01/12/2014 - Refugee Resettlement Watch

How many times have we heard this over the years! It is the same old story. The federal contractors and their subcontractors (hundreds of them) are begging for more taxpayer dollars for refugees (and themselves!). When the Refugee Act of 1980 was signed into law by Jimmy Carter, the VOLAGs (He! he! voluntary agencies) were supposed to form public-private partnerships with government, but increasingly over the years, the contractors raise little money themselves and depend on the federal government for larger and larger shares. Some contractors are now more than 90% funded by tax dollars.

AND, as much as they tell you the refugees are working and becoming self-sufficient within a few months it’s a lie (sorry to be so blunt!). That is why they are now lobbying like heck to get more federal funding as this Ohio subcontractor of Episcopal Migration Ministries is doing (they were previously affiliated with another contractor, Church World Service). Hat tip: Joanne

Angela Plummer Executive Director of CRIS (right) met with Somali President Mohamud when he spoke in Columbus in September of last year.
http://criscommunity.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/a-presidential-visit/

See action alert below directly from the website of Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS). They even supply a script for their followers to use when calling Congress. Interesting we just reported on advocacy (aka lobbying) in our previous post. For legal sticklers out there, we know they can legally do this, but it’s morally wrong in my view for religious organizations, like the Episcopalians, to run to Congress for payola.

Are they doing this from the pulpit too? Do they have a Washington DC lobbyist like the Lutherans, Evangelicals and Catholics do to tell them it’s time to gin up the grassroots? Of course they do!

Here is CRIS’s action alert:

Calls Urgently Needed for Refugees and Unaccompanied Children

BACKGROUND: The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program provides persecuted refugees with safe haven and a chance at a new life. Additionally, the United States must care for a growing number of children fleeing violence in Central America who arrive within our borders alone. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) urgently needs additional funding for FY 2014 to serve all of the vulnerable migrants under its care – refugees, asylees, victims of human trafficking and torture, Cuban-Haitian entrants, Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holders, and unaccompanied alien children (UAC). If ORR is not able to secure more funds, the road to self-sufficiency and integration could be hampered for thousands of refugees and other populations assisted by ORR. In addition, the ORR funding that states, counties, and cities rely on would also be at risk.

Take a moment to call your TWO Senators and your Representative by dialing (202) 224-3121 to encourage them to support. Calls are especially needed to members of the appropriations committees, which can be found here http://appropriations.house.gov/about/members/ and here http://www.appropriations.senate.gov/about-members.cfm

Here is a sample script you can use to tailor your personal message, describing your own work or relationships with refugees, unaccompanied children and other vulnerable migrants:

Hi, my name is [NAME], from [CITY, STATE]. May I please
speak with the staff person who handles appropriations issues?
I am calling to urge the [SENATOR OR REPRESENTATIVE]
to support increased funding in the Labor-HHS appropriations
bill, specifically for the Department of Health and Human
Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. Without Congressional
intervention to increase this funding, America’s ability to
provide persecuted refugees and vulnerable unaccompanied
children with safe haven and a chance at a new life would be
compromised. Funding for this program is an investment in the
safety and self-sufficiency of people we welcome to American
communities. Please ensure that Congress appropriates
sufficient funding for HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement for
FY 2014.

If you think they don’t need more money, why not have some fun, use their script and tell Senators and Members of Congress to not increase their funding—they should be raising private money for any shortfalls they have (it’s mostly for their offices and salaries anyway!).

CRIS is in Columbus, Ohio. I wonder how many Somalis they resettled in probably the second largest Little Mogadishu behind Minneapolis?

Molly Groom (Homeland Security): We are working on developing exemptions from terrorist definitions for Syrians. Photo Aljazeera America

Update January 17th: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops was there too, they want the US to admit 15,000 ASAP.

It’s not just the Lutherans telling Congress—wahhhhh! we want Syrians, it’s the International Rescue Committee (IRC) the Wall Street Journal calls an “advocacy group” that told Senator Dick Durbin’s Judiciary subcommittee last week that they want to forego security measures and bring ’em (12,000) in NOW!

I’m struck by the label “advocacy group,” generally meaning lobbyists, and am wondering why then we are paying the lobbying group millions of taxpayer dollars to lobby for themselves (they are paid by the head to resettle refugees; of course they always want more!).

Just a reminder you pay the new IRC head honcho, David Miliband, nearly a half million dollars a year to do his job for an “advocacy group.”

And, by the way, these “advocacy groups” have been agitating for all the years we’ve written this blog for the post-911 “material support to terrorism bar” to be removed with just about every group of refugees we bring—it was especially a big rallying cry to get the Iraqis in here. It did cause the Bush Administration to keep the Iraqi flow slow, but eventually, worn down by these groups and their media lackeys, Bush opened the floodgates (and some terrorists got in!).

As the lobbying groups did at the Senate hearing, they like to throw out the ol’ sandwich story—-golly if you gave a sandwich to a terrorist (even a terrorist on the side of the US) then you were barred from entering the US. The Iraqi terrorists who did get in were making IEDs not sandwiches!

By the way, these are the same stories (sandwiches) we heard with Iraqis and Burmese. I think it’s amusing that there are still Iraqis coming in and Burmese too, but the “advocacy groups” (bored perhaps with those refugees) have moved on to the newest coolest refugee group—Syrians—to add to their multi-culty collection of immigrants. Plus I suspect the “Syrian crisis” keeps their organization’s name in the news.

Not a word in this story though about the truly persecuted Christian Syrians. That would not be politically correct for even the supposedly religious refugee contractors.

Here is reporter Miriam Jordan at the Wall Street Journal this past week:

U.S. plans to resettle thousands of Syrians displaced by their country’s civil war could hinge on those refugees receiving exemptions from laws aimed at preventing terrorists from entering the country.

A U.S. official stated publicly for the first time this week that some of the 30,000 especially vulnerable Syrians the United Nations hopes to resettle by the end of 2014 will be referred to the U.S. for resettlement.

[….]

The U.S. has not set a specific target for how many refugees it will resettle. But at a Senate hearing Tuesday, State Department Assistant Secretary Anne Richard said, “We expect to accept referrals for several thousand Syrian refugees in 2014.”

[….]

Molly Groom, acting deputy secretary for the Office of Immigration and Border Security at the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that “broad definitions” of terrorist activity under U.S. law were “often a hurdle to resettling otherwise eligible refugees who pose no security threat.” She said agencies were consulting to develop exemptions for the Syrians.

Human Rights First is an “advocacy group” but the International Refugee Committee is a quasi-government agency, a federal contractor***, due to the large portion of its budget you pay!

Anwen Hughes, a lawyer at Human Rights First who has studied the laws’ impact, said that the government has been “reactive, slow,” about giving exemptions up to now, and urged a swifter process, given the magnitude of the Syrian crisis.

The advocacy group has called on the U.S. to work to resettle 15,000 Syrians a year. The International Rescue Committee, another advocacy organization, is pressing the U.S. to set a goal of 12,000 Syrian refugees this year.

When they say “this year” they mean this fiscal year—FY2014—that began October 1, 2013. And, because the economy is still so weak, it means they will be brought in with poor job prospects and join the ever-expanding welfare rolls.

***If you are seeing this list of contractors for the first time, don’t be fooled by the title—Voluntary Agencies—that is such a joke implying they are doing their resettlement out of private charity and the goodness of their hearts. It isn’t so. They could not exist without the millions and millions of tax dollars they each get from the US State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement to bring refugees to your cities and towns.

Photo is from Aljazeera America which must obviously have covered the hearing.

Day: January 12, 2014

Eeeek! Crisis for CRIS! Refugee contractor(s) out of money AGAIN

“Advocacy group” tells Congress to bring in 12,000 Syrians THIS year, waive the security rules