President Trump has kept his pledge to reduce the number of United Nations approved refugees coming into the United States — by a wide margin.
Trump has slashed refugees by over 73 percent since just 2016, according to the State Department.
An analysis of the data from the Migration Policy Institute said that the administration allowed just 22,491 refugees into the country in 2018.
That is far below the cap of 45,000 the president has set, which is well under the 100,000 cap sought by former President Barack Obama.
In 1980, the U.S. let in over 200,000 refugees.
The Trump the administration has made several moves to cut refugees coming to the country. It has cut the cap, focused spending on helping refugees settle closer to their home nations and raised the security bar for refugees to pass in a bid to limit potential terrorists from entering the country.
“These numbers reflect several promises made to Americans,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“First, the reduction in U.N. refugee admissions is an important and needed change in the course for how best to use our resources to help with international humanitarian challenges. The Trump administration has rightly decided to help more people through international efforts where the refugees are living than by allowing a select few to resettle here, at great cost to taxpayers and some security risk,” she said.
“This is not an abdication of our national commitment to help others in dire straits — we still take tens of thousands, and we are also approving tens of thousands of asylum claims from people who show up on our doorstep. That is a much more pressing situation that we have to deal with, and which is stressing our immigration agencies and the communities where the new arrivals are settling,” added Vaughan, who regularly testifies before Congress on immigration issues.
She also highlighted the administration’s vetting process to thwart terrorists pretending to be refugees.
“The Trump administration has implemented new vetting procedures that make it less likely that we will admit someone who is a national security risk. There have been too many cases of people who slipped through as refugees who turned out to be persecutors, participants in genocide, or took part in terror attacks here or overseas, and the new vetting addresses that problem,” she told Secrets.
