Oklahoma Senator Lankford Leads Bipartisan Push to Increase Refugee Admissions

lankford-rubio
Senators Lankford and Rubio: Two of nine Republicans pressing Trump to “increase” number of refugees to be admitted to the US. 18 Senators in total signed the letter.

Responding to the fear that the Trump Administration might really cut the number of refugees to be admitted to the US in FY2020 (which begins on October 1, 2019) to zero, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Coons (D-DE) spear-headed a letter to the Secretary of State saying they want the President to “increase” the number of refugees to be admitted.
However, they aren’t willing to say what that number should be! I suspect that is because once a number was discussed their ‘bipartisan’ effort threatened to fall apart.
We assume they want more than the 30,000, the number the President set as the ceiling for the present year.
The resettlement contractors want 95,000!
Note the usual Leftwing Open Borders Dems are joined by nine Republicans.
See if your Senator is among them.
This is Lankford’s press release yesterday:

Senators Lankford, Coons Lead Letter on Concerns to Eliminate Refugee Cap

 
 

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Coons (D-DE) led a bipartisan letter with Senators John Thune (R-SD), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Tina Smith (D-MN), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Thomas R. Carper (D-DE), Rob Portman (R-OH), Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Ed Markey (D-MA) to the administration to express concern about reports of a proposed elimination of refugee resettlements for FY2020.
The Senators wrote, “While some Members of Congress have already expressed their displeasure with the FY2019 resettlement cap, and the lower-than-normal admittance numbers for FY2017 and FY2018, eliminating refugee admittance altogether is even more alarming. At a time when we are facing the ‘highest levels of displacement on record,’ according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, we urge you to increase the refugee resettlement cap and to admit as many refugees as possible within that cap.
America has a responsibility to promote compassion and democracy around the world through assistance to vulnerable and displaced people.”

Continue reading here.  There is a link to the letter there as well.
See that the Catholic News Agency is on the story. Of course!
I don’t need to tell you what to do, right!  If your Senator is one of the Republicans in this gang of nine, let him or her know what you think!
Some of the Rs on this list might think this is a freebie for them, make sure they know you are watching!

Arab Americans Say their Mental Health Suffers Because There is No Box for Them

“Without a racial classification for Arab-Americans by the U.S. Census Bureau, the population’s mental health goes largely unstudied – particularly in a political climate that threatens it.”

(Science writer Passant Rabie)

Here is an article you likely didn’t see from a publication called ScienceLine.  Writer Passant Rabie is an Egyptian living in New York who is concerned about environmental justice as well as race and genetics.
In her article she argues that there should be a box for Arabs on questionnaires and on the census to identify the exact number of Arabs living in America.
She explains that their mental health suffers (even more than she says it already does!) when they must check the “white” box.
 

Arab-Americans’ mental health suffers due to census box

Within my first week of moving from Egypt to the U.S., I was forced to undergo a series of medical exams and receive a host of vaccinations. But it wasn’t the needles piercing into my left arm that made it an unpleasant welcome to a new country. It was the medical forms.
Before filling out my information at the student health center, I was asked to check an ethnicity box. I hovered my pencil over the given options: white, black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

race-ID-form
Not sure if this is the final version of the 2020 Census form.

I struggled to find where I fit in. And then, right there next to the ‘white’ category, it read in parenthesis, “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”
This was awkward. I was about to get a tuberculosis shot in order to stay in a place where I already felt like I didn’t belong.
Rather than having our own racial category, U.S. residents originating from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are made to check off “white” on their health forms. Even for someone like me, just arrived and whose jet-lag still hadn’t worn off, checking off that ethnic box was alienating. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for those who had grown up here, and all the times they were made to check off a box that wasn’t theirs.
Beyond cloaking millions of people in invisibility, the lack of a MENA ethnic box has also proven problematic when trying to conduct research on the minority group’s mental health. Approximately 3.7 million Americans claim Arab ancestry, according to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau. But there is no way to obtain nationwide data on Arab-Americans’ health because they are not identified as an ethnic group. This leads to major health disparities and an inability to provide for the group’s medical and psychological needs.

She tells us that Arabs in America have a lot of mental health problems:

Meanwhile, no MENA box means crucial nation-wide data on the mental health of Arab-Americans’ continues to go unrecorded at a time when anti-Muslim rhetoric and its accompanying mental health stress is on the rise.
People of Middle Eastern descent are more prone to psychological distress, as revealed by a 2013 study that was the first to estimate the prevalence of psychological disorders among the MENA population in the U.S. The study compared the mental health disparities between people grouped as ‘non-Hispanic whites,’ revealing that ‘whites’ from the Middle East were twice as likely to report serious psychological distress when compared to whites of European descent. Additionally, Middle-Easterners suffering from psychological distress were less likely to have seen a mental health professional within the last 12 months, according to the study.

Read the whole thing.  She says that mental health problems already existed in the Arab community, but we made the problem worse for them after 9/11.  Hmmmm?
See that she also blames Trump (who doesn’t!) because she says his administration nixed the idea of a special category for Arabs on the 2020 Census form.
What do you think?
I do think we need a special category for Arabs so that we can have a count of how many are living in the US.