Yesterday one of our readers, Paul, bothered to read some of the over 1,000 comments at our Youtube video (here if you have never seen it) and found this one from a man named Jim Delaney who posted it a month ago.
Here is what Mr. Delaney had to say. (I’ve broken the text into smaller paragraphs and the emphasis is mine.)
What this woman says is terribly true. Until my retirement 13 years ago, I was in charge of resettling thousands of refugees in a northeastern state. And I was damned good at it. When I began resettling refugees in the early 80’s, the vast majority were non-Muslim, primarily Vietnamese.
Program money was scarce and we heavily relied upon church groups and humanitarian zeal to get the job done. It was personally rewarding work for us all.
Toward the end of my experience nearly 22 years later, the number of Muslim refugees began to skyrocket. They were a particularly difficult group with which to deal and acculturation was always a critical problem. It was often difficult to find willing resettlement partners in the community once the Muslim resettlement experience got out.
At this point, I lost faith in the correctness, morality and goodness of the resettlement effort and resigned as soon as I could. We must understand that gov’t-funded church, et.al. organizations throughout the US have a huge financial stake in the resettlement of refugees. It’s come to the point where it matters not a whit whether or not the refugees have been properly vetted or are potential Islamists.
What is of paramount/overriding importance now to resettlement agency staff is their ability to pay their mortgages and car loans.
It’s become a competitive business, plain and simple. Quite simply, the number of refugees resettled translates into program dollars and each agency vies for a bigger share of refugees numbers. No higher purpose than that, I’m afraid. While I don’t regret the work I did–and I DO mean hard work–as said, I wouldn’t want anything to do with refugee resettlement now. It’s become self-serving, subversive and destructive. Just needed to get that off my chest.
Thank you, Mr. Delaney! Are there more of you working (or recently retired) in the refugee industry who would like to get this off your chests? I suspect so! Send us a comment, we don’t need to know who you are.