Category Archives: Legislation

That Iran Propaganda Strategy Thing Began in 2011

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Amazing what details can be uncovered and how dates and people all seem to tell a much different story when facts are compiled.

A deeper look is required into Ploughshares and the deep relationship with the White House, as the world has been punked by some well placed organizations and some money…imagine that.

Related: White House Makes the Case for Iran Diplomacy (lots of details here)

Related: Ploughshares at the White House in 2011

Related: Where did Ploughshares get the Money? (Whoa on this one)

Related: Commitments, Verification and Next Steps (Ploughshares going to do the work?)

The Secret History of the Iran-Deal ‘Echo Chamber’

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Bloomberg: A network of advocates, experts and messaging specialists the White House says helped it sell the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 actually began to campaign for such an accord four years earlier, before the real negotiations started.

Last week I was leaked e-mails and documents from an internal listserv operated by the arms control nonprofit Ploughshares Fund. That foundation has come under scrutiny after the New York Times Magazine quoted top White House foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes boasting how the foundation amplified the White House message in 2015 on the Iran deal. Rhodes told the magazine that supporters of the deal comprised an “echo chamber,” suggesting the independent experts were tools of a White House media campaign.

But the messaging work from Ploughshares on Iran began long before there was any Iran deal and long before Rhodes convened his regular meetings with progressive groups on shaping the Iran narrative.

Beginning in August 2011, Ploughshares and its grantees formed the Iran Strategy Group. Over time this group created a sophisticated campaign to reshape the national narrative on Iran. That campaign sought to portray skeptics of diplomacy as “pro-war,” and to play down the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program before formal negotiations started in 2013 only to emphasize those dangers after there was an agreement in 2015.

The strategy group, which included representatives of the Arms Control Association, the National Security Network, the National Iranian American Council, the Federation of American Scientists, the Atlantic Council and others, sought to “develop process and mechanism to implement Iran campaign strategies, tactics and narrative,” according to an agenda for the first meeting of the group on Aug. 17, 2011.

 Related: WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran

As a nonprofit, Ploughshares discloses annually the organizations that receive its grants. But until now, the way this network of nonprofits, advocacy organizations and policy experts coordinated its media campaign has been shrouded from the public.

The members of that network had two things in common. They all received substantial grants from Ploughshares and they all sought to prevent a war with Iran. But at the time, the progressives assessed the situation was bleak. An August 2, 2011 memo from Heather Hurlburt, then executive director of the National Security Network, and Peter Ferenbach, a co-founder of ReThink Media, shared with the group an assessment of the “media environment” on Iran and concluded it was “extremely difficult.”

The problem, according to Hurlburt and Ferenbach, was that in 2011 a succession of news stories on Iran, ranging from reports of progress on the country’s nuclear program to the Treasury Department’s designations that accused Iran of colluding with al Qaeda, had put progressives on defense. “We are left in the position of responding to the news headlines and parrying the negative commentary that follows,” they wrote.

Among the authors’ recommendations was that the Iran Strategy Group attack conservatives who advocated military strikes. “On a messaging note, it would be best to describe them as ‘pro-war,’ and leave it to them to back off that characterization of their position,” they wrote.

This approach became a centerpiece of the White House’s own message four years later when Obama was selling his deal to Congress. In a speech at American University that summer he said, “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war.”

And yet while the Iran Strategy Group’s message about critics of the deal was echoed by the White House, the group’s initial messaging on Iran itself was much different between 2011 and 2013 than what Ploughshares and its grantees ending up saying in 2015. When the White House and its surrogates were campaigning for the deal in 2015, they emphasized how close Iran was to producing the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon. Joe Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares, made this point in a piece for Slate after the deal was announced when he wrote, “without the deal, Iran could use its centrifuges to purify enough uranium for one or more bombs within weeks.”

 

This is not an accident. As I reported last year the White House declassified its estimate that Iran was three months away from producing enough fuel for a weapon in April 2015, after a framework for the Iran deal was agreed in Vienna, even though the intelligence community had assessed for more than two years that Iran was three months away from weapons-grade fuel.

Back in 2011, the Iran Strategy Group drafted a set of talking points called “Key Points on Iran and Nuclear Weapons.” Joel Rubin, the director of policy and government affairs for Ploughshares between 2011 and 2014, wrote in an e-mail to the strategy group, “We believe that this paper will help each of you to clearly enunciate, with confidence, a consensus view on how to argue for a sound U.S. policy towards Iran.”

The talking points — drafted by Paul Pillar, the intelligence analyst who was the lead author on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate shared with Congress before the Iraq war — stressed that diplomacy was the best way to decrease the likelihood Iran went nuclear and that bombing Iran’s facilities would be counterproductive. But the talking points also included “An Iranian nuclear program is not imminent”; “An Iranian nuclear weapon is not inevitable”; and most controversial “If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the United States and the West could live with it, without important compromise to U.S. interests.” Obama himself has contradicted that last line for years, arguing that he would be prepared to use military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear program if diplomacy did not work.

The Iran Strategy Group sought to play down Iran’s nuclear program as late as 2013. E-mails between strategy group members in August of that year in anticipation of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran’s nuclear program that was released at the end of that month show that the network was already in campaign mode.  In an Aug. 20, 2013, e-mail to the Iran Strategy Group, Cirincione encouraged the Ploughshares grantees to “create a social media, web, expert push that carries our main points into the media and policy discussions in the first 12-24 hours.” He recommended that the points the group pushed in the media should include the argument that making enough highly enriched uranium for a single bomb “is just one step in a long weaponization process,” and that while Iran’s decision to start the Arak plutonium reactor was not good, it was “also just one step in a long alternative path to nuclear material for a weapon.”

The timing here is important. In September 2013, Iran and six other great powers including the U.S. announced the beginning of nuclear talks that ultimately produced the agreement in 2015.

Rubin, who is now president of the Washington Strategy Group, told me that the difference in talking points for the Ploughshares network between 2011 and 2013 and then in 2015 reflected the state of diplomacy with Iran and the real concern for progressives that Israel or the U.S. would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The difference between 2011 and 2015 was that there was a different reality of what was taking place on the ground in terms of the negotiations and the process,” he said. “Ahmadinejad was the president in Iran, there was no negotiation process, and much of the chattering class was talking about when will Israel or the U.S. drop the bomb on Iran in 2011.”

When asked for comment on the story, Ploughshares communications director Jennifer Abrahamson said, “As a nonpartisan public foundation dedicated to reducing nuclear threats, Ploughshares Fund is proud to have supported a network of longstanding experts that helped stop Iran from building a bomb without starting another war in the Middle East.”

That pride is apparent. After a critical story from the AP last week on Ploughshares grants to National Public Radio, Cirincione went on the attack. In a column for Huffington Post suggesting the AP story was part of a campaign from opponents of the Iran deal to discredit him and his organization, he wrote, “Neoconservatives are furious that their efforts to trick the country into another unnecessary war in the Middle East failed.”

Don’t be surprised if you hear Ploughshares grantees repeating that. It sounds like a talking point.

Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases

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Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases –

The Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration

Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest

May 19, 2016

Statement of Mark Krikorian

Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies

Hearing May 19, 2016

Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.

– Barbara Jordan

CIS: The Obama administration has embraced a radical new approach to immigration law. It has, without the consent of Congress, transformed violation of immigration law into a “secondary offense.” That is to say, the goal is to ensure that an alien faces consequences for breaking immigration law only if he also breaks some other, “real,” law involving, say, violence or drug dealing. And even then, the primary violation has to be quite severe to warrant deportation for the (secondary) immigration offense.

This is comparable to the seat belt laws in many states; in places where failing to wear a seat belt is a secondary offense, a police officer cannot pull you over just for that, but if he pulls you over for speeding or some other primary offense, he can then also write a seat belt citation.

The administration’s November 2014 deportation priorities memo pretends this is not so; it includes ordinary violations of immigration law, but only as the lowest priority for deportation. And the collapse in interior removals of immigration violators shows that this third priority category is just for show.

John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE, stated the Obama administration position succinctly: “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.”

This extra-legal shift in the conception of the immigration statute has been misleadingly packaged as “prosecutorial discretion.” True prosecutorial discretion is exercised by individual law enforcement officers in ways that do not undermine the agency’s mission. For instance, if a state trooper stops you for speeding and your documents are in order, you’ve interacted with him in a respectful manner, and your toddler in the back seat is crying because she needs her diaper changed — and he lets you off with a warning rather than a fine, that is prosecutorial discretion.

What the Obama administration has done is use discretion as a pretext for simply exempting the vast majority of immigration violators from any possibility of legal consequences.

The results of this transformation of immigration law are clear in the data. ICE statistics show that deportations from the interior (aliens arrested by ICE deportation officers and special agents, as opposed to the Border Patrol) have collapsed, from 236,000 in President Obama’s first year in office to 72,000 last year, a decline of 70 percent over the course of this administration:

Not only have total interior deportations collapsed, but even the removal of criminals has declined by more than half, from about 150,000 in 2010 and 2011 to about 63,000 last year — this despite the Obama administration’s claim of prioritizing such removals:

This decline has occurred despite increases in the number of criminal aliens identified by ICE, largely from the nationwide implementation of the Secure Communities program, which screened the fingerprints of aliens arrested by local law enforcement agencies. This successful program, which was tremendously popular with local law enforcement agencies, was dismantled by the president’s November 2014 executive actions, and replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). ICE removal officers are still alerted to the arrest of criminal aliens by local police, but are prohibited by the White House and subservient ICE political leadership from acting on that information.

This collapse in deportations is not because we’ve run out of illegal aliens. After declining in 2007-2009 because of new enforcement efforts at the end of the Bush administration, followed by the recession, the number of illegal aliens has remained essentially constant at between 11 and 12 million. Many of these are new illegal arrivals — we estimate that some 2.5 million new illegal immigrants settled here during the first six years of the Obama administration, offset mainly by departures and legalizations.

Nor is the steep drop in deportations due to a lack of resources. Last year the Obama administration re-programmed $113 million that Congress had provided to ICE/ERO for enforcement and gave it to other agencies within DHS. The White House 2017 budget request actually seeks a decrease in funding for immigration enforcement, most notably a decrease of $100 million in funding for detention beds — from 34,000 beds to 30,900 — and a 15 percent decrease in funding for fugitive operations (i.e., the effort to locate the roughly 900,000 people ordered deported who simply ran off).

Rather, the collapse in enforcement is a policy choice of the Obama administration. Its strategic vision is, as I described above, to downgrade the immigration law to a secondary status. Among the tactics that serve this strategy, especially with regard to criminals, is the termination of the successful Secure Communities program and its replacement with the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). There are three ways PEP suppresses enforcement:

  1. The new, more restrictive PEP prioritization scheme exempts a larger number of criminal aliens from deportation. Essentially, under PEP the only aliens ICE officers can target for deportation are people convicted of felonies, multiple “serious” misdemeanors, certain gang members, terrorists, and recent deportees. This exempts large numbers of criminal aliens from deportation.
  2. PEP imposes new logistical hurdles for ICE, most notably the requirement that an alien be convicted before ICE takes custody — which can enable a criminal alien to abscond from facing charges, or in some cases walk out of a courthouse or jail before ICE is aware that the offender is being released; and
  3. PEP explicitly allows local governments to impose non-cooperation or sanctuary policies on local law enforcement agencies. In 2014, local sanctuary jurisdictions released more than 10,000 aliens that local ICE field officers were seeking to deport.

As a result of these policies, fewer deportable aliens (and criminal aliens) are being removed from the country and criminal aliens who formerly would have been removed are now being released back to our communities only to commit new crimes.

There is an enormous public safety cost to these enforcement suppression policies. Since 2013 ICE has released approximately 85,000 criminal aliens from its custody. Many of these aliens have gone on to commit additional crimes. More than 125 have since been charged with homicide.

Here are some of the most egregious examples of crimes committed by illegal aliens released from ICE custody because of the president’s prioritization rules:

Sarah Root. In Omaha, Nebraska, on January 31, 2016, an illegal alien named Eswin Mejia, age 19, who had entered illegally as an “unaccompanied minor” but was allowed to stay with his brother, was drag racing while drunk and crashed his pick-up truck into the back of a car driven by Sarah Root, age 21. She died in the hospital soon after, just a day after her graduation from college. Mejia was arrested several days later for felony motor vehicle homicide. He had prior infractions as well. Bail was set at $50,000. Knowing Mejia was an illegal alien, local police contacted ICE five times to urgently request a detainer, fearing he would flee after making bail. ICE refused, saying that Mejia “did not meet ICE’s enforcement priorities.” As the local police feared, Mejia disappeared after posting bail.

Grant Ronnebeck. A 21-year-old man who was murdered while working at a convenience store in Mesa, Arizona. Ronnebeck’s killer was an illegal alien who was released by ICE in 2013 after conviction for a burglary and kidnapping involving drug dealing, to await an immigration hearing years in the future.

Katerin Gomez. This 35-year-old mother of three children under age 13 was killed in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2014, by a stray bullet through her window. The gun was fired during a street brawl allegedly by Hector Ramires, a 21-year old illegal alien member of the notoriously violent MS-13 gang, who was at large awaiting trial for two prior arrests for armed robbery (one with a gun, one with a knife), in which his illegal status and gang membership were noted. The police report also includes mention of prior criminal involvement in his home country of Honduras. ICE did not issue a detainer or initiate deportation proceedings after either prior arrest, nor did it make an effort to charge Ramires as an illegal alien in possession of a firearm, which is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Greg Morton. This Frederick County (Maryland) sheriff’s deputy was attacked last November while sitting in his vehicle by Jose Misael Reyes-Reyes, an 18-year-old illegal alien who had entered as an unaccompanied minor. The attacker was a member of the notoriously violent MS-13 gang and had prior arrests, including one for carrying a dangerous weapon. ICE declined to take him into custody after the prior arrests because he was already awaiting an immigration court hearing.

* * *
Prioritizing enforcement resources is not, in itself, the problem we face in immigration. Applying any body of law requires trade-offs and choices. The Treasury Department, for instance, devotes significant resources to the detection of money-laundering by organized crime or funding for terrorists. But it also has parallel initiatives of routine enforcement, to serve as a deterrent for ordinary taxpayers who might be tempted to cheat. Likewise in traffic enforcement; a driver doing 100 miles per hour through a school zone, firing a gun out the window, will obviously be top priority — but at the same time, there are parallel, routine enforcement efforts — speed traps and the like — to deter ordinary people from endangering others with unsafe driving.

If the IRS were to issue memos exempting anyone who’s not a mobster or terrorist from paying taxes, Congress would be aghast. Yet that is precisely what ICE has been ordered to do in the immigration context.

Some might object that the anticipated “raids” to take Central American illegal aliens into custody prove that the administration has not relegated immigration law to secondary status. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The first round of “raids,” in January, netted a whopping 121 people — out of thousands of recent Central American illegal aliens — and only 70 of them were actually deported. Even if this next round of apprehensions is several times larger, it still amounts to nothing more than “enforcement theater.” It’s not even good enforcement theater. These Kabuki raids are too small — microscopic would be more accurate — to change the perception in Central America that if you get into the United States it’s unlikely you’ll ever be required to leave.

Despite staged disagreements with the administration over immigration enforcement, Congresswoman Pelosi concisely articulated the view she shares with the White House when she said in 2013 that “Our view of the law is that … if somebody is here without sufficient documentation, that is not reason for deportation.”

This is very different from an earlier Democratic congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, a civil rights pioneer and champion of the rule of law. As head of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, Jordan testified before Congress that “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”

Hey State Dept. What’s the Hurry?

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Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
May 19, 2016

Terrorist Designations of ISIL-Yemen, ISIL-Saudi Arabia, and ISIL-Libya

U.S. State Department: The Department of State has announced the designation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL’s) branch in Libya (ISIL-Libya) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Today, the Department is also simultaneously designating ISIL-Libya, along with the ISIL branches in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Section 1(b) of Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which imposes sanctions and penalties on foreign persons that have committed, or pose a serious risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.

The consequences of the FTO and E.O. 13224 designations include a prohibition against knowingly providing, or attempting or conspiring to provide, material support or resources to, or engaging in transactions with, these organizations, and the freezing of all property and interests in property of these organizations that is in the United States, or come within the United States or the control of U.S. persons. The Department of State took these actions in consultation with the Departments of Justice and the Treasury.

ISIL-Yemen, ISIL-Saudi Arabia, and ISIL-Libya all emerged as official ISIL branches in November 2014 when U.S. Department of State-designated Specially Designated Global Terrorist and ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced that he had accepted the oaths of allegiance from fighters in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Libya, and was thereby creating ISIL “branches” in those countries.

While ISIL’s presence is limited to specific geographic locations in each country, all three ISIL branches have carried out numerous deadly attacks since their formation. Among ISIL-Yemen’s attacks, the group claimed responsibility for a pair of March 2015 suicide bombings targeting two separate mosques in Sana’a, Yemen, that killed more than 120 and wounded over 300. Separately, ISIL-Saudi Arabia has carried out numerous attacks targeting Shia mosques in both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, leaving over 50 people dead. Finally, ISIL-Libya’s attacks have included the kidnapping and execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, as well as numerous attacks targeting both government and civilian targets that have killed scores of people.

After today’s action, the U.S. Department of State has now sanctioned eight ISIL branches, having previously designated ISIL-Khorasan, ISIL-Sinai, Jund al-Khilafah in Algeria, Boko Haram, and ISIL-North Caucasus. Terrorism designations are one of the ways the United States can expose and isolate organizations and individuals engaged in terrorism, impose serious sanctions on them, and enable coordinated action across the U.S. Government and with our international partners to disrupt the activities of terrorists. This includes denying them access to the U.S. financial system and enabling U.S. law enforcement actions.

WTH Tennessee, Against Pro-Life Voters?

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In Tennessee, a Federal Judge Disenfranchises Pro-Life Voters

DFrench/NRO: No one should ever doubt the Left’s commitment to abortion. For the sake of preserving the right to kill an unborn child, the Left will sacrifice democracy and even reason itself. Pro-life lawyers have a term for liberal judges’ tendency to twist the Constitution for the cause of death — the “abortion distortion.” The latest example comes from Nashville, Tenn., where an Obama-appointee federal judge just wrote perhaps the least credible judicial opinion I’ve ever read. But first, some background. Before the 2014 election, Tennessee, one of America’s most conservative and religious states, had become the South’s abortion supermarket, all because of a Tennessee Supreme Court ruling that declared that the Tennessee constitution protected the “right” to an abortion to a greater degree than did even Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Consequently, even if a pro-life law would have passed federal constitutional muster, Tennessee state courts would strike it down.

 KAGSTV

Tennessee voters responded by passing Amendment 1 — a pro-life constitutional amendment that reversed the state’s high court and unequivocally declared that “nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.” Tennessee’s amendment process is arduous. First, a proposed amendment has to pass with a majority in both houses. Then, after the next legislative election, the amendment has to pass with a two-thirds majority. Finally, it comes before the people. But even there an amendment faces a double hurdle. It has to pass with a majority of the vote, and the “yes” votes have to equal a “majority of all the citizens of the state voting for Governor.” For decades, Tennessee officials have interpreted this rule as merely requiring that the total “yes” vote exceed half of the total gubernatorial vote. In other words, a person could vote yes on the amendment and still have their vote count even if they didn’t vote for governor. In fact, amendment proponents expressly told voters that they could pursue exactly this strategy — they didn’t have to vote for governor to have their vote count.
After their loss, pro-abortion leftists sued in federal court, making the astonishing claim that this process violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Why? Because it didn’t give the “no” side enough advantages in the fight against the amendment. They claimed that Tennessee’s process violated their right to “participate on an equal basis with other citizens in the jurisdiction.” They also claimed that the Tennessee Constitution required election officials to count only the votes of people who voted for governor. So if you wanted your vote to count for the amendment, you had to vote for governor.
On Friday, Judge Kevin Sharp did what liberal federal judges do: found a way to rule for abortion rights. He backed the plaintiffs, holding that the traditional manner of counting votes for constitutional amendments violated both the state and the federal constitutions. He then ordered a statewide recount, in which only the votes of those who voted in both the amendment contest and the gubernatorial race would be counted.
In an opinion full of insulting asides and other potshots at amendment supporters, Sharp claimed that the votes of those who voted in the governor’s race but against the amendment were “not given the same weight” as those who voted for Amendment 1 but did not vote in the governor’s race. In other words, he claimed that a voter who did not vote for governor but did vote for the amendment had more influence over the process than a voter who chose to vote in both elections. Yet that additional influence was the product not of discrimination but of voter choice, of deliberate voting strategy.
The judge’s solution to this fabricated problem was to give the votes of those who voted for the amendment but not for governor no weight at all. In other words, his concern for voting rights (he called the right to vote “precious” and “fundamental”) was so strong that he just went ahead and disenfranchised thousands of voters who relied on longstanding state-government interpretations of its own constitution. Moreover, he signaled that even if a recount shows that the amendment would still pass under his new, judicially created standard, he may still rule that the election itself should be voided.

When I was in law school, one of my radical leftist professors declared that the role of a judge was to first determine the “right” result, then to manipulate law and precedent to justify the pre-ordained outcome. He turned the process of judicial reasoning on its head, and my classmates loved it. Abortion jurisprudence is the product of exactly this ideology. Sexual revolutionaries aren’t just professors, activists, and lawmakers. Some are robed Robespierres, and you can always count on them to protect the culture of death. — David French is an attorney, and a staff writer at National Review.

A New Scheme for Syrian Refugees?

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Related: Obama pledge to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees far behind schedule

Read more from the White House directly:

Refugees Welcome graphicInfographic: The screening process for refugee entry into the U.S.
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Refugees Welcome graphic
By the numbers: What you need to know about Syrian refugees in the U.S.
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“Alternative Safe Pathways” for Syrian Refugees – Resettlement in Disguise? 

By Nayla Rush

CIS.org: With the Syrian crisis entering its sixth year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is thinking of “innovative approaches” to organize Syrian admissions, alongside the refugee resettlement program, to countries willing to welcome them. UNHCR’s target for resettlement is 480,000 places over the next three years; it is not sure how many additional admissions into the U.S. and elsewhere these new “alternative safe pathways” will ensure. Refugees who are not resettled could be “legally admitted” using various routes described below.

The legitimacy and transparency of these new “alternative pathways,” aimed at admitting increasing numbers of Syrian refugees into the United States without calling them “refugees,” remain to be seen. They might even amount to convenient admissions detours at a time when the U.S. refugee resettlement program is under tight scrutiny.

In a panel discussion on The Global Refugee Crisis: Moral Dimensions and Practical Solutions organized by the Brookings Institution earlier this year, 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:

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.)

The UNHCR conference Ferris was referring to took place in Geneva this March 30. It is one of a series of initiatives aimed at comprehensively addressing the Syrian crisis in 2016. The Geneva “High-level meeting on global responsibility sharing through pathways for admission of Syrian refugees” focused on the need for a substantial increase in resettlement numbers and for “innovative approaches” to admit Syrian refugees. It followed February’s London Conference on Syria, which stressed the financial aspect of this humanitarian crisis ($12 billion pledged in humanitarian aid) and precedes a September 2016 high-level plenary meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Worthy of note here, President Obama will host a global refugee summit this September 20 on the margins of this upcoming General Assembly meeting.

The focus of the Geneva meeting was to introduce “other forms of humanitarian admissions” since “[r]esettlement is not the only aim”, explained UNHCR’s spokesperson. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appealed to the international community in his opening statement, calling for “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.

At the end of the meeting, Grandi highlighted several commitments made by a number of participants in his closing remarks. Promises were made to:

  • Increase the number of resettlement and humanitarian admission places.
  • Ease family reunification and increase possibilities for family reunion.
  • Give scholarships and student visas for Syrian refugees.
  • Remove administrative barriers and simplify processes to facilitate and expedite the admission of Syrian refugees.
  • Use resources provided by the private sector in order to create labor mobility schemes for Syrian refugees.

The Geneva meeting was attended by representatives of 92 countries, including the United States. Heather Higginbottom, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, reiterated in her remarks the U.S. commitment to refugees: “President Obama has made assisting displaced people a top priority for the U.S. government.” Last year alone the U.S. contributed more than $6 billion to humanitarian causes. So far this year, the United States has provided nearly $2.3 billion in humanitarian assistance worldwide. She also announced additional measures: “We are further increasing our support of Syrian refugees, and we will make additional contributions to the global displacement effort through September, and beyond”, while reminding the participants of President Obama’s role in hosting a high-level refugee summit this September.

The U.S. State Department released a Media Note following the Geneva meeting. It confirmed the goal of resettling at least 10,000 Syrians in FY 2016 and of 100,000 refugees from around the world by the end of FY 2017 – an increase of more that 40 percent since FY 2015. It also announced the following:

  • “The United States pledged an additional $10 million to UNHCR to strengthen its efforts to identify and refer vulnerable refugees, including Syrians, for resettlement.”
  • “The United States joins UNHCR in calling for new ways nations, civil society, the private sector, and individuals can together address the global refugee challenge.”
  • “Additionally, the United States has created a program to allow U.S. citizens and permanent residents to file refugee applications for their Syrian family member.” [Emphasis added.]

On this last note, why create a family reunification program for Syrian refugees when refugees in the U.S. are already entitled to ask for their spouse and unmarried children under 21 to join them? Unless of course, the aim is to widen family circles to include aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers.

Let’s see if we got this right: More Syrian refugees are to be resettled in the United States; administrative barriers (including security checks?) are to be removed to expedite admissions. Come to think of it, this is exactly what we witnessed with the “Surge Operation” in Jordan, where refugee resettlement processes were reduced from 18-24 months to three months in order to meet the target of 10,000 Syrian refugees this year.

Moreover, the United States government, by its own admission, “joins UNHCR in calling for new ways” to move more Syrians to other countries. With the U.S. Refugee Resettlement program under close scrutiny, other routes for “legal admissions” (not “resettlement”) of Syrian refugees into the United States seem more appropriate. Those routes may vary from private sponsorships, labor schemes, expanded family reunification programs, humanitarian visas, medical evacuation, to academic scholarships and apprenticeships, etc.

What remains to be determined is how transparent these “alternative pathways” will be. Will we be given details about numbers, profiles, locations, screening, or costs? Also, what additional measures are we to expect from this administration as it prepares to host a Global Refugee Summit this September 20?

Meanwhile, we are left to wonder: aren’t these “pathways” for refugees nothing more than disguised resettlement routes? Akin to “pathways to citizenship” in lieu of amnesty…