees. Maybe it’s hard for the U.S. to go from 2,000 to 200,000 refugees resettled in a year, but maybe there are ways we can ask our universities to offer scholarships to Syrian students. Maybe we can tweak some of our immigration policies to enable Syrian-Americans who have lived here to bring not only their kids and spouses but their uncles and their grandmothers. There may be ways that we could encourage Syrians to come to the U.S. without going through this laborious, time-consuming process of refugee resettlement.” [Emphasis added.]

Professor Ferris was relaying the plans of a UNHCR conference that took place in Geneva this March 30, under the title of “High-level meeting on global responsibility sharing through pathways for admission of Syrian refugees.” Hundreds of UN delegates from 92 member nations and representatives from UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participated in the confab, which focused on drastically increasing resettlement numbers and for “innovative approaches” to admit Syrian refugees.

The new UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, in his opening remarks, called upon governments to create “alternative avenues” for the admission of Syrian refugees:

These pathways can take many forms: not only resettlement, but also more flexible mechanisms for family reunification, including extended family members, labour mobility schemes, student visa and scholarships, as well as visa for medical reasons. Resettlement needs vastly outstrip the places that have been made available so far…. But humanitarian and student visa, job permits and family reunification would represent safe avenues of admission for many other refugees as well.

The Voice of Goldman Sachs/Trilateral Commission/Bilderberg Speaks

Peter Sutherland, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration and Development, told the Geneva conference: “We face a rising tide of nationalism, which is based on false concepts of identity, which has no moral core, and which rejects multiculturalism as an essential part of modern society that is globalizing. It is essentially a moral issue, and there is not enough moral leadership, politically, to deal with the crisis which we now face.”

As we have reported previously (see here and here), Sutherland is the consummate predatory one-worlder (former chairman of Goldman Sachs International, former Steering Committee member of the ultra-secretive Bilderberg Group, former European chairman of the Trilateral Commission) who invokes humanitarian compassion to centralize power. According to Sutherland, it is imperative “to set out a future governance system, which is based on principle and morality.” “What do I mean by that?” he asked rhetorically, before answering that we must create permanent “support mechanisms” with permanent revenue streams, as well as expand the definition of “refugees” to include not only those threatened with persecution, but those suffering from natural disasters. The UN and national governments, he averred, must create and issue “humanitarian visas” to an ever-widening classification of refugees. He said:

I mean that we have to have, into the future, agreements in terms of support mechanisms, which are not simply ad hoc responses year by year to developing crises. We have to recognize that there are those who are not refugees who also deserve support: those who are escaping from natural disaster, their lives may be threatened equally, with the appalling faith of those who are escaping from dreadful wars. We have to accept collectively, as a global community, the need for a humanitarian visa system to supplement the unquestioned obligation to provided asylum to those who are refugees. We have to look at these in terms of not having to come year after year begging for pledges, pledges that are sometimes given and then, as the Secretary-General said at the outset today, have not been always honoured in performance.

Sutherland pointed repeatedly to the upcoming UN High-level Meeting on Refugees and Migrants scheduled to take place at the UN headquarters in New York on September 19 of this year. Between now and then, Sutherland, Obama, and the UN’s NGO activists and their establishment media allies plan to step up the drumbeat for turning the new “pathways” into a Refugee Express freeway.

Photo of Syrian refugees entering Iraq from Syria: AP Images: UNHCR

Source: The New American

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