Day: October 3, 2011

Jewish agency resettling 25 Darfuri young men in New Jersey

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

My first thought when I read this was—where are the women?  Aren’t they the ones being raped?

The first  three young men have arrived according to New Jersey Jewish News:

After fleeing from the ravages of genocide in their native land, three refugees from Darfur are now crafting new lives in the MetroWest community with a large assist from the Jewish Vocational Service, a beneficiary agency of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.

Thanks to a $88,532 grant from the federal State Office of Refugee Resettlement, JVS has helped the men find transitional housing in the area, while providing caseworkers, translation services, English classes, vocational training, job coaching, and other support.

The men are the first wave of Darfuris to arrive in New Jersey, ahead of several families and 25 young men expected to be coming to this area in the next few months. JVS and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society hope to resettle 25 or more refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region, which suffered under genocidal attacks by the Sudanese government.

JVS is a subcontractor of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the gang of ten (or eleven, but who is counting) major federal refugee contractors.  That means that HIAS deals directly with the State Department and the Dept. of Health and Human Services then sends your bucks down the line to its subcontractors making it all very hard to follow the money.

I had just written about HIAS here last month where I said this:

I couldn’t find any financials on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (if they are at the website they have it hidden well!)  until I decided to try their initials—HIAS—and sure enough here is their most recent Form 990.  Seems that HIAS (2009) had an income of $20,484,336 and $12,231,825 came from you—-the taxpayer!

…..  But, here is the kicker—salaries and benefits at this organization amounted to around $12 million dollars!  HIAS’s CEO, Gideon Aronoff, racked in a cool $340,000 salary (with benefits) and the organization had at least another 8 executives making 6-figure salaries.    Once again that old adage applies—doing well by doing good!

In case you are wondering, HIAS doesn’t just resettle Jews anymore—Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists are all welcome.

So hopefully, the above information—HIAS has money!—puts the begging for bucks and other donations in the rest of the NJ article in some context.

One big concern the Darfuris and their hosts share is housing.

“There are major issues,” said Fisher. “Each refugee is given $1,100 from the federal government when they arrive in the United States. For a family of five, the $5,500 can tide them over. But for the single guys, the $1,100 is not enough. We need to find them transitional housing at reduced rates. Housing around here is not cheap.” [In New Jersey—no kidding!—ed]

To help out, JVS board members provided goods, services, and contributions for the refugees. The Sleepy’s mattress company donated five beds to a temporary housing facility in Newark for new arrivals.

You see this mattress donation?  HIAS is probably in the Match Grant program where they get a $2 match of taxpayer cash for every dollar of donated goods.  I’m over simplifying a bit and there are some other hoops, but say the mattress is worth $100 bucks, HIAS (if its signed up for the program) gets $200 in cash from you via the federal government.

If you saw my last post, I said that it’s virtually impossible to know just how much the refugee program costs and the Match Grant is just one more confusing factor.   But, LOL!  when I had a look at HIAS website I noticed their healthy marriage program—guess they won’t have to use any of that grant money on these single young Darfuri men they are bringing to NJ.

Suicide prevention: one more refugee-related expense

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

I’ve mentioned this problem before—-Bhutanese refugees committing suicide when they get here.  I don’t suppose these are large numbers in the overall scheme of things, but this piece from the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center points to one more hidden cost of the refugee resettlement program.

I was at immigration meetings all weekend and was asked many times, how do we figure the cost of all this?  You basically can’t because it isn’t just the cost of some volag like Catholic Charities resettling a bunch of refugees in your cities and what they get from the federal taxpayer to do that, but there are all the costs to the local community that are never tallied; plus the volags get all sorts of federal grants—things like “Healthy Marriage initiative grants” to teach refugees, what else, how to have healthy marriages.

So you can be sure we are paying for this too (suicide prevention) for those who have been ripped from their cultural moorings and cannot cope with the joys of multicultural America.

From the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center:

In response to reports of suicides among Bhutanese and other refugees resettled in the U.S., RHTAC has sought to develop resources and tools that are consistent with our goal of improving the health and well being of newly arrived refugees by providing technical assistance focused on refugee health and mental health to refugee-serving organizations.

You can read the whole list of initiatives but this is one of my favorites:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at the request of the ORR[Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services] and in collaboration with RHTAC, has developed an investigational framework to increase our understanding of risks for suicide, belongingness and burdensomeness, and Bhutanese community resilience.