The Migrant Racket

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Some of the nation’s most deeply-rooted and venerable churches are vehemently opposed to Trump’s efforts to curtail mass migration. But do they have an ulterior motive?

The nation saw this opposition on the day after Trump’s inauguration, when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde lectured Trump and Vice President Vance about immigration during her sermon at the National Prayer Service. Budde immediately became a hero among leftists. But as it turns out, however, Budde may have had motivations that were more pecuniary than principled. The Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM) rakes in millions from a number of taxpayer-funded entities for bringing the migrants. And the Episcopal Church is by no means alone in this: other churches that have recently taken principled stances against Trump’s immigration policies are in on the gravy train as well.

According to a Friday report in the New York Post, Budde’s “sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest.” This is because in 2023, EMM “earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals.” If Trump stops the migrant influx and ends the funding for such programs, the Episcopal Church could suddenly be facing a significant shortfall of cash.

Budde appealed to Trump to have mercy upon those who “fear for their lives” – what? From whom? In a magnificent display of elitism, she exhorted him to be kind to “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.” She said nothing, of course, about the small matter of that $53 million.

Budde also omitted all mention of another salient fact. According to the Post, EMM “‘sponsored’ 6,400 individuals from 48 countries in 2024. The leading nationalities were Afghans under a special humanitarian program.”

That should be cause of immense concern. There are many people who fled Afghanistan because the Taliban would kill them if they got the chance, but did EMM take any time to consider the fact that besides the Taliban, Afghanistan is a key center of operations for al-Qaeda and ISIS? There are certainly Afghans who aren’t members of any jihad terror group, but they didn’t exist in sufficient numbers to prevent the Taliban from returning to power, or to keep al-Qaeda and ISIS from acting in that country with complete impunity. So what measures did EMM take to vet these Afghans and make sure they weren’t bringing in any jihadis? Likely they did nothing about this, for to have made any such effort would have been “Islamophobic.”

The Episcopal Church isn’t the only culprit. The Post notes that “the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) dwarfs EMM. Forbes reported that USCCB affiliate Catholic Charities USA, which has its hand in all aspects of immigration and seems to get money from every government agency except NASA, received $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2021. That’s 68 times more than EMM got that year.”

The gravy train has kept rolling since then. OSV News reported Friday that “audited financial statements by an outside firm show that the USCCB received about $122.6 million in 2022 and about $129.6 million in 2023 in funding from government agencies for refugee-related services. But the same statements show that the USCCB spent more on those services than the government gave them, meaning the conference did not profit from the grants, according to the conference’s auditors. In 2023, for example, the conference spent $134.2 million for such services.”

Thus when the USCCB condemned Trump’s executive orders on immigration, it is reasonable to ask: did it have a pecuniary interest in doing so? Vance, who is a Roman Catholic, thinks so, saying: “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line? We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people.”

Good. For too long, bringing massive numbers of immigrants into the country has been a cash cow for organizations that were supposedly motivated solely by humanitarian concerns. No one, however, was concerned for the well-being of the American people. Trump is turning that around.