Month: June 2009

Refugee Resettlement Reform: Let the debate begin

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m happy to report that after nearly two years of slogging along alone on the issue of Refugee Resettlement Reform we now have company in the debate.*  First, check out Refugee Resettlement Reform blog in which the anonymous author (probably Transitionland, also anonymous)  takes RRW, and specifically me, to task for suggesting that we get rid of the Top Ten (volag) Government Contractor middlemen which I believe siphon off the lion’s share of the funding for refugees.  CEO’s with $400,000 salary and benefits packages, come on!

I look forward to these anonymous folks getting some gumption and stepping forward with their ideas (that don’t involve throwing more taxpayer money at the problem!).  From Refugee Resettlement Reform blog:

I’ve never met a resettlement agency employee who did not think that the entire system needs to be overhauled. Resettlement workers, the people on the ground, working day in and day out within the system have plenty of ideas for how to reform it in ways that will benefit the people all of this is about –refugees. That is why I started this blog; I wanted to get my own reform ideas out in the public domain and inspire others to share theirs.

And, last night this blog came to my attention, peterhuston.blogspot, and I assume the author is Peter Huston.  

As mentioned, the local refugee office [Albany] has several problems. Its staff is under trained, overwhelmed and exhibits high turnover. Many essential services are performed by short term, unpaid interns who leave about the time they become proficient at their job. The office has no control over when the national office sends it refugees or how many they choose to receive. The result is a constant stream of things that are poorly done or sometimes not done at all.

One’s opinion on the refugee center depends on whether you view it as an overwhelmed charity or whether you view it as an under-monitored government contractor. In fact, it is both, as although a not for profit supplemented by donations and volunteers, it receives the bulk of its funding from the government.

Which begs the question of “Just what sort of tabs do the governmental agencies keep on the refugee center?”

Good question, Peter!

Welcome all!  If anyone knows of other blogs discussing reform of refugee resettlement, please let us know!

* I don’t mean to leave out a couple of reform advocates who have been working for reform for years and have been extremely helpful to me and deserve enormous credit for their work, but am focusing my comments here on bloggers.

Defense of CAIR by Somali writer demonstrates split in the “community”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you (here) how surprised I was a week or so ago to learn that some Somali Muslims had the guts to protest against the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the actions it has undertaken that some claim undermine FBI investigations into the Somali missing youths.  My estimation of Omar Jamal had actually gone up a bit!   A Somali political activist, Farheen Hakeem now informs us that anti-CAIR protesters were not really representing the Somali “community.”

Omar Jamal, Executive Director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, is the go-to guy for media coverage of Somalis in Minnesota. But does he really speak for Minnesota’s Somali community?

Last week, Jamal participated in a protest accusing Minnesota’s only Muslim civil rights organization, the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) of impeding an investigation into the missing Somali youth. The protest was organized by Abdirizak Bihi, Jamal’s colleague and an uncle of Burhan Hassan, one of the missing Somali young men.

I, unfortunately, know Bihi all too well. When I ran for Mayor* of Minneapolis, I caught Bihi, who was working for McLaughlin’s campaign, running around the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood telling Somalis not to vote for me because “she is a lesbian.” This didn’t damage my campaign because I actually received more votes. It did however completely kill my romantic life (don’t get me started). I know who I am so I could care less of others’ opinion of my sexuality, but I was appalled that Bihi would use hate toward the GLBT community to gain political power.

Hakeem:  Jamal and Bihi run amok when accusing the mosque of involvement in the case.

Not surprisingly, Bihi’s irresponsible tactics against the Somali community have also found their way into the media. In a WCCO interview, Bihi said, “They [Abuubakar Islamic Center] curse us [Burhan’s family]. Call us infidels, because simply we spoke up for our son…Now we can say yes, that they do have something to do with it because they’re always acting out in a sinister way.”

Faheen says in no way does the protest against CAIR represent the “community.”  Darn, I had high hopes for the “community” when they did protest CAIR!

Bihi and Jamal definitely have a right to speak for themselves, but speaking for the thousands of Somalis in Minnesota will warrant questioning of their intent, credibility and integrity. They must be held accountable to their statements. The protest against the civil rights group received media coverage. The Star Tribune’s headline read, “Somalis take to the street to protest group’s actions.” Did the protest really represent the Somali community?

According to a press conference the following Saturday, organized by over a dozen local Somali organizations, it did not.

[….]

United Somali Movement Vice President Aman Obsiye said, “All [CAIR] is saying is that Somali-Americans are equal to all other Americans. We have the same civil rights as other Americans have…These attacks on CAIR are not from the Somali community.”

Well, that is a bummer.

*Mayor of Minneapolis?  Hummm! Hoping to be one of the 30 Muslim Mayors of American cities that Yahya Hendi told the Saudis about here.  See also my recent post on Somali community centers and the stealth jihad, here.

For new readers, the US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

Resettlement agencies can say “no” to more refugees, so can cities and states! USCRI affiliate (Part 2)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This post is a follow-up to the post I just wrote (Part 1) on allegations that an USCRI affiliate, Jewish Vocational Services (JVS), in Kansas City, MO was not taking good care of refugees.

The Jewish Chronicle cites the standard defense—the economy is bad— but other information here is extremely informative.

That doesn’t mean JVS isn’t feeling a pinch. The agency receives an annual refugee social-service grant, made up of federal monies funneled through the state of Missouri. The amount JVS gets is based on the number of refugees it serves over a three-year period. [no clients=no taxpayer money!]

Because JVS’s refugee numbers had fallen during the previous three-year period, its annual funding for post-arrival services dropped from $470,000 last year to $320,000 this year. Then refugee arrivals increased, putting the squeeze on agency finances. And because JVS has just begun a new three-year cycle, Foster said, it could take two more years before its annual post-arrival funding goes back up.

“The whole situation is really difficult right now, because of the job situation and the economy … we’re struggling after they arrive, finding employment for them. There’s a limited amount of funding for each refugee, and if they can’t get a job as quickly as they have historically, they’re responsible for all of their finances in short order … Without a job, it’s difficult for them to pay the bills,” Foster said. “It’s not like no one’s getting jobs, but it’s a lot more difficult.”

JVS’s national partner, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, provides funding for pre-arrival and arrival costs, as well as for the first few months in the United States, though not necessarily six months, as stated in the Star’s story, Foster said.

JVS says they cannot say “no” to more refugees, that the State Department just keeps them coming.

JVS can’t simply reduce the number of refugees it brings to Kansas City, because the State Department determines how many people will be allowed in the country as refugees and parcels them out amongst about 300 agencies nationwide.

Well, that is funny.  Didn’t a State Department spokesman just say this, quoted in Part 1 of this story:

“These groups are signing a cooperative agreement based on the idea that they will make these payments,” mostly through private fundraising and matching grants, said U.S. State Department spokesman Todd Pierce. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be accepting the refugees.”

Cities can say “no” too!   Detroit and Atlanta have already!     This is more real news from the Kansas City.com story from May.   Apparently Kansas Catholic Charities has told their bosses at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops—keep the numbers down in Kansas!

On the Kansas side, resettlement of refugees is handled through Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas. Its president, Jan Lewis, said she can empathize with any agency struggling to meet the needs of the area’s swelling refugee population.

Because larger cities such as Detroit and Atlanta have told federal officials to send no additional refugees, the State Department has ramped up expectations on communities such as Kansas City, where low housing costs are appealing, Lewis said.

“Last year, they told us we’d get 150 refugees, and we wound up taking in 317,” Lewis said. “This year, if we took in all that the government wants us to take, we’d be getting 500.”

Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas has agreed to accept about 350 this year and recently told the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — one of nine groups nationwide that allocate refugees — it must stick to that agreement.

States can legally opt-out of the entire Refugee Resettlement Program

We are constantly told that nothing can be done.  The federal government holds all the cards on refugee resettlement, but it isn’t true!  We just learned that Atlanta and Detroit said to close the spigot, presumably because they can’t handle more importation of poverty.

According to the code of federal regulations governing the program, a State can exercise its ‘state’s rights’ and withdraw from the program too.  See this post I wrote in February of this year explaining how that works.   The Feds will make it tough on the state, and these refugee agencies will scream bloody murder, but it can be done!  Wyoming is out!

USCRI affiliate in Kansas City, MO not taking care of refugees, employees quit (Part 1)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Humm!  Sound familiar, same old story, this time it’s Jewish Vocational Services, an affiliate of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) making the news.   This article was posted at Kansas City.com in May.  We missed it then but it came to our attention when a follow-up article was reported yesterday in the Jewish Chronicle.   I’ll write about the follow-up in part 2.

From Kansas City.com:

In their first month of life in Kansas City, Sudanese refugees Elamin Suraj, Wafa Kut and their three young children had no hot running water. 

The Peery Street apartment provided to the family had other issues, too: grime on the walls, basement mold, cupboard doors that fell off the hinges and a lonely couch so dirty that Suraj, the father, refused to sit on it.

“Please take me back to refugee camp if government can’t help me,” he wrote earlier this month to Jewish Vocational Service, the nonprofit agency that brought his family here. 

A mile away on Maple Street, a Somali family of eight — none of them with jobs — faces eviction just five months into their American experience.

“Why do they bring us here if there’s no money to help us get started?” said Asma Siraj, 21, whose siblings share two apartment units, one in which the fourth and fifth months’ rent are overdue.

Readers, you get the picture, we have now written dozens of posts on this very same problem, resettlement agencies won’t say no to more refugees because they receive their government payments by the head and so they keep bringing them in, putting them in substandard housing (slums!) and then cry that they have no money.

USCRI seems to be a leader in this strategy.  See this post of a few days ago where a commenter in Vermont says the same thing about an USCRI affiliate there (note the other links in that post to other cities and other affiliates).

A State Department spokesman reminds us again that these agencies, like Jewish Vocational Services, are part of a public-private partnership and they are supposed to come up with the extra needed funds.

But even in a sour job market, federal authorities expect resettlement groups such as Jewish Vocational Service to cover refugees’ essential needs for up to six months, if need be.

“These groups are signing a cooperative agreement based on the idea that they will make these payments,” mostly through private fundraising and matching grants, said U.S. State Department spokesman Todd Pierce. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be accepting the refugees.”

All of the above is the same old story.    But, this one line is what really got my attention.

At least two top directors at the agency tendered their resignations this spring, citing management decisions and their impact on the clients.

That is the story I would like to know more about!

Our top posts

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just now as I looked at our most visited posts for the last day or so, I realized I should remind readers that we have a sidebar in the right hand column of this page that tells you too what’s hot at RRW at the moment.   It’s called, not suprisingly, “top posts.”  Notice two of our posts on the IRC make the top ten tonight.

We will be 2 years old in about 2 weeks, and this is post number 2001.  Not bad!

By the way, our search function is pretty good.  I know;  I use it all the time to find long-forgotten posts on a whole host of subjects.