Category: Refugee statistics

Data Watch: Biden on Track for Lowest Annual Number of Refugees Admitted to the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is likely because the administration is too busy admitting illegal aliens by the hundreds of thousands.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not upset by potentially the lowest resettlement year in the history of the four-decades-old program, but it is puzzling that he and Kamala went through the charade of setting a legal refugee admissions ceiling of 62,500 to be admitted by September 30th when they struggled in May to admit 916 refugees (271 were admitted in April).

For this fiscal year, limited data available at the Refugee Processing Center was updated yesterday to show that with the 916 added in May our total for this fiscal year now stands at 3,250 legal refugees.

If that rate continues Biden beats Trump to the lowest annual admissions since 1980.

Trump admitted 11,814 in his last full fiscal year in the White House

https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/10/23/congolese-refugee-women-in-america-need-costly-mental-health-care-50000-in-the-pipeline/

By the way, at a quick glance down the admissions list, it looks like the Africans from the DR Congo still lead in the resettlement sweeps.

In 2013 Obama promised the United Nations we would take 50,000 from the DR Congo, a number we have far surpassed now (the extensive data we could mine for such information is now gone).

However, as of last July we were up to 74,000 from the DR Congo and they are still coming!

Texas is the top ‘welcoming’ state and it has been for years!

Here are the top ten states so far in FY21:

Texas (100)

California (72)

North Carolina (56)

Michigan (53)

New York (49)

Georgia (46)

Kentucky (45)

Ohio (41)

Virginia (37)

Illinois (34)

Getting ready for October!

Right now, the big nine refugee resettlement contractors (below) are out scouring America for new resettlement sites so that when October first comes around they will be ready to move 125,000 impoverished people (Harris/Biden have promised) from the Middle East, Africa and Asia into Anytown, USA where they can gain a foothold and open an office.

You need to be alert for any sign that the contractors and their hundred or so subcontractors are preparing their paperwork for your town or city (it is called an R & P Abstract) to open an office where you live.  This is the time of the year they get those documents ready to submit to the US State Department so they can get their allotment of paying “clients” (aka refugees) for the new fiscal year.

And, incidentally, once refugee offices are open, I’ve noticed that illegal aliens tend to congregate in those towns and cities as well.

Your job is to make political noise if they have targeted your town!  The only hope I see is if enough political turmoil is created, they may move on to a town/county/city they can pushover more easily.

Hold them off for a year or so and then work like hell to get the Dems out of the White House.

Here are the nine Foreigners First! organizations that are changing America by changing the people.

(LOL! For my faithful readers you probably wonder why I keep showing this list.  I was told once that people need to see something seven times before they remember it.  Well I figure seven times seven is better than a measly seven!)

 

State Department Data Not Showing Large Increase in Refugees (yet!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve seen a couple of news reports lately mentioning that Joe Biden’s refugee numbers are picking up. But, will he admit 62,500 by September 30th?

So, I checked the little bit of data still available at the Refugee Processing Center and see that as of April 30th, he isn’t even up to Trump levels for Fiscal year 2021 (FY21 ends on September 30th, 4 and 1/2 months from now).

For new readers, the Refugee Processing Center, until the Fall of 2020, provided a treasure trove of information about refugees arriving in the US.

However, for some reason the Trump Administration took down most of the database and we are left with only scanty information that you can find on this page.

You can see how many refugees came from which countries and went to your state, but only for this fiscal year and only up until the end of the previous month.

We have admitted 2,334 refugees in the regular program from October 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021.

Top ‘welcoming’ states are:  California (355), Washington (210), Texas (186), New York (154) and North Carolina (100).

But, that doesn’t tell the whole story!

Afghans are coming in large numbers!

We admitted another 2,237 Special Immigrant Visa holders from Afghanistan (a few from Iraq are included in that number)!

That huge number includes a large percentage of dependents who are all treated to the same resettlement benefits regular refugees receive, and are “clients” of the nine federal refugee contractors.

Top Afghan SIV ‘welcoming’ states are California (828), Texas (484), Virginia (270), Washington (143) and Maryland (73).

Have a look at the monthly columns and see that the Trump Administration brought in higher numbers than Biden is admitting so far.

Biden/Harris Make a Hash of Refugee Plan; Infuriate Their Friends

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update April 18th:  Biden himself commits to increasing the number of refugees to be admitted; references the border saying we couldn’t do two things at once, but now we can (oh really! so what changed?).

 

“This is a breathtaking betrayal of the plan to ‘build back better.’”

(Matthew Soerens World Relief, a refugee contractor)

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I am just fine with it. In fact, I find it hilarious.

However, Biden/Harris have now so screwed-up the US Refugee Admissions Program (which I know a little about) with their ham-handed incompetence that it makes me ask how badly are they screwing-up elsewhere—-like handling the pandemic or dealing with Russia and China?

We know they are creating a catastrophe and angering most Americans with their policy, or lack of a policy, at the southern border!

And, that is not so funny.

Now, by not going forward with his promise to reset the annual refugee cap to 62,500 for what remains of the 2021 fiscal year, RRW readers know that Biden has been pissing-off his friends in the NO Borders community.

Leading the pack of the pissed-off are the refugee contractors*** whose business it is to place third world clients in your towns and cities while being paid by you, the taxpayer, to do it.

And, see here that the final straw for those who helped Biden steal the White House was when a contractor, the International Rescue Committee, published a report saying Biden was ‘welcoming’ fewer refugees than President Trump.

Biden is on Track to Admit Fewer Refugees Than Trump

 

If that wasn’t bad enough, yesterday all hell broke loose when the White House announced it would leave TRUMP’S CAP of 15,000 (or fewer) refugees to be admitted by September 30th in place. 

The “faith groups” (aka contractors) were “outraged.”   

Nothing Trump did should ever be left in place!

A few hours later Biden/Harris backtracked and said they would set a new higher cap/ceiling in mid-May.

Keep in mind that while running for the presidency Biden promised his 80 million (ha! ha!) voters that he would admit 125,000 annually.

There is a lot of coverage of the “betrayal.”  Here is one account at Religion News Service:

Biden reverses course on refugee cap after faith groups express outrage

 

WASHINGTON (RNS) — President Joe Biden’s administration has reversed a decision to keep in place a historically low cap on refugee admissions left by Donald Trump, saying it will raise the ceiling next month after faith-based groups initially decried the move as an “abandonment of our ideals.”

Matthew Soerens of World Relief

Biden signed a memorandum Friday (April 16) aimed at speeding up refugee admissions this year — but that memorandum does not increase the so-called refugee ceiling, something the president has pledged to do when speaking to religious audiences.

Although the memorandum leaves open the possibility of raising that number should the United States resettle the maximum 15,000 refugees this year, news that the ceiling will at least temporarily remain at that historic low was met with disappointment by many religious communities, including the faith-based groups that partner with the federal government to resettle refugees.

By Friday afternoon, The Associated Press and CNN reported the Biden administration has reversed course, announcing plans to lift the Trump-era refugee cap next month in the wake of widespread pushback from allies.

The White House confirmed to Religion News Service on Friday that officials intend to revisit the refugee ceiling sometime in the coming days, saying in a statement, “We expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15.”

Keep reading here to see what the other Christian contractors, in addition to Soerens, had to say about their man Joe yesterday.

In a more tempered response, see what the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is saying about the flip-flopping from the White House.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

‘Relieved but disappointed’: How America’s Jewish refugee aid agency is doing 3 months under Biden

 

“We’re relieved but disappointed,” said HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield following Friday’s initial announcement that the cap, also known as the refugee ceiling, would not be raised.

Following the second statement, Hetfield added, “There’s no reason to delay raising the refugee ceiling. It’s just a ceiling, it’s not a floor. They should be focused on what’s the goal and how are you going to reach it?”

It is all Trump’s fault!

The fight over the refugee cap encapsulates a dilemma confronting HIAS as the agency moves from Trump to Biden. On one hand, HIAS leaders are glad that the United States no longer has a president who opposes refugees, separates families at the border and fires up his base with anti-immigrant rhetoric.

On the other hand, they say that Trump did so much harm, and made immigration so heated an issue, that it will be a challenge just to bring the immigration and refugee systems back to where they were before Trump.

Returning to a point in which the U.S. allows hundreds of thousands of refugees a year, and passing immigration reform through Congress, these leaders say, feels even more daunting. [HIAS was heavily involved in lobbying for failed Comprehensive Immigration Reform some years ago.–ed]

“It’s just a relief to have that administration in the rearview mirror,” said Melanie Nezer, vice president for public affairs at HIAS. She  dubbed the Trump era “the fire swamp.”

But Nezer is cognizant as well of “the sheer amount of time, effort and creativity it’s going to take for the new administration and those of us who work on these issues to unravel and fix it.”

“The prior administration really decimated our infrastructure, our systems, our staffing,” she said. “It’s stunning to think about the damage that was done.”

[….]

Trump’s actions on immigration, beginning with the travel ban, spurred a flood of donations to HIAS. Since Trump’s term, the agency more than doubled its annual budget to $90 million. But resettling refugees — how the organization had once spent the majority of donations — became unprecedentedly controversial and difficult.

With its windfall, HIAS sued the Trump administration over its travel ban, increased its advocacy work and shifted its weight outside the U.S.

For refugee resettlement nerds there is a lot of useful information in this article, so keep reading.

Here is the data from the State Department showing the paltry number of refugees admitted in the first half of the fiscal year.

This is what has the contractors hopping mad.

Notice (sorry the screenshot isn’t clear, but take it from me) that although we are admitting hundreds of thousands of illegal border jumpers from Central America, more are being admitted as refugees through this legal avenue.

2050 total for six months. They will have a hard time getting to even 15,000 at this rate.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Americans Last! is their motto!

Biden is on Track to Admit Fewer Refugees Than Trump

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“We cannot and we must not fall victims to politics of fear and hatred that drives the far-right…..[Biden] “must follow through on his promise.”

(Rep. Ilhan Omar)

In addition to abysmally low numbers, Biden hasn’t re-started the flow of refugees from Muslim countries, the flow Trump halted for a handful of countries that hate us.

Syrians, Somalis, Iraqis are waiting and frustrated, but not nearly as frustrated as the refugee contractors*** and their friends in Congress like Minnesota Somali Rep. Ilhan Omar.

As I have said before, the mystery for me is this:

How do the contractors who have been paid since at least 1980 to place refugees in your towns and cities and who have had a pipeline to the US State Department via their swamp dwelling bureaucrats (even as Trump was in the White House) not know what is going on?

Apparently they don’t and the guess is that Biden doesn’t want to look too pro-immigration as the southern border is being overrun.

Well, duh!

It is too late for that as most of America sees Biden as the most open borders President ever!  

And, besides the average American voter does not even fully understand the difference between fake asylum seekers (illegal aliens!) at the southern border and the Refugee Admissions Program.

It is ludicrous to think that voters are sitting around saying, gee it’s good of Biden to stop the refugee flow right now so let’s give him some brownie points because he is slowing, by a tiny bit, the Great Replacement!

Yesterday the Washington Post got in on the guessing game.

Biden’s delay on refugees baffles and frustrates allies

Senator Ted Kennedy created the present refugee and asylum system with the help of Joe Biden in 1979. Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act into law in 1980. A question I have asked for over a decade is this: Why has Biden’s Delaware resettled only a handful of refugees since then? Maybe Joe doesn’t like foreigners in HIS neighborhood!

President Biden sent a stark message in February to foreigners fleeing oppression, persecution and danger: The United States stands ready to help them once again. He pledged an eightfold-plus increase in the annual cap on refugees set during the Trump administration, saying he would aim for a “down payment” on that promise “as soon as possible.”

More than two months later, Biden has not made good on his vow. He has yet to sign a directive that would lift the cap for the next fiscal year or enact more-immediate changes to the Trump limits.

His advisers have provided little public clarity on why, angering many human rights advocates who say the delay is inflicting growing harm on refugees desperate to take flight to the United States.

[….]

People close to the White House’s decision-making attribute the delay to several factors. Some point to the administration’s ongoing struggles to contain a massive increase in migrants arriving at the southern border, saying they detect political concerns from the White House about expanding the refugee program at a moment when there is increasing pressure on Biden to be tougher on immigration and border security.

Jenny Yang of World Relief

“What’s missing is the political will of the president,” said Jenny Yang, vice president for advocacy and policy at World Relief, one of a handful of resettlement agencies working with the government.

The result, Yang said, is that “the program is effectively operating as if President Trump were still in office.”

[….]

Before becoming a highly paid refugee contractor CEO,  Vignarajah worked for Michelle in the White House.

“Unfortunately, I think it shows that President Trump may have been effective in conflating refugee resettlements and the asylum program,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, another resettlement agency working with the government.

She said there “is no substantive reason” why Trump’s directive should remain in place, given that changing it is “not a herculean task” for Biden.

I don’t know why Lutheran CEO Vignarajah is complaining as her organization is raking in millions of your tax dollars to take ‘care’ of the Unaccompanied Alien (mostly teens) Children invading the border.

Biden cautious on immigration!

Biden’s careful posture underscores the broader caution with which he and his advisers are approaching immigration.

Keenly aware of how the issue has sparked impassioned divisions in recent years, Biden, who ran as a unifier, did not emphasize it as a candidate. As president, he and his aides have treaded lightly, wary of inflaming a polarizing debate that could threaten to his appeal to a broad swath of voters.

He didn’t emphasize it as a candidate because controlling immigration appeals to most Americans and plays in Trump’s favor!

Some of the most fervent concern has come from Democrats in the House. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who lived in a refugee camp in Kenya as a child after her family fled a civil war in Somalia, warned in a recent statement that “We cannot and we must not fall victims to politics of fear and hatred that drives the far-right.”

Biden, she said, “must follow through on his promise.”

[….]

Biden announced that he would raise the annual cap on refugee admission to 125,000 for the first full fiscal year of his administration, which begins in October. He informed Congress that his target for the current fiscal year was 62,500.

But he never signed a new presidential determination, a decision that has left Trump’s directive in place. Now, Biden is on pace to accept the fewest refugees this year of any modern president, according to a report the International Rescue Committee released last week. The Biden administration has admitted only 2,050 refugees at the halfway point of this fiscal year, according to the nonprofit organization’s report.

Data from the Refugee Processing Center. You can readily see that if Biden follows through on what he said, his numbers would eclipse anything George Bush or Barack Obama ever did.

Six months into the fiscal year and only 2,050 refugees have been admitted. They have to do some real hustling if they want to beat Trump’s lowest year of 11,814.

 

The Washington Post continues….

The report says Biden’s inaction means “tens of thousands of already-cleared refugees remain barred from resettlement and over 700 resettlement flights have been cancelled.”

Absent a reversal of Trump-era restrictions, most refugees from civil war-ravaged Syria, who have the highest resettlement needs according to the report, do not have a chance of coming to the U.S.

Refugees from other Muslim countries are also being hit hard by current rules, according to the report

[….]

Some White House allies find the president’s delay perplexing because the refugee program has attracted bipartisan support in recent years. Even some of the Republicans who have been critical of Biden’s handling of the border have called for raising the refugee cap to expand the legal pathways for immigrants to come to the United States.

Republican Senator Portman:  Increase the refugee cap!  Any Republican wanting to increase the cap is making the Chamber of Commerce types happy!

“The refugee program is much more of an orderly and legal process that is entirely distinct” from the situation at the border, said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “I would increase the refugees cap from where it was in the Trump years, and I would make the asylum system work as it should.”

There is much more.

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Americans Last! is their motto!

Refugee News Round-up: Third Week of March 2021

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ll begin this week with high praise for Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who introduced legislation in the House of Representatives that calls for a moratorium on immigration.

One tough brave woman! https://vdare.com/posts/marjorie-taylor-greene-backs-full-immigration-moratorium

It will go nowhere, but she deserves much praise for doing something the Republicans rarely do—she went on the offense!   

The foolish GOP chickens, time and again,  simply react to what the Dems are pushing and virtually never stake out a position that forces the Socialists to counter them.

Trump did it brilliantly and they all hated him for it. And, that is why they want to get rid of Marjorie as well!

I heard Greene interviewed by Greg Kelly on Newsmax and Kelly seemed a bit nervous when he asked her if she meant a moratorium on all immigration and she said, no, just illegal immigration.

Kelly looked relieved.  Although it is simply a guess on my part, I figure that he has swallowed this line and has been repeating it everywhere:

ILLEGAL immigration is bad, but LEGAL is good!

When I hear someone say that, usually a politician, I know that they don’t know what the hell they are talking about (or they think you are too dumb and uninformed to counter them!).

Don’t they know how screwed-up the LEGAL US Refugee Admissions Program is (I have over 9,000 posts archived here to prove it)?

Don’t they know about all the LEGAL temporary refugees who stay here for decades under the ridiculously named Temporary Protected Status label?

Or, what about the LEGAL Diversity Visa Lottery (aka Green Card Lottery) where 50,000 migrants a year are admitted to the US after winning a lottery—a program that exists thanks to the now deceased Senator Ted Kennedy who created it because he claimed we don’t have enough diversity in the US.

Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC)

And, that brings me to the news that you are all hearing, every day and all day, that the US border is being overrun by child refugees.

First, the “children” are mostly teenaged boys as I reported here recently.

Oops! Biden Administration Faces Immigration Crisis

 

Secondly, readers need to understand that these “children” are NOT refugees. 

Supposedly they plan to ask for asylum which if granted would make them refugees and give them all the rights of refugees we select and bring to America through the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). However they are not refugees when they arrive.  They are illegal aliens.

Finally, most will never even fit the definition of a legitimate refugee who must prove that he or she is being persecuted, has left their country, and cannot safely return to his/her home country.  The UACs are largely economic migrants.

Seeking a better life and/or running from crime are not legal grounds for refugee status.

I think the Open Borders agitators knew that by pushing legislation two decades ago that put the (mostly) teens’ care under the umbrella of the Office of Refugee Resettlement it would (further) muddy media understanding and cement in the public mind that they are refugees.  They are not!

And, as you know, they are eventually coming to a town near you with the help of at least a couple of the nine refugee resettlement contractors.***

Two contractors that are paid to take care of the kids are the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

From the Office of Refugee Resettlement:

View the number of unaccompanied children released to sponsors by state and by county.

The Hill reported yesterday that apparently, since Biden’s inauguration in January, the US border has been breached by 15,000 UACs:

Number of migrant children in US custody passed 15,000: report

The number of migrant children in U.S. custody has passed 15,000, CBS News reported Saturday.

Records reviewed by the network showed that the government has about 15,500 unaccompanied migrant minors in U.S. custody. Over 5,000 unaccompanied minors are currently held in a tent holding facility run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other stations along the U.S.-Mexico Border as of Saturday morning.

More here.

And to put that in prospective here is data at the Office of Refugee Resettlement on past years.  See that in the entire FY20, that UACs were at 15,000.

However, there were many Trump years that saw very large numbers of mostly teenaged youths entering the US.

And, btw, I have finally begun hearing commentators on Newsmax say that the “children” are mostly teenagers.  It is about time!

Moving on to other refugee news….

It is a great mystery that as of a couple of days ago there was still no news about Biden signing a Presidential determination to admit 62,500 refugees into the US before September 30th. 

As I reported in the first week of March round-up, refugee plane tickets are being cancelled and the so-called banned Muslim refugees have not begun entering the US. 

Checking the (limited!) data just now at the Refugee Processing Center, I see that we have admitted only 1,779 refugees in the first 5 months of the fiscal year.  The 2020 fiscal year began on October 1, 2020.  That is a long way from 62,500 with only 6 and a half months to go.

It is interesting to note that the cabal at the Refugee Council USA, the Washington, DC based lobbying arm of the refugee industry, is silent about Biden’s (their man!) failure to sign the determination.

Biden is however, getting some negative media attention for his failure to agree to the 62,500 admissions proposal his State Department has already put forth.  See this headline:

Biden wants credit for reversing Trump’s refugee policies. So why has he left them in place?

 

In more round-up news LGBTQ refugees are in need of mentoring.

Vermont is looking for more refugees and so is Arkansas.

 

***  I wrote about one of the nine federal refugee contractors yesterday at Frauds and Crooks:

Refugee Agency Settles Fraud Case with US Department of Justice

In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the contractors.  They worked to ‘elect’ Biden and as taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.  Americans Last! is their motto!

See my category News Round-up for previous posts.  Round-ups have been sporadic over the years, but I am trying now to do them regularly.