As we reported here, the Office of Refugee Resettlement recently released its Annual Report to Congress for 2009 (four years late!). To save you from going through its nearly 200 pages, I’m from time to time going to bring you some nuggets. Already I’ve told you two place we could start cutting the bloated federal budget by cutting grants for “healthy marriages” and for “ethnic community based organizations” which are essentially little ‘Acorns’—community organizing outfits funded by you.
Wait till I tell you about those special savings accounts for refugees. Did you know that you are putting your money into their private savings accounts laundered through non-profits?
I hope to have a couple of things for you today, including the savings accounts, here is the first. If you go to Appendix C of the report, you can learn all about the Big Nine federal contractors who monopolize the program. There were ten in 2009 as the State of Iowa was being phased out.
Here is the contractor and the number of refugees it brought to your towns and cities in 2009 (remember they are being paid by the head!):
Church World Service: 6,602 (plus helped 10,806 Cubans and Haitians)
Episcopal Migration Ministries: 4,792
Ethiopian Community Development Council: 3,874
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society: 2,306
International Rescue Committee: 11,547
Iowa Dept. of Human Services: 426
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service: 10,129
US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants: 7,166
US Conference of Catholic Bishops: 22,417 (11,064 Cubans and Haitians)***
World Relief (National Association of Evangelicals): 7,264
For more on these mostly “religious” non-profits read a report at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) which I missed in March of last year, here. Looks like in my survey of 2009, the Catholics are number 1 followed by the secular IRC, and with the Lutherans coming in at number 3. (Although that depends on whether you count Church World Service’s Cubans and Haitians).
Says the always diplomatic CIS:
It is to the United States’ credit that our nation has, from her founding, provided a safe haven for the unjustly persecuted. However, even well-meaning efforts require accountability and should be balanced against other important, competing priorities. Without appropriate balance and oversight, helping refugees shifts from being a worthy humanitarian gesture in truly exceptional cases to an avenue for government largesse, enriching private bureaucracies while feeding public cynicism.
Readers, there is no oversight of the refugee resettlement program.
***Endnote: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is pouring $millions into their political immigration platform, as we learned a few days ago at the Washington Post. Are they using taxpayer money? Remember they are paid by the head for all those refugees they are resettling.