Writer challenges assumptions in Tennessee study of cost to state of refugee resettlement….

01/13/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..calls the study “a completely innumerate and illogical financial analysis.”

Here is the opinion piece in its entirety written by Don Barnett of Nashville that appeared in The Tennessean on Saturday. Please visit The Tennessean for the comments which are enlightening, readers want answers to fundamental questions like, why are we doing this? Who decides? Doesn’t the state have the power to say NO!

Holly Johnson, left, of Catholic Charities in Tennessee calls the shots along with the US State Department about which refugees come to the state. http://www.isedsolutions.org/blog/wilson-fish/wf-workshop-highlights

Barnett:

Struggles over state versus federal power relations are still not settled about 225 years after the signing of the U.S. Constitution. The left and right have launched movements to alter the Constitution, with progressives tending to support change that would assign more power to the federal government, while conservatives and libertarians would give more influence to states.

Tennessee legislators established the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee for the purpose of exploring this question.

Examples of possible federal overreach of constitutional authority abound, and the committee will, presumably, get to each of them in turn, but it has seemingly run aground on its first choice for study: the federal Refugee Resettlement Program.

The federal government assumed there would be a cost to states when it established the resettlement program in 1980. That’s why it promised three years of support for refugees, reimbursing states for their social-service costs. That period quickly shrank from three years to eight months, and there is no longer any reimbursement for state costs. The federal government has repeatedly documented the fact that refugee program costs are being shifted to states.

The bulk of support for refugee resettlement now comes from welfare programs, all of which are available to refugees upon arrival.

The main program cost falls to the federal taxpayer, but states have costs, as well. When the main private refugee resettlement contractor in Tennessee places 59 percent of its refugee arrivals into TennCare, as it did in 2011, it imposes a cost on state taxpayers, who cover 30 percent of TennCare.

The oversight committee asked for a report from the legislature’s Fiscal Review staff on just what the costs are and who pays them.

The review identified costs totaling $753 million from 1990 to today that were paid by the state of Tennessee. According to their analysis, however, tax receipts from refugees, mostly from the state sales tax, totaled $1.3 billion since 1990. For most of the media, the main finding was that refugees contribute “nearly twice as much” in state taxes as they take out in state-funded public services.

Now, for the fine print. The study considered only the cost of English Language Learning (ELL) and TennCare, but new arrivals were credited with paying 100 percent of the taxes the average Tennessean pays. Further, it assumed refugees were exactly like the average Tennessean with regard to income, TennCare use and tax remittances. Are these assumptions logical?

According to the latest data available — a federal study of refugees who have been in the country five years or less as of 2010 — the unemployment rate for refugees was 21 percent, compared with 9 percent for overall U.S. population. Twenty-six percent were dependent on cash assistance, 63 percent were in the food stamp program and 48 percent were in Medicaid (TennCare) or short-term federal refugee medical assistance. Those refugees who were placed in employment in Tennessee after arrival earned an average wage of $8.79 per hour in 2010, according to the study.

Of course, wages will go up and welfare dependency will go down with length of time in the country, but there is considerable evidence pointing to long-term dependence, and there are social services other than ELL and TennCare that Tennessee provides.

The federal welfare program SSI is a good indicator of long-term welfare dependency rates. It is generally a lifetime entitlement and usually includes Medicaid and other social services. The federal study of arrivals over the previous five years found an 11.6 percent rate of usage — about 2.5 times the national average.

None of this should be unexpected or surprising. What is surprising is that the conclusions from a completely innumerate and illogical financial analysis would become the story.

The oversight committee should insist on a realistic financial impact analysis and get back to the questions it originally set out to explore.

Some of you will be surprised to know that Nashville is considered by some to be the fastest growing immigrant city in the US, here.

Catholic Charities runs the refugee program in Tennessee—not the state government! It’s my view that the progressives, the Leftists, have to win the south demographically and that is what this is all about.

Catholic Charities rolling in your dough!

Just for fun, visit the most recent Form 990 that Catholic Charities of Tennessee submitted to the IRS, here.

Out of a total revenue stream (p. 9) of $11.4 million dollars, government grants (YOUR money!) amounted to $7.4 million, so like all of these ‘religious’ non-profits they could not exist without federal tax dollars. While you are perusing the form, see page 10 and see how your money is spent: salaries, pensions, employee benefits, compensation to officers, office and rent expenses, travel, conferences, etc. etc. And, with your money they are also busy advocating in Washington, DC.

Any wonder then why “progressives” want a larger federal role in governing you through their little fiefdoms!

For your reading pleasure, we have written 60 previous posts on Nashville/Tennessee archived in a special category.

Endnote: It defies logic that if refugees are doing so well, as the Tennessee study indicates, then why are refugee contractors begging for more payola from Washington. See post yesterday.

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

01/12/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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?

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

01/12/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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.

Bulgaria refugee story reads like scare tactics; pro-Palestinian blogger the source

01/11/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have reported on the rise of the rightwing in Bulgaria, the poorest of the 28 European Union countries, as it struggles to deal with thousands of Muslim “refugees” (not only Syrians) coming across their border from Turkey. Why isn’t Turkey stopping them when they get to Turkey’s border? That is what we want to know?

But, this story in the Standart (and reprinted from the International Business Times) looks to me like it’s designed to whip-up a frenzy of anti-right sentiment linking the Bulgarian right to Greece’s controversial Golden Dawn. And, they rely on a blogger they describe as a Syrian/Bulgarian, founder of the Forum for Arab Culture (in Bulgarian language we presume), who produced these pro-Palestinian youtube clips (here and here). He would hardly be an unbiased source. Emphasis below is mine:

Bulgaria nationalist groups have launched civil patrols to round-up migrants in the country in a hate attack strategy that is reminiscent of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn group, The International Business Times reports.

The Balkan country has seen a surge in xenophobic attacks since a wave of refugees escaping from the horrors of the civil war in Syria, 2,000 km south of the capital Sofia, has entered via the Turkish border.

From June 2013, more than 10,000 refugees reached Bulgaria and human rights organisations expect tens of thousands to make the journey in the coming months.

The surge of nationalist sentiment, which led to the creation of the new Nationalist Party of Bulgaria, is fuelled by the government’s lack of preparation, information and adequate response to the refugee crisis, according to Ruslan Trad, Syrian-Bulgarian blogger and founder of Forum for Arab Culture.

“Lack of information leads to aggression and fears. And these fears are used by nationalist factions,” he told IBTimes UK.

“We have no clear information for the refugees: who are they, what’s their ethnic and religious composition.

Wouldn’t that last bit concern you no matter what your home country is that is being overrun?

Read it all. Trad appears to be the source for the whole piece.

Our growing archive on Bulgaria can be found by clicking here. Time to read about Al-Hijra, the Islamic doctrine of immigration!

Utah murder might not have happened if US State Department had not placed Burmese Muslim in Christian apartment

01/11/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Why are we resettling so many Muslims? Why any Muslims at all?

It ultimately falls on the US State Department to have some understanding of Muslim/Christian tensions among the refugees they resettle in America even if it was Catholic Community Services or the International Rescue Committee (federal contractors in Utah) who ultimately placed Muslim Esar Met in the middle of a Burmese Christian Karen group of refugees. We learned from the extensive reporting of former Salt Lake Tribune reporter Julia Lyon that the two (the alleged murderer and his young victim) were in separate parts of the camp in Thailand—but “America made them neighbors.”

I could hardly sleep last night after reviewing some articles on the on-going murder trial of 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo. It is a terrible shame this “epic tragedy” is not being covered by the national news media.

I know it’s not covered because Met is a Muslim and because the average TV news outlet, even conservative ones, cannot bring itself to show the dark side of refugee resettlement where most viewers want only to feel warm and fuzzy feelings about the bright future we supposedly offer tens of thousands of third-worlders every year.

Here is a pretty good editorial at the Salt Lake Tribune, with this section (below) catching my attention. Who are these people?

I’ve found that until a crisis occurs, most residents of “welcoming” cities have no clue they have “welcomed” so many refugees into their community. And, that is because the State Department and its contractors operate secretively. By law they are supposed to “consult” with political leaders, but you know how that goes, some fearful ‘leaders’ are informed but keep their mouths shut for fear of being labeled racists/xenophobes should they question the feds’ wisdom.

Editor Terry Orme:

The murder of the friendly girl who loved to dress in pink appeared, at first, to be a straightforward crime story. But it soon became much more, a window into a community in the Salt Lake Valley that most of us didn’t know existed. Who are these people who live in the South Parc apartments? Where did they come from? What is their story?

To find out, former Tribune reporter Julia Lyon, with a grant from the International Reporting Project, traveled to Southeast Asia, and the refugee camps in Thailand, where Hser Ner Moo was born, and where her family and Esar Met’s family lived before coming to Utah. Lyon’s prize-winning report is available at sltrib.com.

[….]

Their lives would intersect in South Salt Lake amid a small refugee community.

Then here is the news account from the trial on Wednesday.

You can read about details of the case and the weeping parents as they took the witness stand, but here is the section I found most telling and why I say the US State Department should never have allowed Met to be placed in this living situation. In court, Met’s attorneys are trying to pin the murder on Met’s Karen roommates (with whom he “had been assigned to live” a month earlier) or we would not likely even hear about the religious/ethnic tension going on.

Reporter Marissa Lang:

The child’s oldest brother Ker Ker Po told jurors that he knew the men in Apartment 472. He went over there to drink beer and watch movies. They were his friends.

But Ker Ker Po never met the man who lived downstairs. He saw him once, briefly, but he didn’t care to speak to him, he said, because he knew him to be a Muslim man of Indian origin.

Met’s people are different, Ker Ker Po said. They speak different languages and practice different religions. They don’t share customs. They don’t mingle.

Met, who had also been living in a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand before moving to the U.S., arrived in the apartment about a month before the slaying. The other men had been there much longer.

Defense attorneys painted a picture of Met’s relationship with his four roommates as cold — stemming from their negative perception of his ethnic background.

Hser Ner Moo’s parents said they didn’t know their daughter ever went to the apartment to play with Met. The father typically did not allow her to enter the homes of others — particularly those who were not ethnic Karen.

I’m not beating around the bush! The way one makes sure there are no more “epic tragedies” like this one—don’t resettle any more Muslim ‘refugees’ from anywhere. Why bring the problems from most areas of the world—Africa, the Middle East, Asia—to be replayed in America? And, if you argue that Met was just a mentally impaired man, then why are we bringing those now too?

For new readers, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops testified to the US State Department in May that they wanted to see more Burmese Muslim Rohingya resettlement in America. Why? Aren’t there enough destitute and persecuted Christians for the Catholics to care for?

An afterthought: Somalis protesting in Maine, that was the Catholic church too.