The One Place D.C. Won't Resettle Refugees

Can you guess where it is?

From 2018 and 2024, the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. arranged for the ‘resettlement’ of 6,299 ‘refugees’ in Maryland. Nearly 1 in 5 of them came from the Islamic terror state of Afghanistan and 1 in 10 came from the equally violent and dangerous terrorist state of Syria. Nearly 70% spoke no English. The second most common language was Arabic.

However in Washington D.C., only 73 ‘refugees’ were resettled in 6 years. The Immigration Research Initiative listed an even smaller number of 66 in ten years.

D.C. is small, but Vermont, which has an even smaller population, got 1,260 ‘refugees’. 1 in 10 were from Afghanistan. 77% don’t speak English. North Dakota was sent over 1,000 ‘refugees’ including the usual assortment of Afghans, Somalis, and Venezuelans.

Even Alaska was saddled with resettling over 400 refugees (the Afghans and Somalis couldn’t make it, only the Ukrainians could apparently handle the bitter Alaskan winter.)

Why doesn’t the capital of refugee resettlement want to take in refugees?

Washington D.C. has been the hub for resettling migrants, yet of the 288,709 ‘refugees’ placed in Americans big cities and rural towns alike, only 73 went to D.C.

Some people might argue that housing in D.C. is too expensive for everyone except a small elite, but no one was proposing to resettle Afghans and Somalis in Georgetown mansions (not that there wouldn’t be a certain amount of justice to it). Despite being a nexus of wealth for government contractors, lobbyists and the well-connected, 1 in 7 people in D.C. live under the poverty line. And nearly 50,000 people in D.C. already live in subsidized housing.

There is no reason that the ‘refugees’ couldn’t have been placed in D.C. low-income housing the way that they have been all over the country (occupying space meant for America’s poor.)

Nor is D.C. unready to take in the ‘wretched refuse’ yearning to bomb marathons.

Indeed, the D.C. government maintains the usual ‘refugee office’ contracted out, as usual, to Catholic Charities and offers cash assistance and social services. Lutheran Social Services runs an operation there. The Office of Refugee Resettlement claims to have dealt with only 261 ‘refugees’ in D.C. in the last financial year and there’s little sign that they actually stayed.

When you go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, every state listing links to a collection of local resources. The D.C.directory page mysteriously links only to “Page Not Found.”

Or maybe not so mysteriously after all.

D.C. is where the various federal agencies, the refugee organizations, the resettlers, the lobbyists and politicians operate, but they don’t want that sort of thing where they live and work. It’s fine for a small town in Georgia or Ohio to suddenly have to absorb hundreds of potential terrorists, to find interpreters and keep their daughters locked up, but it’s a different matter in Washington D.C.

When 3,000 illegal aliens were dumped in Lockland, Ohio, a village of 3,400, the locals were told to welcome them and keep quiet, all the while D.C., at 200 times Lockland’s size, was fulfilling its obligation by taking in not thousands or hundreds, but dozens.

The minimal refugee resettlement in D.C. reveals that the people behind the program know that it’s destructive and they don’t want to deal with it in their own homes, cities and communities. Refugee resettlement, like police defunding and cutting back on heating in the winter, is for other people. That’s why Washington D.C. resettled ‘refugees’ in every other possible place.

Even in Alaska. Just not in D.C.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.