Texas Governor Greg Abbott has a lot of chutzpah. He actually thinks his job is to put the interests of his own taxpayers ahead of an endless line of potential impoverished immigrants from violent countries after his state has experienced record legal and illegal immigration in recent years. What a novel idea! He had the nerve to express the Founders’ view on immigration – that it should factor the interests of Americans and those already here before those of foreign nationals.

On Friday, Greg Abbott became the only Republican governor to actually adopt the position of the Republican platform as championed by President Trump and reject the refugee resettlement scam for this coming year. Every major liberal newspaper in Texas rushed to condemn him as heartless and evil, while some “conservative” commentators hurried to join the virtue-signaling.

The reality is that these commentators need a little more virtue and a little less signaling. True virtue begins with understanding the foundation of the issue at hand before commenting on it. The entire concept of refugee resettlement is outdated and only continues to line the pockets of private contractors at the expense of the taxpayer.

The true motivation: Are they really refugees as originally understood under the law?

As far back as 2000, David M. Robinson, a former acting director of the refugee bureau in the State Department, described the insidious power of the contractors as follows: “The agencies form a single body [that] wields enormous influence over the Administration’s refugee admissions policy. It lobbies the hill effectively to increase the number of refugees admitted for permanent resettlement each year and at the same time provides overseas processing for admissions under contract to the State Department. In fact, the federal government provides about ninety percent of its collective budget. If there is a conflict of interest, it is never mentioned. [Its] solution to every refugee crisis is simplistic and the same: increase the number of admissions to the United States without regard to budgets or competing foreign policy considerations.”

This is why the program has brought in impoverished individuals from third world countries in recent years, as opposed to past years when we brought in educated people fleeing communism. It’s not about individualized, one-sided persecutions. Since 2004, we’ve admitted 51,564 Sunni refugees and 36,764 Shia refugees from Iraq. Well, who is the persecutor and who is the persecuted? Iraq is full of Sunni and Shiite jihadist elements, yet each group is able to claim refugee status if they can show they are persecuted based on their minority status in a given neighborhood.

Further, elements of both Sunni and Shia groups have been admitted to places like Bowling Green, Kentucky, and there are now stories of violence erupting between them! We have brought the sectarian problems to our shores by admitting immigrants not based on their love for our values or their status as a persecuted minority, but based on the sectarian violence itself.

With nearly every GOP and Democrat governor thus far supporting open borders and even more refugees at a time of record legal and illegal immigration, the fight now moves on to the counties. This is the opportunity for the grassroots to be heard and to demand of county officials that they take a pause from lining the pockets of taxpayer-funded resettlement groups for a year. Beltrami County, Minnesota, is showing the way.

Earlier this week, the county in far north Minnesota became only the second jurisdiction in the nation to formally reject refugee resettlement. Pursuant to Trump’s order, an affirmative vote of support is needed in order to greenlight State Department funding for resettlement contractors in a given county, so simply doing nothing has the same result as a rejection. Nonetheless, it’s important that county governments be prodded to make a statement of rejection.

When the people are actually informed of what is happening to their communities, they overwhelmingly reject this racket. During the Tuesday night meeting at Beltrami County’s administration building, over 200 people turned out to watch the vote. At one point, Commissioner Craig Gaasvig asked for a show of hands from the crowd if they opposed resettlement. According to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, “A clear majority of the crowd raised their hands.” The resolution to reject resettlement passed 3-2, with commissioners Richard Anderson, Craig Gaasvig, and Jim Lucachick voting in favor and Reed Olson and Tim Sumner voting against it.

Trump carried Beltrami County by 10 points in 2016, and it’s very much the sort of swing county he needs to hold in order to win re-election. Historically, it has voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Trump shifted the electoral balance by about 21 points from the 2012 election.

Minnesota is a very important state in the battle over fundamental transformation of our communities. Although Beltrami is far north of the population centers in the Twin Cities and hasn’t taken refugees in recent years, those who showed up at the meeting are undoubtedly aware of the cultural, social, and financial problems the state has had from the influx of tens of thousands of Somali refugees and thousands more as derivatives of chain migration. Not only has there been a terror-recruiting problem among Somalis in Minnesota, there is a lot of street crime, as some of the same clans who fought each other in Somalia are dividing along the same lines on the streets of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. Violent incidents spiked 60 percent from 2010 to 2017 in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, a trend authorities blame on a “simmering rivalry between St. Paul and Minneapolis East African gangs as a cause of much of the violence.”