Business groups and cheap labor advocates are denouncing President Donald Trump’s plan to shrink the inflow of invited refugees down to 18,000 in 2020.
“Slashing the refugee program goes against both our national values and our economic interests,” said John Feinblatt, the president of billionaire-backed New American Economy advocacy group. “Refugees help reverse population decline, start new businesses that create jobs, and boost tax revenues,” he said. His group claimed that “between 2016 and 2018, the number of new refugee arrivals to Salt Lake City dropped by 70 percent, creating major problems for local ventures.”
The existing population, 2.3 million refugees in the United States, had $56.3 billion in disposable income in 2015, Steve Hubbard, a data scientist at New American Economy, told a sympathetic Newsweek reporter. He continued:
“In a community, you want to make sure you have workers … employers want to see that and people who work in economic development want to see that there are plenty of workers in the area, because it attracts business and entrepreneurship,” Hubbard said. “With communities like Salt Lake City, they have seen a decrease in the number of new refugees arriving … and that’s creating problems of finding enough workers for future ventures and for entrepreneurship and things like that.”
Mike Bloomberg founded the NAE network, and the members include Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, and Laurence Fink at BlackRock, Inc.
“The Trump Administration’s continual efforts to gut the refugee and asylum systems harkens back to the worst moments in our nation’s history,” said Todd Schulte, director of another investor-funded FWD.us lobby group. “America has been made stronger, more prosperous, and more vibrant because of the contributions of people seeking refuge and asylum,” said Schulte, whose wealthy investors — including Zuckerberg — gain from higher inflows of workers, renters, and consumers.
Trump’s new goal of 18,000 invited refugees is far less than President Barack Obama’s 2017 push to invite more than 100,000 refugees from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America.
Throughout his eight years, Obama worked with several government-funded groups to send new refugees into town with labor-intensive meatpacking plants — usually without any regard for the wishes of the local Americans.
So Trump’s 18,000 goal was released with a new policy that would give Americans the authority to block the drop-off of new refugees into their communities.