Refugee gardening projects: How much do those veggies cost you?

Your tax dollars!

Michelle Obama on refugee gardening: “It’s a model for the nation, for the world”

Michelle O. visits refugee garden project in 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/16/michelle-obama-visits-san_n_540440.html

A reporter once asked me how on earth could these refugee resettlement contractors and their spin-off groups make much money out of resettling refugees by the head when they receive a one time flat fee for each refugee planted in your town.  I explained that most of the income for the contractors and subcontractors come through the myriad grants they receive through the Office of Refugee Resettlement for administering everything under the sun—job training programs, English classes, refugee savings accounts, micro-enterprise loan programs, healthy marriage training programs, and even refugee veggie growing projects like those described in an article at TakePart.

Knowing a bit about agriculture and how hard it is to make a profit (unless you are a corporate farm with millions invested in land and equipment) these feel-good gardening projects taxpayers pay for—you pay for!—can only survive with large infusions of federal cash.

From TakePart (hat tip: Joanne):

There are now agricultural programs across the country—many of which have been bolstered by federal Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program grants—aimed at transitioning people into their new lives in the States by focusing on the agrarian background shared by many refugees. But these garden plots are also meeting the demand for niche produce, such as bitter melon, providing a local market for vegetables that are staples in a refugee’s country of origin but are harder to find in the U.S. and are often sold for a premium.

After a discussion about Cleveland, reporter Sarah McColl takes us to one of our favorite locations for refugee resettlement—Nashville, Tennessee where we learn about an $85,000 grant that the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee received from the federal government for FY14-FY16.

So how many veggies can you grow with $85,000 in federal funding!

Somali Community Center becomes Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee

Some longtime readers may remember that the Center was originally the Somali Community Center in Nashville.  Let’s take a minute and go down memory lane.  Here is what we said about the name change back in 2009:

So they conveniently dropped the name, Somali Community Center, eh?  Could it be they want to shed their bad image with federal granting agencies?    We have heard of this before, some agency or volag gets into grant trouble and pretty soon they are going by another name, I suppose hoping that new federal or state grantors (or the public!) won’t link them to the former bad acts.

A reminder to readers, the Somali Community Center got into hot water with the federal government over misuse of grants and with a possible connection to terrorist activities back in 2007.   Check out this important and shocking story from Nashville’s Channel 4 news at the time.

The link to the shocking story is gone, but visit our post where we had, thank goodness, preserved the original text.

Back to the gardening grant where you can be sure the Center gets to keep a certain amount of your money for administrative purposes.

Snake gourds trellised up a willow tree?  (and you paid for it!)

Lauren Bailey: We grow crops without spending a lot of money.  $85,000 is a lot of money!

It’s much the same in Nashville: There are plenty of international grocery stores, explained Lauren Bailey, director of agricultural programs at the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee. Access isn’t the problem.

“It’s less that they’re not able to find it and more that it’s expensive,” Bailey said. “But the crops that we’ve grown this year, they’ve been able to grow prolifically without spending a lot of money.” One enterprising gardener told Bailey he’d earned $25 from his mustard greens haul, though most take what they grow home to their own kitchen. “I sense that they’re excited to be growing, but also excited to be providing for their families,” she said.

In its first year after receiving a 2014 federal Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program grant, the Nashville program now includes a community garden, ESL instruction, and a training garden that hosts an 18-week market gardening course that’s regularly attended by refugees from Burma and Bhutan. It’s not a simple matter of the students learning from the teachers, however. “At one training garden they were growing a snake gourd, and they trellised it up a willow tree, and I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Bailey said.

Supplemental income, language practice, fresh veggies, and marketable skills are all important aspects of resettlement that are easier to quantify than some of the other benefits Bailey and Fitzpatrick have observed in the garden.

“It’s not just that it might provide income,” Bailey said, “but that it might bring health or improve their quality of life. For a lot of our gardeners, it’s a sense of ownership and pride—the work that they’re doing, and what they’re able to accomplish.”

Again, check out the whole list of grants for refugee gardens.  By the way, I see that the now defunct Indiana gardens that American volunteers had to try to save (when refugees tired of the work) are no longer on the list.

Someone needs to take one of these grants, get the original grant requirement and track the federal money and figure out how much it costs to produce the veggies and what the return on your investment is, photograph the gardens on a regular basis and see how many refugees are actually gardening.  I suspect there is lots and lots of room for fraud in managing one of these federal warm and fuzzy give-away programs.

NY Times does the ‘invasion of Europe’ boat people story

For our regular readers there is not much new here except that we get some details about one particular smuggling route out of Egypt and it makes me wonder why the hell all of the European powers and American pressure on Egypt too, couldn’t get the Egyptian government to stop this lucrative smuggling route.

Europe! Here we (single men) come! Photo: Reuters http://www.mirrornewsgy.com/mirrornewsgy/index.php/component/k2/item/1540-mediterranean-boat-people-numbers-soar-to-near-100000-this-year

Instead of really clamping down on Egypt, one policy consideration for the Europeans is to increase LEGAL immigration as a way of stopping the smuggling business.  Sheesh!

The ‘stars’ of this New York Times article are Palestinian brothers who survived a boat wreck and are now in Malta hankering to move on to a first world country.  Emphasis is mine:

Today, the business of smuggling refugees and migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe has become a hugely profitable, if deadly, enterprise, with more than 3,000 people believed to have died so far this year. One United Nations official estimated that in 2014 smugglers on those routes would gross more than $1 billion, with sophisticated operations that sometimes overlap with criminal gangs who traffic in arms and drugs.

For Europe, the enormous influx of migrants and refugees has stirred both sympathy and resentment, while presenting a policy conundrum — the humanitarian imperative of rescuing the desperate at sea versus the economic and political burden of absorbing them.

With illegal migration very likely to keep growing, one question is whether to expand legal migration.

[….]

By some estimates, as many as one million migrants are hiding on the North African coast, from Libya to Egypt, during the peak summer months, waiting for boats. In Egypt, smuggling in Alexandria and nearby ports has risen sharply since the Syrian exodus began in 2013, when five to seven boats left every week. Now five to seven boats leave every day.

The Palestinian survivors, looking for sympathy, want your help to get into some sweet country:

Today, the three survivors are living in a migrant center and trapped in bureaucratic limbo in Malta. They want to reach a country that will provide them asylum, perhaps Sweden or Canada or Australia. But on Wednesday, they must submit fingerprints and be processed in Malta.

“We need support,” said Mamoun Doghmosh. “We need help.”

Read it all.  Note that there are many places along this smuggling pipeline where the migrant flow could be stopped.

Please don’t anyone tell them that the US State Department is packing up illegal aliens in Malta and bringing them to America.  We will be taking another 500 this fiscal year!

See our ‘invasion of Europe’ archive here.

In Liberal, Kansas meat packing plant a black guy named Smith murders a Somali refugee

Update November 23rd:  For some reason this month-old story is exploding on the internet, does anyone know why?  See my post this morning.

Liberal by the way, is the name of the town!

Here we learn that an African-American killed one of his African ‘brothers’ apparently on the job at National Beef.

It was just last week that we reported on the on-going tension between African-Americans and Somali refugees in Minneapolis, here.

We have a whole raft of posts at RRW on problems in Kansas meat packing towns as ‘BIG MEAT’ continues to bring in refugee laborers.  Click here for that entire archive.  See also ‘Globalists changing the Heartland’ as they look for cheap immigrant labor for big business (with a side benefit of creating more Democrat voters in traditionally red states).

This news from last week (thanks to a Kansas reader) doesn’t tell us what the altercation was about, but searching around there is some commentary that the police are keeping details hushed up.  If anyone sees more news on the Liberal meatpacking murder, let us know.

From the Leader & Times:

Smith is charged with 2nd degree murder in meatpacking death of Somali refugee.

 Jail logs issued Thursday by the Seward County Sheriff’s Office identify the man arrested for second degree murder of a man he had an altercation with last Friday as Michael Joel Smith.

Smith. 31, is listed as a resident of Guymon., Okla., and he was initially taken to Liberal Police Department headquarters for questioning on Oct. 10, after he had an “altercation” with Abdukadir Mohamed Dahir, 25, while both were working at National Beef. He was then released.

Dahir was airlifted that same day to a Wichita hospital for treatment of his injuries, where he died the following day, Saturday, due to “blunt force injuries of the head,” according to authorities.

After Dahir’s death, LPD Capt. Pat McClurg announced LPD had arrested Smith Tuesday evening and was seeking a second degree murder charge against Smith with the Seward County Attorney’s office.

Authorities have yet to release the cause of the injuries or any additional details of the altercation.

“No other suspects are being sought in connection with this incident,” McClurg noted Wednesday. “The investigation of this incident is ongoing.”

Can we expect CAIR to show up?