Secretary of state Mike Pompeo announced yesterday that the U.S. would cap the number of refugees it will accept at 30,000.  This is down from 45,000 the previous year and down considerably from the 110,000 refugees admitted during the last year of Obama's presidency.

Pompeo announced the reasons for the lower cap – which, naturally, did not suit those predisposed to demand much higher levels of refugee resettlement.

Politico:

The administration argued last year that refugee resources should be employed to address a backlog of domestic asylum cases that ballooned to more 300,000 cases this year – an argument repeated by Pompeo Monday.  Unlike refugees, who apply from overseas, asylum seekers request protection after arriving in the U.S. ...

Pompeo lumped refugee admissions with asylum cases in his remarks, saying the U.S. would aim to process the cases of 280,000 asylum seekers in the coming year. ...

A former White House official familiar with the discussions told POLITICO that Pompeo internally argued to keep levels at 45,000, but apparently relented. ...

Pompeo did not take questions from reporters after the announcement Monday. As he left a podium in the State Department Treaty Room, someone shouted, “Has the U.S. lost its heart?”

No, we haven't lost our "heart."  Nor have we lost our brains.  No other country takes in as many asylum-seekers and legal immigrants as the U.S.  No other country even comes close to the number of illegal aliens living permanently here. 

Every other nation on Planet Earth gets to decide its own immigration, refugee, and asylum policies.  But whenever the U.S. seeks to apply a little common sense to the idea of who can come here and settle, all of a sudden, we've lost our heart.

The very same people who demand that the U.S. not be the world's policeman want us to be the world's nanny.  It doesn't make any sense, but then, "sense" has nothing to do with those who advocate that anyone and everyone who wants in should be allowed to live here.

As for the refugee cap, apparently, the critics don't pay attention to what's happening in Europe.  The E.U. now has strict quotas on refugees for every country, and most E.U. nations have cracked down hard on economic asylum-seekers.  The results of recent elections in Europe show a massive pushback against the ultra-liberal refugee policies of E.U. nations with ordinary people ignoring the strident warnings from the media that nationalist parties are "racist" or "Nazis" and voting for them anyway.

Some nations like Hungary have said enough is enough and are refusing to play ball with the E.U. on refugees.  Their hugely popular prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has endured the most vicious smear campaign, with the E.U. parliament condemning Hungary for being undemocratic.

David Goldman at PJ Media:

The notion that minorities, religious, sexual or otherwise, are under threat in Hungary is at variance with the facts; in the case of the Jews, as I reported in this space some months ago, it is diametrically opposite to the facts.  Jewish life flourishes in Budapest as in no other European capital.

Prime Minister Orban's crime in the eyes of the European Parliament may be just the opposite: He was elected for a third term last April 8 by a two-thirds majority, which makes him the most popular leader in Europe.  In fact, he may be the only popular leader in Europe; I cannot think off-hand of another European head of government with a popularity rating of more than 40%.  Germany's two ruling parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, together poll at just 46%.  France's Emmanuel Macron stands at 31%.  The two Italian populist parties, who have mutually incompatible agendas and entirely different constituencies, poll at around 30% each.  Spain is ruled by a minority party.  Britain's Theresa May polls around 25%.

And then we have Viktor Orban, who has governed Hungary for eight years, long enough for the voters to get to know him, with an enormous popular majority.  He gained the majority by good economic management (Hungary has a fast-growing economy and a labor shortage) and by opposing large-scale Muslim immigration against the efforts of the European Commission to impose this on Hungary. There are right-wing European radicals who should worry us, for example, Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). But Mr. Orban is not one of them; he is a Calvinist married to a Catholic with five children, whose model of a European politician is Germany's late Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl.  Mr. Orban's opponents claim that he has put his thumb on the scales by using state institutions to build media support for the government, but no one says that he has falsified votes or intimidated opponents. Opposition politics in Hungary is open and uninhibited.

The unelected European Commission, with members appointed by governments that represent a minority of their voters, ordered Hungary to accept its quota of so-called refugees, and Hungary refused.  Last year it ordered Poland to rescind a judicial reform that gives the elected legislature a modicum of authority over appointed judges, many of whom retain lifetime appointments from the Communist era.  Poland and Hungary refused the imperial decree from the bureaucrats of Brussels, and for this, both countries faced the censure of the European Parliament.

The wishes and desires of ordinary people don't count for much when E.U. elites engage in virtue-signaling.

I don't agree entirely with Trump's immigration policies, but he's at least making an effort to bring some rationality to the issue.  For too long, open border advocates have held sway in the media and in the halls of government.  Getting control of our border, making reasonable decisions on whom we let in and whom we don't, is a refreshing break from the past and should be supported.