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Just because a lot of them do that doesn't mean they all do. I was a fast food manager in Virginia in the early 1980s when thousands of Asian refugees were arriving in the area. They were exceptionally hard and responsible workers. I'm sure many were on some kind of public assistance for a while, but I'm also sure they didn't stay on it long.

One kid I had working for me had been 15 or 16 when he arrived from Vietnam with his much younger brother. Their parents were dead. At the beginning the boys had been living with some unrelated adult Vietnamese refugees who were receiving some public assistance for providing a home for the boys. At the time I hired the kid, he was going to high school part time in a vocational prep program, working full time in a nursing home's food service area, and took a part time job at my restaurant when he was about to turn 18, because he was about to lose his public assistance eligibility due to his age, and if he couldn't show that he could support his little brother, they were going to be separated. He did what he had to do -- took on the additional job for a total of 60 hours a week, continued to go to high school, took legal custody of his younger brother, and began paying rent to the adults they were living with (with an adult legal guardian, the younger boy was no longer eligible for assistance either). Having kids like this around was beneficial to our society even in the very short run, as they were working side by side with some spoiled suburban native-born Americans, who got a dose of perspective that they sorely needed. And I'm absolutely sure this boy and his brother grew up to be very productive citizens.

This was just one example -- there were many more with the same kind of responsibility and work ethic.

We need to be more selective about who we let in, but also need to think through the support systems needed for particular individuals and groups, and retain the right to force refugees into appropriate intervention programs when the need is evident. Right now they're treated like US citizens with the whole raft of Constitutional rights from the minute they set foot on our soil. We have a similarly stupid habit of applying full Constitutional rights to native-born minors, who can refuse to have their lockers and bookbags searched in drug and weapon-infested public high schools (some years back, in a California high school, this resulted in removal of lockers and a ban on bookbags, to which students responded by ceasing to have any books at school -- problem solved! everyone's got their Constitutional rights! -- except the taxpayers who are forced to shell out $20,000/year/student to run these schools where nobody's learning anything).

Some of our problems with refugees are our own fault, not theirs. THEY didn't vote in politicians who created all these hand-out programs. But once they've come here legally, and are having all this stuff thrown at them, even the most responsible ones are likely to take it, to divert resources that they're being told they have a "right" to, to their children and as many relatives as they're allowed to bring over. I expect you and I would do the same thing in their position. How do you tell your elderly parents back in some third world hell-hole, starving and dodging armed extremists every day, that you are allowed to bring them over here and sign them up for a free apartment, food stamps, medical care, etc., but you're not going to because you think it's not fair to the American taxpayers? We have only ourselves to blame that they've been put in that position.