State Dept. Briefing on Iraqi Refugees, Part III, “How much is this?”

 Your tax dollars:

This is the third in a  series of posts on the State Department Iraqi Refugee Briefing of February 4, see Part II yesterday.  

The exchange that follows occured in the briefing right after the question about exactly how many Iraqi displaced persons are coming in this fiscal year that ends September 30th.   We heard it was 12,000 plus maybe(?) an additional 5000 mandated by the newly signed “Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act.” 

QUESTION: Speaking of Peter, Paul and payment, how much is this – how much money is being expended on this program currently?

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AMBASSADOR FOLEY: Which program?

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QUESTION: The – well, on bringing Iraqi refugees in?

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MS. RUSCH [Director Office of Admissions, PRM]: It’s hard to specify. It’s on average somewhere between $4,000 and $4,500 per refugee, of any nationality. That’s the cost to the State Department. That doesn’t include DHS costs, and it certainly doesn’t cost – take into account the actually larger contribution from Health and Human Services for refugees once they get here.

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QUESTION: So does anybody have a figure of how much the U.S. taxpayer is spending to bring refugees in – bring Iraqi refugees in?

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AMBASSADOR FOLEY: We can get that for you, Charlie. We’ll multiply, based on the assumption that we’ll bring in 12,000 this fiscal year.

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QUESTION: I don’t know about the rest of us, but you’ve lost a – you lost me in some of the numbers. So it would be good to know if there is a number that we’re spending to try and bring Iraq refugees.

[next question]

Hey, Charlie, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an answer to the question of how much this costs the taxpayer, but if you find out let us and the taxpayers know!

In addition to the number cited above, there are huge costs buried in Department of Health and Human Services for grants to the volags (voluntary agencies), not to mention the cost of the welfare itself.  Then there are the costs to the Dept. of Homeland Security to screen the refugees, then we give millions to the United Nations for them to pick refugees for us.  There are taxpayer dollars flowing out of the Department of Labor for refugee training and job placement and who knows what else spread throughout the government at federal and state level.  Imagine all the goverment workers’ salaries running this program!

Just a little side note if you have been following Parts I and II of my series:   Ambassador Foley says they will multiply this magic number when they get it by 12,000, so I guess he is saying they aren’t bringing 12,000 Iraqis plus the Congressionally mandated 5000 afterall.

State Dept. Briefing on Iraqi Refugees, Part II, how many exactly?

This is Part II in a series on the February 4th State Dept. briefing on the Iraqi displaced persons issue.  See Part I here.   We are bringing these additional points to you because the coverage we saw in the mainstream media missed a few nuggets!

When the President signed into law the “Refugee Crisis in Iraqi Act” at the end of January, those of us following this issue wondered if the new law which specified 5000 Iraqis would be brought each year for the next five years meant the 5000 was on top of the 12,000 the Bush Administration aims for this fiscal year.  By the way, the Presidential Determination for FY 08 for all refugees sets a ceiling of 70,000 refugees from all parts of the world. 

A reporter getting lost in the numbers asked this:

Wait a minute – this 12,000 does not include this 5,000? The 12,000 will go up?

Ambassador Foley set the record straight and added an interesting bit of information.

Well, Congress specifically wrote into the law that it will not count as part of our global admissions goals, including the 12,000 for Iraqi refugees. However, the law does mandate that recipients of Special Immigrant Visas receive full refugee resettlement benefits, so – and unfortunately did not provide funding for that. So it is at this stage, in any case, what you could call an unfunded mandate. And the practical impact is that ultimately we’ll have to take – we’ll have to account for these SIV recipients, for their resettlement needs, out of the budget that goes towards the global number. So it could come at the expense of not necessarily Iraqi refugees but our global admissions numbers. Remember, the 12,000 is part of our global goal of 70,000, that in cooperation with Homeland Security we’re trying to process, adjudicate, approve and have enter the U.S. this fiscal year. And resources are finite and in this case, we will face robbing Peter to pay Paul, unless the appropriation is forthcoming to pay for the resettlement benefits that will go to Special Immigrant Visa recipients under this law.

When someone is designated a refugee it’s like hitting the lottery, you get to come to America and be taken care of—airfare, apartment subsidy, food stamps, case worker etc.    As for the unfunded mandates mentioned by the Ambassodor,  Congress passes a bill, the President signs it into law but they forget one measly point—they don’t appropriate money for it!  That leaves the agency struggling with how to stretch the dollars, and later when they are unable to do so, interest groups clamor, members of Congress respond by calling for hearings and drag some poor agency schmuck up to the Hill for a tongue lashing. 

Based on what Ambassador Foley said above, it looks like Refugees International and the Associated Press will be squawking again as the year progresses and the magic numbers (5000 plus 12,000) are not reached.

Somali woman in New Zealand knifes airline pilots

Here’s some news from the other side of the world —-for February 9th—-it’s tomorrow there you know!

A Somali woman who would have been just fine and not attacked airline pilots on a flight today (tomorrow) if only the bad authorities had brought her extended family to New Zealand, will hopefully get some taxpayer funded mental health treatment and then be returned to Africa so she can be with her extended family there.

The Somali woman who allegedly knifed airline pilots on a flight from Blenheim to Christchurch today was lonely, alienated from her community and frustrated by failures to reunite with her family.

People have known since her arrival in New Zealand (in 1994!)  that she wasn’t quite right.

But in this woman’s case “it was apparent that from the time of her arrival that she had some very significant adjustment problems that often demonstrated themselves in angry outbursts.”

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There were attempts to determine if the problems were psychiatric or behavioural and generally the feeling was her problems were behavioural.

The point of this post is not to say that Somali women pull knives on pilots, while other people don’t.  I’m sure all sorts of people from all races and cultures have been so inclined.    The point is that we need to stop being so squeamish about returning some refugees to their home country if they aren’t fitting in to western-style societies.  

P.S.  In case you are wondering how the pilots are doing, the article doesn’t say, it’s all about the Somali woman and her problems.

Walkersville, MD says no to Ahmadiyya Muslim Convention Center

Update 2/09/08:  Here is another good article on this topic at Red Maryland blog.  Be sure to read the comment from a Walkersville resident. 

Last night, the Board of Zoning Appeals of Walkersville, in Frederick County, MD turned down the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s request to make a special exception and allow the construction of a worship and convention center on 224 acres adjacent to town.  

The annual convention of the AMC could draw 10,000 or more people to the town of about 5000 clogging roads and putting pressure on services.    Up until now this Pakastani Muslim splinter group had held its convention in a convention venue near Dulles Airport with all the normal amenities of such a facility–bathrooms, parking, water, hotel rooms—so it has always puzzled me why they needed a large piece of farmland for a one time a year event.

The Frederick Post has this account of last night’s proceedings.   The article begins:

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community will have to look for another site for its worship and recreational center.

As I sat in on one of the deliberations this week, I thought every little town in America needs to  have its zoning in good order if a community wishes to avoid having  a large separate community set up within its confines.  

Call me an Islamophobe but I never once heard the AMC disavow Shariah law for themselves.   Separate Shariah law is actually being considered in Great Britain and if we are to dodge that bullet we need to be alert to its possible establishment here.

If I’m wrong and the AMC has publically disavowed Shariah law, please send me a comment with a link to that official statement.

State Dept. briefing on Iraqi refugees, Part I, “gosh I missed my flight”

On February 4th representatives of the US State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security held a joint press briefing on the Iraqi refugee situation and on the new “Kennedy” Iraqi refugee bill that President Bush signed into law last week.  We have posted on issues raised in that briefing here, here, and here.    However, there are several points  in the 14-page transcript that were not mentioned in the AP story or the Washington Post story for whatever reason.

As you have gathered from those previous posts,  the Administration is being bombarded by refugee advocates who contend that the process is too slow, so that is the context in which this press briefing is occurring.  

I’m going to post on the points I wish to make, the points the mainstream media isn’t mentioning, in small doses over the next couple of days, partly because I’m tired and I expect you don’t want to read a lengthy treatise.

This is Ambassador James Foley speaking about one of the reasons why the process is so slow:

There are no-show referrals, in other words, refugees who do not appear for pre-screening with our Overseas Processing Entity having been referred by UNHCR. There are no-shows for the DHS adjudication interviews. There are no-show departures. In other words, applicants who don’t appear at the airport to take their scheduled flight to the U.S. There are different reasons for the attrition. Some families return to Iraq at different points in the processing. Some applicants pursue both special immigrant visa and refugee processing at the same time and they ultimately opt for the SIV route. Some applicants treat the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program as a kind of a safety net and when the time comes to board the plane for the U.S., it turns out that they’re not ready to depart. And finally some applicants change their minds about wanting to resettle in the U.S.

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The attrition shows up in our statistics. For example, our OPEs have been unable to locate 608 refugees referred to our program. There have been 227 no-shows for pre-screening – OPE pre-screening or DHS interviews or medical appointments. There were 104 no-shows for departure flights that had to be rescheduled, which takes a certain amount of work and of man-hours to accomplish. And there are 51 more who missed their first departure flights who still need to be rescheduled. And finally we’ve closed the cases of 25 individuals who did not show up at all for departure flights.

So, here is the question we keep asking over and over again?  If the refugees are in such desperate straits why would they walk out on this fabulous opportunity to come to America?    This is my partial answer:  The refugee industry is driving this.   Most Iraqis just want to go home, but the refugee industry requires warm bodies to fuel the business—no refugees, no federal grants and contracts. 

Refugee advocates, the volags and their lobbyists, want to return to the glory days when hundreds of thousands of refugees entered the US from Vietnam and later Bosnia in the wake of a war—a guaranteed steady stream of refugees assures that volag offices stay open and employees have steady salaries.   They need the faucet opened wide and flowing steadily.

 Oh, incidentally, all those missed flights mentioned above,  you, the taxpayers, are paying for them.