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Suzanne Bowdey | The Washington Stand
Is the U.S. bankrolling our own border invasion?
That’s what an explosive new report from The Epoch Times suggests. While Americans struggle to pay for shelter, medical care, food, and schooling for the migrants who’ve been bussed to major cities, we may also be footing the bill for their journey here. “We’re actually funding our own border crisis,” the Center for Immigration Studies’ Todd Bensman warned. And most taxpayers have no clue.
While the Biden administration has been all too willing to throw open the gates to illegal crossers, their biggest contribution to the crisis is through the U.N., where this president has been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to agencies sabotaging our border. The International Office for Migration (IOM), for instance, which is part of the U.N., had been raking in about a half-billion dollars before 2021. Now, alarmed experts say, that funding “has skyrocketed” to an eye-popping $1.3 billion in 2023 — double what it was under Donald Trump.
Why is that a problem? Because that money, investigations have shown, is being handed out directly to migrants who want to cross the border illegally. “People who might not have taken the risk to travel to the U.S., because they were worried about food or safety now have help,” Bensman points out. “That help,” The Epoch Times notes, “comes in the form of prepaid debit cards, food, water, shelter, medical care, and transportation.” In most cases, these migrants are “directly” receiving cash — “what the U.N. emergency manual calls ‘cash in envelopes.’”
Bensman went to Mexico to see with his own two eyes whether this was actually happening. In 2021, his tweet of migrants in long lines for U.N. debit cards went viral. “The IOM workers said a … family of four gets about $800 a month.” Most of this, he told The Epoch Times, “[is] provided by, ultimately, the United States taxpayer.”
They have money — and something just as dangerous: motivation. They know the border is wide open, Bensman points out. “They say, ‘Well, you know, we’re coming now because Biden’s letting us in.’” The reality is, “People respond to the signals that are being sent,” Ian Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), argued. “If they believe that there is a good chance that they’re going to be able to get to the United States and be allowed to remain here, then they will go through all the things that they have to go through.”
Meanwhile, people tracking the money say that a majority of it comes from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which, ironically, is responsible for processing and resettling people requesting refugee status. But, as experts point out, millions of dollars are going to migrants — most of whom don’t qualify as refugees — long before they step foot on American soil.
All of this is propped up by the U.N.’s own efforts, which is siphoning off donations from U.S. taxpayers to overrun their own borders. One program is “allocate[ing] $372 million in ‘cash and vouchers’ and ‘multipurpose cash assistance’ during 2024 for 624,300 migrants — the population of Detroit — in Central and South America who are headed for the U.S. border.”
With America’s help, Bensman wants people to know, the U.N. is “aiding and abetting mass migration.” Just last month, the IOM announced that it’s upping the ante to $7.9 billion to “[realize] migration’s promise as a force for good throughout the world.” IOM’s director general, Amy Pope, in her plea to member nations, even claimed that the kind of migration the U.S. is experiencing, “when well-managed, is a major contributor to global prosperity and progress.”
She’s also been speaking that into the ear of Joe Biden for years, since, as The Epoch Times points out, she served as the president’s senior advisor on migration and as deputy Homeland Security advisor to Barack Obama. It’s no coincidence that the person incentivizing these mass border crossings has direct ties to the White House, where she’s used her perch at the U.N. to extract more money from the overly generous United States.
Raising even more eyebrows, the report points to a stunning number of political appointees who share Pope’s radical views. That alone, experts say, shows that the crisis is intentionally “engineered.”
Illegal immigration “is a big business for the Biden administration,” Mehlman points out. “There’s no question that we saw a vast increase in migration to the United States, starting from the day that Joe Biden took office. … It’s happening because people are allowing it to happen. It is being facilitated every step along the way.” Largely, Bensman shakes his head, because of these giveaways, this U.S.-backed “cash bonanza.”
The U.N. seems to believe that “people should be able to move to any country they desire,” regardless of the laws they’re violating, or the havoc they wreak on those societies, or the devastation they do to the nations they’re fleeing. “If the incentive is to leave rather than to reform and change things where you are,” Bensman warns, “then those failed societies continue.”
Republicans, and a surprising number of Democrats, realize that this self-funded invasion is destroying our country from within. They’ve played hardball on the Ukraine bill, impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a historic vote, and, most recently, threatened to cut his salary if DHS’s reports on the exploding border numbers continue to be late. But the reality is a harsh one: Americans are unknowingly fueling the crisis.
“The United Nations is using our own tax dollars against us,” Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) fumed in January, “and U.S. policymakers can no longer stand by while elites in the U.N. actively financing an invasion of our sovereign territory.”
And frankly, as outrageous as it is that Americans are unknowingly paying people to break our laws, it’s who we may be paying that should frighten people. An open border, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued, is an open invitation to terror. With 300 suspects of the Terror Watch List already captured on their way across, who knows how many slipped through — or worse, were simply released into our communities? “We may never know until they are encountered by law enforcement at a later date,” a Homeland Security agent anonymously told The Daily Caller. “Very well after it’s too late.”
“Lawlessness compounds lawlessness,” Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) insisted on “Washington Watch.” He’s right. But even more infuriating is secretly underwriting lawlessness — at the literal expense of American security — knowing that until that stops, it can never be contained.
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON STAND
