Speech #1040087982

I yield myself such time as I may consume. This amendment is designed to achieve several simple but important goals. First. it erects a firewall to ensure that money in the refugee assistance budget will be used for protecting refugees. not for general operating expenses at the State Department. which are adequately funded elsewhere. Second. it avoids a backdoor $12million cut in the refugee assistance budget. We were very proud. in the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. to have been able to hold a few programs level with last year. One of those was child survival. And I am very pleased that the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. Exporting Financing and Related Programs of the Committee on Appropriations has likewise looked to protect this important program. Another was refugee assistance. It was not easy. and I think we all know in these times of deficit reduction. holding anything harmless is very. very hard. But it was done. Third. my amendment would avoid a corresponding $12million backdoor increase in the general operating budget for the State Department for which. again. we have authorized adequate funds. There is no need for the State Department to raid the refugee budget to pay its operating expenses. It already has $2.1 billion in the two largest operating accounts alone. Under current law. the PRM Bureau gets its salaries and expenses from these accounts just like every other bureau in the State Department. The State Department operating accounts have not taken the steep cuts that the operating budgets of USIA or AID and other agencies have taken. Finally. the refugees really do need the money more than the bureaucrats. Let me cite three examples. In the current fiscal year at the height of the Rwanda refugee crisis. UNHCR found it necessary to reduce food rations in the camps that were holding Rwandan refugees. This was because the World Food Program had run out of food. The UNHCR said it had no money to pay for the food program. in large part because the State Department said there was not enough money in the refugee account to make a contribution for this purpose. Surely an extra $12 million. perhaps even a smaller amount. would have made it unnecessary to cut those rations. In Thailand. the State Department decided to shut down an Englishlanguage school for the Hmong refugees in order to save money. This will make it more difficult for these refugees to assimilate in the U.S.. if they are resettled here. Shutting down the language school may also have had the effect of encouraging the Thai Government in its belief that the United States is not serious about accepting those people. Finally. in the refugee centers in Croatia that hold victims of ethnic cleansing from Bosnia. the facilities are inadequate and the screening process is slow and it is erratic. Thousands of people have been in these centers for years. The United States claims it cannot find more than a handful of refugees who are eligible for resettlement. Refugee advocates point out that if you cannot find genuine refugees in Bosnia. we will never be able to find them anywhere else in the world. Many of these people can never go home. Their villages have been destroyed.