Your tax dollars:
That is what a woman in the audience asked Mohamed Abdurahman, the regional refugee coordinator for the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, at a public forum recently in Kansas. He can’t dispel the myth because taxpayers do pay for refugee resettlement.
I just saw this story at Friends of Refugees and it reminded me to remind you to read that blog from time to time. Mr. Coen is on top of many of the problems affecting the refugee program—and many I miss!
In this case, Mr. Coen wonders if the questioner was a refugee agency worker. As a matter of fact, I am just now reading about Communist meeting strategies in the US in the 1940’s and this was an important part of meeting preparation—to have one of their own plant the question that the average person would ask and the speaker would be prepped to answer it. But, it looks like Mr. Abduraham did not get his talking points. He didn’t lie, but skirted the question altogether.
From the Dodge City Daily Globe:
A woman in the audience asked Abdurahman about dispelling myths concerning refugees, including the notion that taxpayers’ dollars pay for their resettlement costs.
“How do we communicate this information to our community in that way?” she said. “Because I’ve encountered so much misunderstanding, and I think that so many Americans do not know this information here.”
Abdurahman said he agreed that it was difficult to convince Americans of the truth concerning refugees.
“There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there,” he said, “And people need to know the right things.”
It would be funny (how he doesn’t answer the question) if it weren’t so serious. By the way, here is a story from 2010 from the Garden City Kansas Telegram where Mr. Abduraham (a Somali if you hadn’t noticed) is quoted on the limitations of “resources” in Kansas. “Resources” is a code word and really means taxpayer funded welfare and other assistance programs.
Public/Private Partnership—NOT!
The Refugee Program envisioned* by those who set it up in 1980 (Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and Jimmy Carter, to name three key actors) was supposed to be a Public/Private partnership where the so-called Volags (federal contractors) would share the cost of resettlement. As the decades have gone by, the program is almost exclusively funded by you through taxes and NOT through charitable donations of church-going people and others.
The truth is that the refugee program is a $2 billion plus taxpayer funded program! That figure does not include the state and local costs of education, crime, healthcare and other “assistance” provided by state and local governments.
* Come to think of it, maybe those voting for the program in 1980 “envisioned” the program as a shared program that would not be almost completely reliant on taxpayer money, but I think Kennedy, Biden and Carter probably “envisioned” it just the way it has turned out.