This past summer, a headline appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal: “Kentucky terrorist arrests shouldn’t jeopardize refugee program, advocates say.”  The first paragraph ran: “As U.S. authorities recheck intelligence gathered on refugees, resettlement agencies say the arrest of two suspected Iraqi terrorists in Kentucky should not jeopardize programs that have helped tens of thousands of persecuted people start new lives in America.”  Two Iraqi “refugees,” you see, were plotting to aid anti-American forces in Iraq.

The story depicted fretful refugees who “came this far to get away from this kind of stuff.”  Then the paper detonated what should be a bomb: One of the two terrorists “came to the United States as a refugee despite previously conspiring to attack American troops while he was in Iraq.”  His “fingerprints had been lifted off an improvised explosive device found near Bayji, Iraq, in September 2005, but 21 months elapsed before they were linked to him—well after he was allowed to enter the United States as a refugee in April 2009.”

Of course, most refugees do not plot terror against American GIs.  But most of them are from the Third World.  And they are changing the country.  Thus is the United States government, through its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), “electing a new people,” as they say at VDare.com.  Even worse, they are electing a people who will destroy the country—if not by terror, then by demography.

Federal data, collected from the ORR by Refugee Resettlement Watch (RRW), show the importation of whole cities and counties each and every year, and the size of those cities and counties have increased steadily.

In 2006, the United States imported 41,053 refugees; 10,330 from Somalia.  The next year, it was 48,281, with 1,605 from Iraq, 5,474 from Iran, and 6,958 from Somalia.  In 2008, the United States imported 60,193 refugees, only this time the number from Iraq skyrocketed to 13,755.  In 2009, we imported 74,654.  Nearly 20,000 were from Burma, and 13,317 came from Bhutan.  Bhutan?  I had never heard of it, either.  Anyway, another 18,709 came from Iraq.

Total: 224,181.  Since 1975, ORR reports, the United States has imported 2.6 million human beings.  That’s a shade more than the populations of Montana and the Dakotas combined.  The Somalis alone, RRW avers, are alarming enough.  Between 1983 and 1993, the United States admitted 4,413.  By 2003, the figure was 42,017.  Since then, however, we have admitted nearly 44,000 more.  As RRW put it, “We have admitted 83,991 Somali Shariah-supporting immigrants to the US in 25 years.  More then half, 43,682, came since September 11th!”

Many of the Africans ultimately settled in lily-white Lewiston, Maine.  Said a professor at Bates University, “That a group from Africa would suddenly show up at our doorstep is really a surprise.  It seems like a shot out of the blue.”

Of course it was.  The ORR, which operates with the help of state agencies and leftist Christians, resettles refugees without the knowledge or permission of Americans.  They didn’t ask the residents of Clarkston, Georgia, whether they wanted hundreds of Somalis.  But about a dozen years ago, they got them.  Somalis became 7.6 percent of Clarkston’s population.  And then they moved, en masse, to Maine for the welfare benefits.  Lewiston got them—along with a doubled welfare budget.  When the mayor asked the Somalis to stop coming, the Somalis and their leftist allies branded him a racist.  “Shot out of the blue” is right.

Nor did the resettlement professionals seek the opinion of Virginians when they resettled nearly 5,500 refugees in the Old Dominion between 2006 and 2009.  Some of them landed in my town, Harrisonburg.  No one consulted residents of the Valley, whose ancestors settled it beginning 300 years ago.  Apparently, being American now means one also accepts the “huddled masses” hooey on the Statue of Liberty.  No need for the government or those do-gooding “Christians” to ask the residents of small-town America whether they want Main Street diversified with niqabs and halal food stores.

Nothing seems likely to stop the transformation of our country via immigration or refugee resettlement.  Even terrorist crimes won’t “jeopardize” the program.