Michelle Malkin - Keep Iraqi POWs off American dole:
Will President George W. Bush allow Iraqi troops to come to America, enjoy better welfare and health-care benefits than our own soldiers, and endanger national security?
It has happened before.
After Gulf War I, the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration recklessly opened our borders to former Iraqi prisoners of war - from conscripts to elite Republican Guardsmen. The resettlement program was launched in response to pressure from the United Nations, the Saudi government (which balked at taking in the captured soldiers), and our own feckless State Department (which has, and always will, act like a hostile foreign entity).
As a result, an estimated 6,000 enemy Iraqi soldiers have resettled in the U.S. at public expense since 1993. Their welcome gifts included air travel, Medicaid, job and language-training assistance, health care, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, Refugee Cash Assistance, and other welfare and housing benefits worth about $7,000 per person.
In total, the resettlement of Gulf War I-era Iraqi POWs and their family members in America soaked up some $70 million in taxpayer funds. No such aid was offered to American troops and their families who sacrificed during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
