“We also know without significant resources, there’s the real prospect of homelessness for some of these families.”
(Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service President and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah)
So what did they expect with Biden’s careless and illegal airlift of tens of thousands of needy Afghans!
Homeless in Sacramento, a top Afghan resettlement site! Will they soon be joined by Afghans?
How did they not see this coming?From CNN no less:
Refugee groups race to find housing for 53,000 Afghan evacuees
(CNN)Refugee resettlement agencies*** are racing to find housing for the approximately 53,000 Afghans on military bases in the United States who will eventually be resettled in the country, but the groups are facing a strained — and expensive — housing market.
Every year, refugee agencies find houses or apartments for refugees to live once they’re admitted to the United States. It’s a cumbersome process that often happens months before a refugee arrives. But the frenzied evacuation of Afghans from Afghanistan has turned the process on its head, with agencies trying to find housing for refugees who are already in the US with limited funds.
Cry me a river!
“We’re expected as a resettlement agency to do the work over the next three to four months that we did over four years,” said Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief.
The difficulty is compounded by the fact that refugee agencies were already under strain after years of low admissions under the Trump administration, requiring them to close offices and lay off staff. That meant they also lost some existing relationships with landlords.
The federal government provides a one-time payment of $2,275 for each Afghan an agency serves, of which $1,225 is available for agencies to use for direct assistance like housing and basic necessities, including furniture and silverware. The other bulk of the money is used to cover administrative costs. (Ha! Ha! That means money for the contractors—for salaries, office space, travel and so forth!—ed)
While outside help and donations might add to those funds, rent remains expensive. The national median rent rose to $1,302 in September, up 15% from a year ago, according to a report from Apartment List, a rental listing site.
“The housing crisis is essentially what Americans are experiencing but imagine approaching it when you don’t have a nest egg, you don’t have a safe income yet, you have no landlord references or history,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, a refugee resettlement agency.
So far, few Afghan evacuees have left the eight military installations that are being used to house Afghans while they finish processing, ranging from a couple dozen to a hundred a day, according to an administration official.
“It’s obviously going to need to be thousands of people moving off a week,” a senior administration official told CNN.
“We’re also cognizant of the fact that if we move people off too quickly before we have adequate housing and the other wrap-around services that people need set up that they could end up in a situation where they don’t succeed from the start in their new homes, so we’re trying to get the balance right.”
LOL! I love how the Left always figures out a new way to say something for media consumption.
There is a lot more information in the CNN report, click here.
BTW, they will likely get their federal payola for housing the Afghans, but it will be to the detriment of low income Americans, minorities, the disabled, and young people getting started who will suffer from increased housing costs.
*** Here are the nine federally funded refugee resettlement agencies which have been begging for more clients (refugees) to fill their coffers.
By the way, I don’t know how it is even legal for them to be tasked and paid to resettle parolees—parolees are not legitimate refugees.
Editor: Apologies from me for not being able to keep up with everyone’s requests for information. I am overloaded on all fronts as I try to maintain some balance in my life.
Searching for something? I urge you to use the search window here at RRW, there are literally nearly 10,000 posts archived here.
Some of you have noticed that I have deactivated my Facebook page—yes, I have.
My e-mail boxes are full and overflowing! The very best way to reach me is to send a comment to this post if there is something you want me to see. I do review and moderate comments every day or so, and if you have sent me some information that is off topic, I won’t post it, but will see it.
This new batch of poor people from all over the world could begin arriving a week from tomorrow!
See my post on Tuesday where I pointed out that the new wave is over and above the millions of impoverished people arriving through various means since Biden took office.
Indeed, the now-arriving Afghan evacuees are not included in the 125,000—they are over and above that number!
However, some say it isn’t enough. They wanted 200,000 for Fiscal Year 2022!
By the way, they really aren’t “faith-based” religious charities as Episcopal News trumpets, but handsomely funded federal contractors hiding under a veneer of Jewish and Christian humanitarian zeal.***
Faith-based agencies celebrate ‘return to moral leadership’ as Biden raises refugee ceiling to 125,000
[Religion News Service] Faith-based refugee resettlement groups are celebrating the Biden administration’s proposal to admit as many as 125,000 refugees to the United States in the coming year, calling the decision a “return to moral leadership.”
The news came Sept. 20 as the Biden administrationsubmitted its report to Congresssetting the refugee ceiling for the new fiscal year, which begins in October.
The proposal fulfills a campaign pledge from President Joe Biden and reverses years of cuts to the U.S. refugee resettlement program by former President Donald Trump.
LOL! Church World Service celebrating a return to moral leadership!
I get to use one of my all-time favorite photos of Church World Service Leftist political activists!
“Today we celebrate a return to moral leadership and our nation’s commitment to welcome and generosity,” Church World Service Senior Vice President Erol Kekic said Monday in a written statement.
We need money, money, money to do our religious work!
Still, amid a pandemic and the work ofrebuilding the U.S. refugee resettlement system after four years of devastating cuts, the U.S. had admitted only 7,637 refugees in 2021 through the end of August.
Faith-based refugee resettlement groups — which make up the backbone of the U.S. refugee resettlement system — agreed Monday there is more work to be done.
Even as they praised the higher refugee ceiling, the groups also asked Congress to commit to rebuilding and fully funding the U.S. refugee resettlement program so it could reach that number.
Vignarajah formerly worked for Obama.
“Raising this cap without dedicating significant resources, personnel, and measures to streamline the process would be largely symbolic,” said Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service President and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah.
Six of the nine refugee agencies the U.S. government contracts to resettle refugees in the country are faith-based: Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, World Relief and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
They wanted 200,000 more poor people for American taxpayers to support!
Church World Service and HIAS both noted they had called on the Biden administration to raise the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. this coming year even higher — to 200,000.
This will all make America stronger says Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service President and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah (as she pulls down a quarter of a million dollar salary, more than Senators and Members of Congress or Supreme Court Justices, at an organization that is almost completely funded by US taxpayers)!
*** For new readers here are the nine federal resettlement contractors, six of which are (ha! ha!) “faith-based” ‘religious charities’!
For long time readers (who get sick of me writing about the contractors) know that the only way to reach past and around the mainstream media is to repeat, and repeat, and repeat some more, and maybe that is the best contribution I can make!
I have the patience to report on them day after day, and year after year!
Hope springs eternal that some day corporate media will tell the truth that these are not charities, but are indeed extended arms of the federal government which have been doing their ‘good works’ for 40 years.
“We had really significant concerns about our ability to provide the level of support to help make that integration successful.”
(Rebecca Kiesow-Knudsen of Lutheran Social Services South Dakota)
Wow! I can’t believe a refugee contractor is actually telling the truth! No, they don’t have the resources and neither does South Dakota or America for that matter!
I was amazed to see that the AP reporter actually remembered that Noem was one of the virtue-signaling Republican governors who told Donald Trump no thanks in 2019 when he tried to give the governors veto power to stop refugee resettlement in their state.
Republican Governor Kristi Noem will get the credit, or the blame, for blocking the Afghans depending on which side of the great divide one resides.
I had a couple of other things I had planned to write about today until I saw this AP story.
Both other possibilities are stories written by John Binder at Breitbartwho is really on top of the news about the flood of ‘new American workers and voters’ Biden is pulling in from around the world.
Heck, they won’t have to cheat in elections once they change the electorate!
From AP(where they have gotten something right in their headline—these are mostly not refugees!):
South Dakota is 1 of 4 states not resettling Afghan evacuees
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota is one of four states, along with the District of Columbia, that won’t be resettling any of the nearly 37,000 Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. during the final days of its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last month.
Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota, which is the state’s refugee resettlement agency, decided not to accept any Afghans after weighing local conditions and its ability to resettle them.
Rebecca Kiesow-Knudsen, the group’s chief operating officer, said Thursday that those arriving from Afghanistan without special immigrant visas are currently not eligible to work or receive federal aid to help them resettle.
“We had really significant concerns about our ability to provide the level of support to help make that integration successful,” she said.
Kiesow-Knudsen said the agency was facing a “rapidly evolving situation” that could change depending on whether Congress decides to provide funding and work eligibility for evacuees who have not been granted refugee status.
How financially burdened will your state be?
The Biden administration this week began telling governors and state refugee coordinators how many Afghan evacuees they would receive.
The numbers ranged from more than 5,200 people who are headed to California to as few as 10 being resettled in Alabama and 10 in Mississippi.
South Dakota, along with Hawaii, West Virginia, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, are not expected to resettle anyone from the first group. [Really those Libs in DC and in Hawaii should be rewarded with refugees and they almost never get any!—ed]
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem last month expressed reservations about accepting evacuees from Afghanistan. She told KSFY-TV, “We do not want them coming here unless we know they are an ally and a friend, and that they don’t want to destroy this country.”
Noem in 2019 decided to continue allowing refugees to be resettled in the state after former President Donald Trump attempted to allow states to opt out of the program.
Remember this. In American anyone can move and that includes migrants of all stripes. Afghans may be placed in most states but they won’t end up there. As tribal people, as soon as they can they will be heading to enclaves where other Afghans have settled because they will want to be with their own kind of people.
LOL! We should take bets on how quickly the Afghans get out of places like Vermont (brrr!) and even places like Minnesota where the territorial Africans (who don’t see the ‘joys of diversity’) will be making it hard on the Afghans.
And, the health care system there is begging the feds for more money to help relieve this latest fallout from Biden’s totally screwed-up Afghan evacuation.
Americans turned away from Virginia hospitals over Afghan evacuees
(Editor: Glad to see that the Afghans are not being referred to as ‘refugees.’ They are not legitimate refugees!)
A massive influx of Afghan evacuees strained Northern Virginia hospitals so much this week that American citizens were being turned away.
Every Virginian should be complaining to Virginia Democrat Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. Let them know that Biden’s disastrous Afghan surrender will be hurting them and their party in the next election. Throwing more taxpayer dollars at the problem won’t get them off the hook.
A hospital near Dulles Expo Center has been running out of beds, forcing the facility to turn away non-Afghan patients who didn’t need critical care, according to The Washington Post.
The overwhelmed hospital system prompted a regional emergency response group to monitor the hospitals after one became so packed with patients that federal officials lost track of a number of Afghans receiving medical care, including a month-old child suffering from a possibly life-threatening condition.
Kristin Nickerson, executive director of the Northern Virginia Emergency Response System, said the child was later located in one of the hospitals. Nickerson, who also directs the Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance, confirmed that another hospital was forced to turn away American patients.
“Our hospitals are already almost at capacity,” she said, referring to patients with COVID-19. “It’s not like they have tons of free beds available. We are still in the middle of a pandemic.”
Nickerson said federal officials have not been responsive to requests for financial help. The Washington Post reported that a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said questions should be presented to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond to several attempts seeking comment.
The offices of both Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner said they are aware of and monitoring the situation.
[….]
Nickerson further explained that a federal contractor which was supposed to retrieve Afghan evacuees after their hospital visits has left them in the facilities for up to six hours. Cherokee Federal, the contractor in question, did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment. [Oh, gee, another contractor for me to investigate!—ed]
Surprise (not!):
As Afghan evacuees continue to arrive, the cost to care for them continues to rise.
On Aug. 28, top local administrators, who make up the board of the Northern Virginia Emergency Response System group, sent a letter to Virginia’s secretary of health and human services, calling for federal and state dollars to be allocated for the ongoing effort.
“To meet the current need, we are leveraging what little resources we have to augment the existing team at the moment, but this is not sustainable with only a staff of 12,” the letter said.
J. Stephen Jones, chief executive of the Inova Health System, said the hospitals shouldn’t expect the impact of the Afghan crisis to end any time soon.
By the way, I have 390 posts in my health issues category. See what other health problems refugees and migrants of all sorts bring to America. Health problems, including mental health problems, that you ultimately pay for, one way or another.
If you missed it yesterday, I wrote a refugee-related story at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’
Of course I have been making the point for 14 years—these so-called religious charities that resettle refugees in the US (the Afghans are not legitimate refugees!) would quickly go belly-up if they had to find private money for their religious charitable work.
They can’t raise enough money to place thousands of refugees without the federal dole, so what does that tell you? It tells me that there isn’t popular support from average Americans for what they are doing!
I’m not picking on Massachusetts or this Jewish resettlement agency, it just happens that this story, of MANY stories that are coming to my attention, came to me as I sat down to write a post for today.
This complaint is everywhere—-too many evacuees, little payment for services for the contractors, no affordable housing and these Afghans, most of them, won’t be eligible for welfare including food stamps unless Congress changes the law.
Somehow the chosen towns and its citizens are going to have to cough up the financial support.
And, you can be sure they won’t be put up in Hyannis!
That would only be fair since it was ol’ Teddy himself who created the refugee admissions program and the Special Immigrant Visa program for Iraqis and Afghans.
You can be sure that no Afghans will be housed at Massachusetts’s Hyannis Harbor Hotel!
Before I give you the story, know that the contractors*** are knocking on doors that were previously slammed in their faces—like this one in Rutland, Vermont.
Nearly 1,000 Afghan refugees are set to arrive in Massachusetts – are we ready?
Roughly 1,000 Afghan evacuees are going to be rehoused in Massachusetts communities, Maxine Stein, president and CEO of the Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts (JFSWM), told MassLive on Thursday, although the specific date is yet to be confirmed.
The problem for non-profits like JFSWM is funding and permanent housing.
[….]
Republican Governor Baker: Welcome Afghans whoever you are!
Gov. Charlie Baker issued a public statement on Aug. 17, at the height of the crisis in Afghanistan that Massachusetts is ready to assist Afghan refugees seeking safety and peace in America, but little has been revealed on the state’s plan for the intake.
Where is the MONEY?
So far no money has been promised to aid the work the charities are doing to rehouse the refugees and Baker’s office has not laid out any guarantee of support.
“I think we’re getting to a point now where we’re being asked to do all of this work, and that’s wonderful, but we are given no resources to do it,” said Stein. “The state of Massachusetts is welcoming Afghan refugees, but we need to see some financial support.”
JFSWM is looking at three communities to house the 150 Afghan evacuees they can help: Framingham, Pittsfield and Springfield.
If you live in one of those Massachusetts towns and you aren’t happy with what you are hearing, you better speak up now or forever hold your peace!
Check out my archives to see that Springfield, Mass, a working class town, has been a real pocket of resistance over the years. Nevertheless, the State Department continued to shove refugees down the mayor’s throat.
***The primary contractors have around 100 subcontractors working for them….
