Grassroots citizen activists in Tennessee are doing the grinding work of pulling facts and figures together in one place so Tennesseans will be better informed.
The ‘tn council 4 political justice’ has published a two-part answer to that all important question—who is working in Tennessee? And, the short answer is that refugees and other immigrants are getting the jobs and it’s all about the political power and cronyism of their well-connected friends (all the way to the Governor’s office and beyond!).
Here is how Part I opens:
An August 2014 Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis of Tennessee’s employment growth since 2000 shows that the jobs have gone to legal and illegal immigrants.
“Tennessee’s working-age immigrant population grew 176 percent from 2000 to 2014, one of the highest of any state in the nation. Yet the number of natives working in 2014 was actually lower in 2000.”
CIS used the same data the government uses to determine labor market participation.
Who are legal immigrants in Tennessee?
Refugees are legal immigrants that are brought to Tennessee by federal contractors like Catholic Charities. They come with work authorization and access to all forms of public assistance including TennCare, SSI and cash welfare, if they meet the eligibility requirements. Federal contractors like Catholic Charities always say that the federal government pays the full cost of the resettlement program. That is not true. The federal government has admitted many times that they have shifted the bulk of the program’s cost to the States.
Part II is here:
The August 2014 Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis can tell you who isn’t working in Tennessee. Their conclusion based on the same data the federal government uses to determine labor market participation shows that the jobs in Tennessee are going to legal and illegal immigrants:
“Tennessee’s working-age immigrant population grew 176 percent from 2000 to 2014, one of the highest of any state in the nation. Yet the number of natives working in 2014 was actually lower in 2000.”
With Chamber of Commerce support for both amnesty and refugee resettlement, this should come as no surprise.
Bridge Refugee Services is a refugee resettlement agency in Knoxville. It partners with Church World Services (CWS), one of the nine national resettlement organizations. A volunteer refugee advocacy group has posted the complaints they received about Bridge’s treatment of refugees. One post addresses four reported worksite injuries in over eight months that the refugees claimed Bridge did not help them address. The volunteer that works with the refugees opined that the “agency even sided with the temporary employment agency that placed the refugees, and is more concerned about keeping up their employment placements than they are with the refugees’ welfare.”
In the federal resettlement contracting business, employment numbers are very important, however illusory they may be, as exposed by a former Bridge Refugee Service caseworker. Despite any reported problems, Bridge continues to receive federal grant money. The last publicly available report in 2010 shows $902,445 in taxpayer funds.
Keep reading…. We come for the jobs!
For new readers we have an entire category devoted to posts about news from Nashville, here. And here is our entire Tennessee archive. By the way Tennessee is a Wilson-Fish state and so the US State Department contractor Catholic Charities is running the refugee show there.