Oligarch Koch Brothers Blast Plans to Freeze Refugee Resettlement

As the Trump administration considers a plan to either reduce or eliminate costly and ineffective refugee resettlement programs, the billionaire Koch brothers have deployed their extensive political network to stop the plan in its tracks.

The LIBRE Initiative, a Koch front group funded by the billionaire brothers to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, released a statement Wednesday blasting reports of an upcoming refugee freeze.

The Koch brothers’ stance in support of troubled and wasteful federal refugee resettlement programs places them in the company of leading Democrats, who have called for annual refugee flows to be massively increased by up to 700 percent.

President Donald Trump has already made considerable reforms to refugee resettlement, shrinking annual inflows from around 100,000 during the Obama administration to a more manageable 22,000. Leading humans rights experts have questioned the effectiveness of the program, which costs American taxpayers around $1.8 billion dollars a year.

It’s entirely possible that funds spent on resettling refugees in the United States could be far more effectively deployed in quartering refugees in safe areas closer to home, in far greater numbers than the domestic refugee programs can handle.

The global refugee population has swelled to more than 20 million people in recent years, making it clear that the trickle of domestic refugee resettlement will do little to improve the circumstances of troubled peoples, who often come from war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa.

As Stephen Miller leads a push for badly needed reforms to troubled refugee programs in the United States, the billionaire Koch Brothers stand hand-in-hand with progressive Democrats to thwart any effort to alter the status quo of costly and ineffective refugee resettlement.