WASHINGTON – In the last year of his presidency, Barack Obama and his administration worked tirelessly with the United Nations to expand the definition of "refugee" to include economic migrants and drastically increase the numbers being resettled in the United States.

And he found a willing partner in the Republican-controlled Congress, which funded not only more refugees but provisions for record numbers of unaccompanied minor children, so-called UACs, showing up at the border from Central America.

In the fall of 2016 Obama hosted the U.N. Leaders' Summit on Refugees in New York, where he and other world leaders used rhetoric strikingly similar to the concept of “replacement migration,” a U.N. plot to replace the population of a given country with migrants and “refugees” from the developing world.

WND recently reported on the scheme, revealed in a U.N. document prepared in the year 2000 entitled “Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations?"

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Read WND's expose of the U.N. "Great Replacement" plan for Western nations.

The report details the plunging birthrates across Western Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States and identifies a solution: mass migration from the Third World into these "aging and declining" nations.

The 17-year-old document makes the case for mass immigration as necessary to replace the aging populations of developed countries. Without the migration of populations from the developing world, it reasons, economies will suffer because of labor shortages and falling tax revenues.

"Therefore, among the demographic variables, only international migration could be instrumental in addressing population decline and population aging in the short to medium term," the report concludes.

Obama's stated goals before the Leaders' Summit last fall were to increase financing for global humanitarian appeals, as well as double the number of resettlement slots and use "alternative legal pathways," such as student and family-based visas, for refugees to enter the United States.

A report by the influential Brookings Institute included reasons to support Obama's plan to increase resettlement, stating: "For receiving countries, migration has already become the most important source of demographic growth and renewal for wealthy societies." This is the goal of "replacement migration."

"The so-called benefits of replacing a country's population with Third World migrants is bogus and imaginary," said Leo Hohmann, author of a 2017 investigative book, "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad."

Hohmann said that while the costs of refugee resettlement are understated, often ignoring refugees' heavy use of public assistance programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, refugee advocates also like to overstate the economic impact of refugees in the work place.

"For example, even after five years in America, 60 percent of refugees use food stamps, compared to 15 percent for native-born Americans," Hohmann said, citing statistics provided by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Yet, when Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services and the other resettlement agencies show up in a city to inform leaders of their intention to send refugees, they talk about how the new arrivals will open businesses and boost the local economy, Hohmann said.

"It's a bunch of lies and half truths," he said. "They're never told the rest of the story."

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Minnesota, for instance, earlier this month approved an additional $600,000 to treat a measles and tuberculosis outbreaks mostly within its Somali and Hmong refugee communities, and that was on top of the $1.5 million the state had already allocated for these outbreaks this year.

Another hidden cost, which is almost never talked about, is that of educating the refugees' children, most of whom require expensive tutors and translators, Hohmann said, pointing to migrant-heavy school districts like Wichita, Kansas, where students speak more than 50 languages.

None of these costs are subtracted from the supposed economic benefits of importing refugees to come up with a net economic impact, Hohmann said.

The official pledge given by the United States at the Leaders' Summit on Refugees included the following statement:

“The United States admitted 85,000 refugees in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 – 15,000 more than in FY 2015 – and pledged to increase its refugee admissions to 110,000 in FY 2017. The United States also increased alternative pathways of admission into the United States, providing special immigrant visas to more than 11,000 people at risk from Iraq and Afghanistan in FY 2016 – an increase of over 4,000 from FY 2015.”

A day before the Leaders' Summit, the U.N. convened at the U.N. Summit for Refugees and Migrants 2016, and statements from top U.N. officials at the event revealed that "replacement migration" continues to be a top priority for their global agenda.

"Replacing populations in the West with those from the Third World is also seen by the globalists as a great way to redistribute the world's wealth," Hohmann said. "We ship many of our manufacturing jobs to the Third World and they ship us their poor masses who can take advantage of our generous welfare programs while working in the factories that have not yet been outsourced. That's a double whammy used against the American middle class, impoverishing Americans while improving the financial lot of those in poor countries."

Expanding the definition of 'refugee'

H.E. Peter Thomson, president of the U.N. General Assembly, made remarks at the 2016 summit that the U.N.'s commitment toward migrants is not restricted to refugees, but toward economic migrants as well, declaring that those migrants "in search of opportunity and a better life for their children" deserve the same rights as those "fleeing armed conflict and the brutal effects of war."

The U.N. included the economic rights of migrants in a major document for the first time with its Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.

Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson echoed that sentiment at the summit, saying that "Development programs are crucial and a key priority. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognized the contribution migration makes to economic progress. We must harness that positive energy.”

The summit also produced the New York Declaration, a document signed by all U.N. member states that makes alarming promises to protect not only legitimate refugees fleeing war zones, but migrants as a whole – even those who would not qualify as "refugees" under the Geneva Accords.

For example, the New York Declaration includes a promise to “Protect the human rights of all refugees and migrants, regardless of status,” as well as a statement to “Strengthen the global governance of migration by bringing the International Organization for Migration into the UN system.”

The International Organization for Migration is a radically pro-migrant U.N. group, and has declared emphatically that migration is both “necessary” and “inevitable.” The group was formally added into the U.N. system at the conclusion of the 2016 summit.

The New York Declaration reveals a plan for the future, including a commitment to "Start negotiations leading to an international conference and the adoption of a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration in 2018... migration, like other areas of international relations, will be guided by a set of common principles and approaches."

With the election of President Donald Trump, the United States has lowered refugee admissions from Obama's 2017 goal of 110,000 to just over 50,000, a move that drew intense criticism from pro-migrant groups – and possible push-back from the U.S. State Department.

This is not surprising, given that the State Department under Obama was extremely pro-migrant as evidenced by its actions at the two U.N. migration summits, and the department remains staffed predominantly with Obama holdovers.

“There is still many, many holdovers from the Obama administration the State Department,” Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, told WND.

Mehlman said Trump has left many top positions in the State Department unfilled, and this is stifling the president's agenda. "If you want to have your agenda carried out, you need people in place to carry it out."

However, with the recent Supreme Court ruling on Trump's "travel ban," it appears Trump has stopped the refugee flow to the United States, at least temporarily. His refugee cap to 50,000 was reached on July 12, and with the travel ban in effect, refugees cannot be admitted until the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, unless they can prove they have a "bona fide" family tie in America.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to make a final ruling on Trump's travel ban in October.

“The latest travel ban ruling says he can limit the number of refugees entering the United States, but what will happen remains to be seen,” Mehlman explained.