Activists are calling for even more refugees and migrants to be brought to Minnesota to settle there, even as millions of illegal aliens continue to pour across the border filling the welfare rolls.
More than 1,500 refugees were brought to the Gopher State in 2023, triple the number sent to the state by federal officials in 2022. And that is up from the 258 sent in 2021, the Star Tribune reported.
The number of refugees was lower during the President Donald Trump era, the paper says, but this year, 443 came from Somalia, while other groups came from the Congo and Ethiopia.
But Minnesota activists are hoping to see as many as 2,400 this year, according to Ben Walen, division director for refugee services at Minnesota Council of Churches. Walen is staffing up and said that “by and large I think everybody is preparing and prepared to take on high numbers of refugees.”
The expectations for new migrants come on the heels of President Joe Biden’s move to raise the number of migrants that are allowed to enter the country. Biden raised the number to 125,000 in 2021 even as resettlement efforts proved inadequate to the task and the number fell short.
Still, 170,000 Ukrainians entered the U.S., as did 30,000 Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians.
The number of refugees has been costing Americans billions every year. In 2018, America spent almost $100 billion to support 606,000 poor refugees since 2014.
But the costs have continued to grow. In 2021, it was estimated that 64 percent of refugees from Afghanistan were still living on welfare after resettling in the U.S.
At the time, Breitbart News reported that the number of Afghan immigrant households living in or near the U.S. poverty line is close to 51 percent. The number is significantly higher than that of households headed by native-born Americans, where as about 27 percent live in or near poverty.
Yet, Joe Biden wants more. Just after entering office, Biden called for billions more in welfare programs for refugees.
Last year, it was reported that close to 60 percent of households headed by illegal aliens use at least one major form of welfare.
In December, Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) noted that illegal aliens rely on welfare “significantly more” than native-born American citizens.
About 59 percent of households headed by illegal aliens use welfare while 52 percent of households headed by legal immigrants do. On the other hand, fewer than four in ten households headed by native-born Americans are on some form of welfare.
“… [T]his is primarily because the American welfare system is designed in large part to help low-income families with children, which describes a large share of immigrants,” the study says.
Immigrant households use far more food stamps, Medicaid benefits, and the Earned Income Tax Credit than legal citizens, the group said.
“Compared to households headed by the United States-born, immigrant-headed households have especially high use of food programs (36 percent vs. 25 percent for the U.S.-born), Medicaid (37 percent vs. 25 percent for the U.S.-born), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (16 percent vs. 12 percent for the U.S.-born),” the CIS report said.
Biden’s steady increases in refugee programs and higher and higher spending on welfare for illegal immigrants and other immigrants run contrary to what Americans want.
Polls consistently find that Americans want to close Joe Biden’s open door for immigrants. A recent Rasmussen Reports showed that 56 percent of likely voters want legal immigration levels cut to at least 750,000 admissions a year — including a plurality who said they want to see fewer than 500,000 admissions a year.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston.
