I'm not a big Bush-pusher, but I think this story, from the L.A. Times (no big Bush-pusher itself), deserves notice:
After hearing graphic stories of suffering directly from persecuted young people who fled to the United States, President Bush intervened personally to sharply increase the number of refugees admitted to the country — undoing the severe limits placed on such admissions for security reasons after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The move to restore the world's largest refugee assistance program, and the president's role in it, has gone largely unnoticed amid recent squabbles in the Republican Party over related questions of post-Sept. 11 immigration and asylum policies.
Times staff writers Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten say that a close study of the current budget proposal includes provision for 20,000 additional refugees to be admitted to the U.S. next year, nearly restoring the 70,000 per year that was the norm before 9/11. (In 2002 and 2003, that number sank to 29,000.) And it was President Bush's personal intervention that swung the deal.
The White House involvement over the last several months helped overcome security concerns, refugee advocates say. And they point to an encounter the president had with two refugees in June — arranged by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives — as a moment that motivated the president to apply pressure where it was needed. . . .
A 21-year-old Liberian woman, Veronica Braewell, broke down in tears as she told Bush about her experience at age 13 of being left for dead on a pile of bodies by militants, of having watched them slice open the bellies of pregnant women and kill unarmed schoolchildren.
As she sobbed, the president handed Braewell a handkerchief and embraced her, Braewell recalled in a tearful interview from her home in Allentown, Pa.
She told the president of her plans to become a nurses' assistant, and thanked him for her rescue.
"Thank the American people," she said the president responded.
He then named some of the religious organizations that are active in helping refugees. (The private meetings preceded a conference on his faith-based initiative.) Bush also spoke with a 22-year-old engineering student from Sudan who, orphaned by war and cholera, had fled on foot and spent 7 years in a refugee camp in Kenya before Catholic Charities got him to Richmond, Virginia. These encounters were planned to last 20 minutes, but Bush drew them out to an hour.
The L.A. Times does conclude that he runs little political risk by promoting an issue so attuned to public heartstrings (hey, he got me going!) and so important to all denominations of his religious constituency:
Two of the most conservative Republicans in Congress on immigration issues — House Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo.), chairman of the Immigration Reform Caucus — do not intend to fight Bush on the refugee increases, spokesmen for both men said Friday.
- amba
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