Month: March 2013

Another suggestion for the sequestration budget cutting ax: IDAs

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars!

IDAs—Individual Development Accounts!

What is that?  It’s a fancy name for your tax dollars matching a refugee’s savings.  For every dollar a refugee saves in this program (administered not by a government agency, but laundered through a non-profit), he or she is matched a dollar from the federal treasury.  I am not kidding!

How many times over the years have I heard someone complain—how are these refugees getting cars and such—this is how.  The monies can be used toward purchasing a car, a house, a business or education.

Here is a profile of a refugee eligible for this special deal.  He/she is usually employed (and may earn up to $3000 a month!) and own a house, have one car, and no more than $10,000 in assets, and can sign up for the program.   Nothing like this is available to a low income American citizen that I know of!  Ever heard of it?

$4-5 million could be saved annually if we dumped this discriminatory program!

Like St. Patrick’s never-ending pot of gold, the federal treasury is available for certain special groups of people.

In 2009 (from that finally-released three years late 2009 Annual Report to Congress, p.38) we spent $4.6 million on the program, again by passing your money through an unaccountable non-profit agency.   If we insist on redistributing taxpayers money this way, couldn’t the program go through the state refugee agencies which are at least nominally open to public scrutiny?

By the way, ORR tells us that 8% of participants quit the program—I wonder do they give your money back?

Here then are the resettlement contractors and ethnic community group grants for 2009.  I bet they each get to keep a cut of the pie for their own “administration” of the program.

Continuation grants awarded in FY 2009 to the following programs with cycles that will end on September 29, 2010 are:
•
Lao Family Community Development, Inc., Oakland, CA, $200,000
•
World Relief DuPage, Wheaton, IL, $235,000
•
ISED Ventures, Des Moines, IA, $235,000
•
Jewish Family & Vocational Services, Inc., Louisville, KY, $230,000
•
International Institute of Metropolitan St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, $180,000
•
New York Association for New Americans, New York, NY, $300,000
•
Women’s Opportunities Resource Center, Philadelphia, PA, $235,000
•
Catholic Charities of Tennessee, Nashville, TN, $194,392.

Continuation grants awarded in FY 2009 to the following programs with cycles that will end on September 29, 2012 are:
•
Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, San Jose, CA, $204,000
•
Western Kentucky Refugee Mutual Assistance Society, Inc., Bowling Green, KY, $150,000
•
Economic and Community Development Institute, Columbus, OH, $230,000
•
Maine Department of Health and Human Services, Augusta, ME, $207,901
•
Catholic Charities, Diocese of Camden, Inc., Camden, NJ, $225,000
•
Diocese of Olympia, Seattle, WA, $205,000
•
ECDC Enterprise Development Group, Arlington, VA, $280,000
•
Mountain States Group, Boise, ID, $201,018
•
United Way, Inc., Los Angeles, CA, $240,000
•
Neighborhood Assets, Spokane, WA, $50,000
•
International Rescue Committee Phoenix, New York, NY, $230,000
•
Alliance for Multicultural Community Service Inc., Houston, TX, $203,500
•
Catholic Charities, Diocese of St. Petersburg, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, $200,000
•
Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association of Greater Lowell, Inc., Lowell, MA,$192,380

I wonder if the Health and Human Services Inspector General has ever looked into this program?  Does anyone audit these outfits?

Editors note:  This is the third in my series of suggested budget cuts.  Here I suggested we could cut the grants for refugee “healthy marriages,” and here for the little ACORN-like ethnic community based organizations.  Including the IDAs, I’ve now saved the US taxpayers over $13 million!  I wonder what the sequester is going to require ORR to cut overall?

Will Atlanta become the Detroit of the South, and did US State Department help push it that way?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

World Net Daily posted a story three days ago that didn’t say anything about refugees, but asked that question and ended with this line:

DeKalb has changed from majority white to majority black over the last several decades. As the Atlanta Journal Constitution gingerly put it: “The county’s transition from majority white to majority minority was politically rocky.”

Where is Professor Kotkin?  Is this one of his stellar examples of how immigrants are turning red cities and states into blue ones?

These refugees didn’t ‘find their way’ to the Atlanta suburbs, the US State Department and its contractors placed them there!

Debris from a condominium, left, in Brannon Hill (near Clarkston) remains five years after it was leveled. Units in several buildings, right, are in such poor repair that they have been boarded up for years. No money because area populated by Somalis says accompanying story. Photos by Andrew Cauthen

John T. Bennett at WND begins his sorry tale of corruption and how some suburbs are breaking from Atlanta and setting up their own cities (of super-white majorities!) to escape the responsibility of dealing with the Dekalb County suburbs.

As Detroit – beset by violence, debt and social woes – prepares to undergo a historic takeover by the Michigan state government, the city of Atlanta could be sliding toward a similar fate.

Some are quietly wondering whether Atlanta is in danger of becoming “the Detroit of the South.”

The city has experienced an ongoing succession of government scandals, ranging from a massive cheating racket to corruption, bribery, school-board incompetence and now the potential loss of accreditation for the local DeKalb County school system.

For several years, problems of this sort have fueled political reforms, including the creation of new cities in northern Atlanta suburbs. Due to the intensification of corruption scandals in DeKalb, some state-level reform proposals could become national news very soon.

Read all the gory details, here.   Obama must be fuming because with suburbs breaking away to form their own incorporated cities this goes against a fundamental Obama goal of making the burbs pay for the cities as outlined by Stanley Kurtz (read about it here), but that’s a story for another day and another blog!

So, how does the US State Department play a role? 

Because they have been for decades pouring refugees into Dekalb County!  That is why! (Just as they did in Detroit!) But, in fact as we learned here earlier this month they have slowed the flow of resettlements to the beleaguered city of  Clarkston, Georgia where city leaders said, ‘no more!’

However, once ethnic seed communities have been planted, secondary migrants will follow.  So even slowing resettlements directly from a third world country into a town does not necessarily mean the immigrant population will stop growing as their kinsmen arrive from elsewhere in the US because they want to be with their kind of people!

Look at this map of Dekalb County!

Dekalb County, Georgia just east of Atlanta proper. Decatur, Clarkston and Stone Mountain receive majority of Georgia’s refugees via US State Department contractors Catholic Charities, Church World Service and Lutheran Services.

Downtown Atlanta is in Fulton County and Dekalb is the county directly adjoining Fulton to the East.

Then go to WRAPS statistics and see what the primary resettlement cities in Georgia have been since Calendar Year 2007 (too much work to go back further, but this gives you an idea).   Also, have a look at a website which shows the changing demographics for Dekalb County from 2000 to 2010, here (whites are moving out).

Here (WRAPS, arrivals by destination city by nationality*) are the US State Department resettlement numbers for Dekalb County cities.   Georgia received 16,295 refugees from calendar year 2007 to 2013:

Atlanta:  3,826

Clarkston: 2,346

Decatur: 5,861

Stone Mountain: 2,525

So 89% of the refugees resettled in Georgia went to Atlanta and Dekalb County!

* I don’t know what’s up with this, they don’t appear to be giving us the nationalities any more—what are they hiding?

About the photo:

The photo is from this story about how the refugees flooding into Clarkston in previous years have driven out the white residents and brought more poverty and decay.  I first wrote about it here.  Don’t expect to see any balanced reporting any time soon in the mainstream media (including on Fox News) on changing demographics through refugee resettlement.

Illinois: Too many refugees, too little money! (Cue the weeping)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They are wailing and rending garments in the land of too many refugees according to this lengthy and very informative article in Medill Reports:

[LOL! After the standard practice of featuring a successful refugee—ed] The Ethiopian association is one of the refugee resettlement agencies in Illinois, which are struggling under a triple burden as the number of refugees steadily climbs: large cuts in federal funding, a greater range of native languages among refugees and the recession.

Illinois has the largest immigrant population in the Midwest as shown here in data collected at the Univ. of Minnesota.  Medill continued:

Tens years of resettlement represented here (23,220). However, according to Silverman’s office in the Illinois Dept. of Human Services, Illinois has resettled 145,000 since 1975.

Illinois has received about 23,220 refugees from 66 countries since 2000, and the flow has steadily increased since 2006, according to data of refugee arrivals in Illinois from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Feds cut our money,while refugee numbers rise!  (They haven’t seen anything yet, wait till the sequester hits Refugee Resettlement!)

Cook, Kane and DuPage counties have unusually large refugee populations, making the state eligible for targeted assistance from the federal resettlement agency, according to Edwin Silverman, chief of the Bureau of Refugee and Immigrant Services at the Illinois Department of Human Services.  [Here is our Ed Silverman archive for the curious reader—ed]

However, in recent years the federal allocation to Illinois has been cut by more than 50 percent, according to official funding data.

“In the year 2000, we received $7.3 million in combined refugee social services and targeted assistance, and in 2012, we received $3.5 million,” Silverman said.

Federal funding to the state has fallen while refugee numbers have increased in Illinois, because they have also increased in other states.

More diversity=more difficulty

In the face of these cuts, resettlement agencies are striving to meet the needs of a greater diversity of refugees.

Over the past decade, the refugee population has become increasingly diverse linguistically, with wide-ranging educational and employment histories, according to a recent report issued by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This makes it more challenging for resettlement agencies accustomed to receiving refugees from a limited number of countries.

More refugees=more unemployment  (by the way, readers, they could say “NO!” to the State Department and ask that the numbers be reduced.)

Achievement of self-sufficiency for refugees has also become more difficult in recent years, according to a 2011 research report for Congress by Andorra Bruno, a specialist in immigration policy.

The recession has played a major part, making it difficult for refugees to find employment and become economically self-sufficient.

Oh NO!  The real horror, Silverman says they have to do private fundraising!

“Finding employment is the biggest problem,” said Erku Yimer, the executive director of the Ethiopian association. “Because many of the companies that hire refugees are not hiring anymore.”

The subsidies resettlement agencies provide refugees is the only financial resource for those who can’t find work. The recession means those who are looking for a job rely on these subsidies for a longer period of time than in the past, Silverman said.  [Not exactly true, refugees are accessing welfare at accelerating rates, most of the contractors are putting their charges on the public dole as soon as they can!—ed]

“So in addition to providing resettlement service, the resettlement agencies have had to be in a constant process of fundraising from the private sector, in order to assure that refugees can pay their rent and don’t go homeless,” Silverman said.

Readers when this program first became law in 1980 (thanks to Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter among others) the understanding was that refugees would quickly become self-sufficient and not be part of a permanent underclass.  Also, the program was to be funded through a PUBLIC-PRIVATE partnership.  Over the years the contractors got lazy and became increasingly dependent on the taxpayer to support THEIR charitable desires and the public is now largely on the hook.

If they have to exert themselves and do private fundraising now, too bad!  They should have been doing that all along.  [sounds of wailing!]

Arab Spring agitators told to get with the green agenda

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The climate refugees are coming!  There needs to be a Green Arab Agenda!

I thought this little blog post at New Generation Consulting was very instructive.  Seems the fomenters of unrest in the Middle East/North Africa went to Europe for some training by the Lefties and got lectured about how they better get on the global warming bandwagon (or at least that’s how I read this post):

I remember witnessing a surreal scene during an international Forum in Northern Europe, in 2011. A group of young Arab pro-democracy actors, heroes of the day, had been gathered for lunch break to meet with one of the Forum leaders. They were duly reminded of the importance of protecting the environment and asked to start promoting ASAP a “green agenda” for their countries. The Arab heroes, slightly taken by surprise, promised politely to do so.

How can you be so disconnected from the realities and preoccupations of the Arab peoples and be so right at the same time?

The latest World Bank report on Adaptation to a changing climate in the Arab countries reminds us that war and peace are not the only matters of life or death in our region.

Assuming that few people in the Arab world would read this fascinating 441 page report, we have decided to select a few striking data about national impact of climate change (CC) at the environmental, social, economic and political levels (table below). This post is but a humble attempt at raising awareness about Climate Change and environmental degradation in the Arab  countries.  At the end of the day, the real missing link for political accountability and a “green Arab agenda” are informed citizens demanding serious change.

Check it out.

Why have I posted this?  Because it’s interesting to me on several levels—first, that the international Left is trying so hard to shoehorn its way into the Islamic supremacist crowd I think not fully understanding that in the long term the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Leftist/Marxist agenda.   But, the Arab agitators know that they have to, for the time-being anyway, work with the Lefties and thus, in this case “politely” agree with their collaborators, in the manufacture of chaos, that they are worried about global warming too!

And, the other reason I’m interested is that the drumbeat about “climate refugees” continues, and I want to keep our climate refugees category up to date after having let it languish for some time.

Man from the UK with drug-resistant SARS-related virus had traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Family members have now contracted the disease.

Reports don’t tell us if he himself was an immigrant to the UK, but in light of all of the news lately about multidrug-resistant TB in immigrants crossing borders, here and here, I think I better set an alert for the topic of ‘immigrant health.’

My caption: The annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The world’s largest gathering of deadly viruses. Photo from wikipedia

Drudge has this story today from CBS :

ATLANTA (CBSMiami) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a new warning to state and local health officials about a virus that is related to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and appeared for the first time in September 2012.

The virus is a coronavirus, which is the same family of virus as the common cold and SARS. Asia dealt with a SARS outbreak in 2003. The new virus sprang up last year in the Middle East, but has since been seen in Great Britain.

The CDC said a worldwide total of 14 cases have been documented since April 2012 with eight of those cases leading to death. No cases have been reported in the United States thus far.

But, the CDC said the virus has clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. According to the CDC, people traveling to the Arabian Peninsula or neighboring countries would have the highest risk of possible transmission.

Of the three cases seen in Great Britain, one came from a 60-year-old man who had traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Maybe he got it at the Hajj!

Related health alert from the UK today, also via Drudge, drug resistant diseases could be catastrophic.