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Monday, June 20, 2016

Who is a Refugee?

Here's a test.  Tell me which of the following people is a refugee:

a.  A Christian family of five which was forced from it's home when ISIS invaded its home town in Syria and began killing all non-Sunni Moslems.  The family is now in a camp in southern Turkey.

b.  A citizen of the USA whose grandparents emigrated to America 50 years ago from the Palestinian city of Jericho in the West Bank.

c.  An Iraqi man who wants to find work in Europe to support his family who he left in Iraq.

Now consider which of these same people the United Nations considers to be a refugee.  The UN answer is that they all are refugees.  We all understand that the family forced from its village by war and the danger of death at the hands of a psychotic terrorist group are refugees.  For the UN, however, all Palestinians around the world (as well as quite a few imaginary ones) are refugees as well.  They got that classification as a means of attacking Israel.  It doesn't even matter if the people
consider themselves to be refugees.  And those who are just seeking work to better the economic conditions for themselves and their families?  We would normally have called them "immigrants" rather than "refugees".  Well that's not the case for the UN.  Mexicans who come across the US border illegally to get work are "refugees".  All of these people seeking work are just refugees for the UN.

I mention all this because today the UN reported on the extraordinary increase in refugees around the world.  The problem is that a major chunk of those refugees are actually not refugees at all.  There is a problem, but by adding phony claimants to the list of refugees, the UN is actually hurting those who do need help.

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