Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com was long distressed that more Muslim refugees than Christian ones were being admitted to the U.S. under the Obama administration, only occasionally pointing out that the numbers may have been skewed because Christian charities tend to handle Christian refugees and, thus, wouldn't be counted in the United Nations totals the U.S. uses. But when President Trump took office, CNS championed how more Christians were being admitted.
That trend has continued, and CNS couldn't be happier. Patrick Goodenough wrote in a Sept. 6 CNS article:
Eleven months into the fiscal year, almost five times more Christians than Muslims have been admitted into the U.S. as refugees, in sharp contrast to the situation under the Obama administration.
Christians are by far the most persecuted group worldwide. According to Open Doors USA, 245 million Christians around the world, or one in nine, are persecuted for their faith.
[...]
Of the 28,052 refugees admitted to the U.S. since FY 2019 began on October 1 last year, 22,281 (79.4 percent) self-identified as Christians and 4,574 (16.3 percent) as Muslims.
Goodenough then conceded (though not explicitly) that his Obama-era fearmongering was incorrect because, contrary to what his reporting suggested at the time, Christian refugees almost always outnumbered Muslim refugees under Obama:
During much of the Obama administration, Christians outnumbered Muslims – although not by large margins – among the far larger refugee admission numbers then prevailing.
In fiscal year 2016, when a total of 84,994 refugees were resettled – the biggest annual intake since 2000 – the balance shifted slightly in the other direction, with Muslims making up 45.7 percent of the total and Christians 44.5 percent. The following year Christians again slightly outnumbered Muslims.
Under President Trump, however, the gap has widened significantly. During the first eleven months of fiscal years 2013-2019, the Christian/Muslim ratio are among admitted refugees was:
FY 2013: 6.2 percent more Christians than Muslims
FY 2014: 1.6 percent more Christians than Muslims
FY 2015: 4.2 percent more Christians than Muslims
FY 2016: 1.7 percent more Muslims than Christians
FY 2017: 3.4 percent more Christians than Muslims
FY 2018: 54.7 percent more Christians than Muslims
Goodenough went on to tout Trump's proposal for "reducing last year’s record-low refugee admission ceiling by a further 40 percent" in a Sept. 27 article. He then touted more Trump remarks in an Oct. 15 article:
President Trump said at the weekend that his administration has, in contrast to its predecessor, made it easier for Syrian Christians to come to the United States.
The president, speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington on Saturday, did not say whether he was referring to refugees specifically, although the totality of the remarks suggested that he was.
“If you were a Christian in Syria – which was a rough place to be – you had almost no chance, during the last administration, of coming into the United States,” he said.
“It was, they say, the hardest thing to do to come into the United States. Number one most difficult place in the world to come in was if you were a Christian in Syria.”
“If you were a Muslim in Syria, it was extremely easy to come into the United States,” Trump added.
It wasn't until the eighth paragraph of his article -- after uncritically quoting Trump -- that Goodenough gently and tentatively pointed out that Trump's assertion was misleading at best, though he never used those words (it isn't like CNS to point out Trump's falsehoods so blatantly, after all), writing that "Syrians of all faiths and ethnicities have suffered during the long and convoluted civil war that broke out in early 2011."
Goodenough didn't note, however, that there is no evidence to back up Trump's claim that Christian refugees from Syria had "almost no chance" of getting into the U.S. Instead, he touted how under Trump "the proportion of self-identified Christians among the refugees admitted into the U.S. has grown markedly, and the proportion of self-identified Muslims has duly dropped."
On Nov. 4, Goodenough highlighted how "Not one refugee has arrived in the United States since fiscal year 2020 began 35 days ago, a State Department spokesperson confirmed on Monday, adding that the last time there had been an “extended pause” in admissions was in November 2001; Goodenough included spin from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the U.S. responds to refugees in other ways, as well as criticism of the low cap.
for good measure, CNS also published a column by Michelle Malkin ranting that the U.S has taken in "enough" refugees, blaming the influx on a "tiny cabal of government contractors, mostly religious groups cloaking their profit-seeking in compassion and Scripture" that purportedly "perpetuates the refugee resettlement racket."
