Community Organizing or a New Electorate? Obama’s Pipeline and the Robo-Pen Years

WASHINGTON — They called it community organizing. In the towns that received the buses, it looked like a pipeline.

Barack Obama’s father was Kenyan. That is the “Kenyan connection” that is on the birth certificate and in the family story — not a throne in Nairobi, a father from Nyanza and a Chicago machine that learned how to turn neighborhoods into precincts. The same instinct scaled. Senate subcommittee tallies put Obama-era green cards to migrants from majority-Muslim countries on a pace past a million. Refugee ceilings jumped late in the second term. Fiscal 2016 was the first year in a decade the United States resettled more Muslim refugees than Christians. Somali arrivals in those eight years ran to the tens of thousands, almost all Muslim, dropped into Minneapolis, Columbus, Lewiston, and a list of smaller cities that never voted on the placement.

That is not a caliphate. Pew still puts Muslim adults near one percent of the country. It is also not an accident of weather. Resettlement contractors, federal grants, and quiet city halls did the stacking one apartment complex at a time. “Community organizing” means you pick the block. National policy means you pick the zip code. Voting follows housing. Housing follows the agency that signed the lease.

The handoff was the “Biden Robo Pen.” House Oversight and a later White House review argued that a mechanical signature carried late-term pardons and a stack of executive paper while the man in the chair faded. Democrats say every stroke was authorized. The public was not in the room. Continuity of the same refugee-and-parole machinery did not require a king. It required a pen that did not ask questions.

A republic can welcome a neighbor. It cannot pretend a federal placement program is a potluck. If the organizing was only kindness, publish the city-by-city lists and the welfare draw. If it was a electorate project, say that too. Towns already know which it felt like.

References

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/10/12/u-s-resettles-fewer-refugees-even-as-global-number-of-displaced-people-grows/
2. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/06/17/obama-admin-pace-issue-one-million-green-cards-migrants-majority-muslim-countries/
3. https://oversight.house.gov/release/oversight-committee-releases-report-on-the-biden-autopen-presidency/

— Josiah Hale, WAA1776