One of President Trump’s goals during his administration was to lower the acceptance rate of international immigrants coming into the United States and the latest figures show that he has kept that promise as immigrant admissions have fallen by 70 percent during his first year in office.
The study was headed by a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). In the study, the researcher analyzed the overall number of immigrants that settled in the United States from January 20, 2017, to December 20, 2017 under Trump, and then compared those numbers to the same time period in 2016 under President Barack Obama.
The refugee data
Under President Trump, most immigrants came from five nations which were Congo (Central Africa), Myanmar (formerly Burma), Bhutan (South Asia), Ukraine, and Somalia (East Africa) while under Obama, three nations were the same, and, not surprisingly, the remaining immigrants came from countries in the Middle East, namely Iraq and Syria.
The U.S. Department of State statistics confirms that those figures fell drastically under President Donald Trump and the immigrants that were admitted into the U.S. at the outset of his administration were primarily Christians at 53.2%, while Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus rounded off at a combined total of 41.2%. When factored in for the same period in 2016 under Obama, the majority of immigrants were of Muslim origins at 45%, Christian at 44.2%, and Buddhists/Hindus at 5.4%.
For the Fiscal Year 2016, the immigrant admissions ceilings under Obama topped out at 85,000 immigrants and the Obama Administration added an additional 25,000 for Fiscal Year 2017 but that number was subsequently lowered by President Trump, after he took office, to 50,000 immigrants. Trump further lowered that number for Fiscal Year 2018 by 5,000, to 45,000, which is now the lowest allowed immigrant ceiling in 37 years.
For FY2018, for the period from October 1, 2017, to December 20, 2017, there were 5,176 admissions and those immigrants consisted of 60 percent Christians, Buddhists and Hindus at 18 percent, and Muslims came in at just 13.5 percent. Those five thousand immigrants came from Bhutan (South Asia) at 28 percent, Congo (Central Africa) at 22.3 percent, Myanmar (formerly Burma) at 12.4 percent, 9.4 percent were from Ukraine, and lastly, nearly 8 percent were from Eritrea (East Africa).
President Trump is committed to immigrant protection
While Trump has lowered the threshold for immigrant admissions into the U.S., he and his administration are still dedicated to defending immigrants, especially in war-torn and impoverished nations, as the U.S. continues to be the largest donor to the UN’s refugee Agency, spending nearly $134 million for FY2018, an increase of $8.7 million that the Obama administration had set for FY2017.
President Trump is also steadfast in helping the “1250 immigrants," most of whom appear to have severe mental health issues due to the punitive detention conditions in Australia's offshore detention centers, the same centers that were in the news in 2017. Those immigrants could begin re-settlement in the U.S. in 2018, with the first group slated to arrive in or around Sept. 2018, with the rest coming in subsequent years.
