Refugee Resettlement: Time To Sue The Feds
by Bill Simon
PRELUDE
At noon yesterday (Monday, November 16), State Senate District 40 Candidate Paul Maner emailed a letter (as well as mailed via the USPS a letter) to Governor Deal, expressing his concern on the resettlement of, not only Syrian refugees, but any other in the refugee resettlement process taking place in Georgia.
Coincidentally, sometime on Monday afternoon, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal issued an Executive Order instructing all Georgia agencies to halt the processing of resettling any Syrian refugees until such time that Congress approved of the process that the Obama Administration was planning on employing to process 100,000 of them over the next two years.
It was either a coincidence of conservative minds thinking alike, or perhaps Mr. Maner’s letter did give the Governor the impetus to get on the stick to issue that EO about preventing potential Syrian terrorists from landing on Georgia soil under the auspice of being “refugees.”
Whatever the case, you can be sure of this: The people of Senate District 40 would NEVER see anything of the sort come out of the mouth of sitting State Senator Fran Millar. According to Millar, there is nothing neither he, the Legislature, nor the Georgia Governor can do except vote to keep accepting federal dollars that contribute, perhaps, only about 50% of the true dollar amount it costs to resettle refugees for the 8 months the federal law stipulates, and then they all become a burden on state, city, and county dollars.
Frankly, the mindset of idiots like Fran Millar (and others, like Senator Renee Unterman, et al., whose very livelihood is based on income derived from her employer as a result of those refugee resettlement programs) is what is costing Georgia a lot of forward progress. Long-time incumbents who would rather sit on their ass and just vote along with the rest of the liberals in our legislature, rather than consider what is best for Georgians, are a real big hindrance to excelling in anything but remaining near the bottom in education, as well as still sucking in ethics (don’t go celebrating the big ‘promotion’ to 24th in the nation because the facts make a difference in the actual results).
A CASE FOR SUING THE FEDS OVER REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT
Just like the concept of a government taking private property without due compensation to the owner under the auspice of “eminent domain,” when it comes to the federal agencies forcing local governments to absorb demands on their infrastructure via the importation of a bunch of refugees from other countries, more money should be paid by the federal government to the states and local communities who have to take the load on the existing infrastructure.
According to this article on ThinkProgress.com, the various states MUST accept the refugees, no arguments allowed. Within this article, they point out the 1997 Scotus decision on the Brady Bill as “evidence” that the feds can direct and force state personnel to carryout laws Congress passed.
A state’s LEO (“law enforcement organization/officers”) personnel carrying-out another legal process to verify a background on a potential gun-owner is hardly the same activity as…sayyy…a population of X-number of people getting 2-10 times the net population gain they would normally get over a year, get it all in within a few months or so.
However…in any population of “X” size, there are certain fixed resources that cannot all of a sudden deploy and expand to handle the influx of a bunch of people all at once (without creating backlogs). The National Fire Protection Association has guidelines on how many fire trucks and locations of fire stations there should be for every X-number of population. You dump 1000 more people in an area within 3 months where you expected a growth of maybe 500 over a year…and all of a sudden, everyone’s property and life is in jeopardy because there isn’t enough pubic safety resources in place to handle the sudden influx of new people, and subsequent demand on resources (yes, I know…I know…stupid liberals like Fran Millar and Renee Unterman think local taxpayer resources are infinite and the laws of supply and demand don’t need to be considered in government decisions).
I would imagine that there are similar guidelines for regular LEOs as well. If the City of Brookhaven has 52,000 people, and a police department of whatever size it is currently, if more people move into the area faster than the natural growth of the city (“natural growth” being net of new people moving in who are not refugees from another country, minus people moving out, minus people dying, plus people being born), then that unnatural growth puts a sudden strain on the law enforcement demands, judicial courts, and on the public safety of all concerned.
Not just public safety, but also other resources (water, roads, sewer, cellphone towers, etc.) cannot all of a sudden be ramped-up to accommodate more folks in the blink of an eye. Safety factors only work for a little while…you keep adding to the load and whatever safety factor was designed into the system to last 20 years becomes obliterated when you place more load on the system, earlier than anticipated. Things have a tendency to collapse when too high of a load gets put on them, whether it be people or government infrastructure.
The county of DeKalb is in the same boat because as refugees come to either Clarkston (as Maner’s letter describes) or wherever in DeKalb, that county has to also increase its government investment in LE, fire safety, government workers, etc….that money to accomplish all that DOES NOT come from the federal government to be reimbursed to handle the load of new people on existing resources.
Also, the burden of these new people will have a costly impact on the state’s resources as well…and, again, that money comes out of our pocket, not the federal government’s pockets. All the feds pay for is the living expenses for 8 months of the refugees, and some other services like English-language training and other “caretaking” services the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Atlanta contracts with the Georgia Department of Human Services to offer the refugees. The money from the feds does not pay for the increased demand on the governments’ infrastructure systems.
Higher demand can lead to more breakdowns and higher cost of repairs than originally budgeted. Why should we be required to pay for the increase in supply that the new demand from Congress/the White House is forcing upon us?
It would seem to me that if something is costing us money that we (as a state or local community) are not being reimbursed for as a result of the acts of the feds directing us to take-on a financial burden, then that cost could be the basis for suing the federal government in district court. Kinda like…a federal-to-state eminent domain issue. The feds are demanding that we forfeit the capital resource lifespan of, say, a water and sewer system that was not designed and built to handle the load of people it is suddenly required to handle. A parallel case could be made for every other government-funded infrastructure resource that is required to take on an additional load it was not designed to handle at the time the demand comes on-line.
Of course, y’all could just act like a bump on a log like Fran Millar does…and just…sit and rotate in place while going through the motions of “representing” the people of your districts. The first time a terrorist attack happens in Georgia, you folks in Georgia government will rightly get the blame for choosing to do nothing…to not even try to adequately argue against the importation of people who won’t even be accepted by the countries far richer that are in their immediate area?
