The Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest is chaired by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
You know the community activists who are alreadyupset that Obama wants to admit (only!) 85,000 refugeesto the US starting tomorrow while they want 200,000, will be crowding in to the Refugee Resettlement oversight hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. They have lots of community (open borders) agitators, paid employees and interns in the DC area to make it look like a big crowd in support of MORE refugees. So, if you live nearby please try to make it to the hearing. Go to our previous postfor all the details about who will be answering the committee’s questions.
If your US Senator is on the Subcommittee (list here) be sure to let him/her know how you feel about more refugees for America and for your state.
This is all you will need for tomorrow:
DATE: Thursday October 1, 2015
TIME: 2:00 p.m.
WHERE: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 226
Doors to the room usually don’t open until 15 minutes prior to the hearing start time. You can get into the Dirksen Office Building as early as you want and wait in the hallway out side the hearing room. But please be aware that Capitol Police will not let you sit in the hallway.
The two closest metro stops to the Dirksen Senate Office building are Union Station (Red line) and Capitol South Metro (Blue, Orange and Silver lines).
I think they are mad at me—85,000 isn’t the 200,000 they wanted! Hereis the White House announcement (posted in full below).
(I’m still looking for the very detailed report, like this one for FY 2015, that is supposed to have been available weeks ago. If you see it let me know!)
One thing I would like to know, and you probably would too, is WHY ARE WE STILL BRINGING ANY ‘REFUGEES’ FROM CUBA? Human Rights First (first out of the box) criticizes Obama, here. The nerve of highly paid (by you, the US taxpayer) Brit David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee on Al Jazeera lecturing Europe and America to take more refugees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbAGZsJqYw International Rescue Committee next in line to criticize the O-man.
Presidential Determination — Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2016
MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE
SUBJECT: Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2016
In accordance with section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (the “Act”) (8 U.S.C. 1157), and after appropriate consultations with the Congress, I hereby make the following determinations and authorize the following actions:
The admission of up to 85,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest; provided that this number shall be understood as including persons admitted to the United States during FY 2016 with Federal refugee resettlement assistance under the Amerasian immigrant admissions program, as provided below.
The admissions numbers shall be allocated among refugees of special humanitarian concern to the United States in accordance with the following regional allocations; provided that the number of admissions allocated to the East Asia region shall include persons admitted to the United States during FY 2016 with Federal refugee resettlement assistance under section 584 of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 1988, as contained in section 101(e) of Public Law 100-202 (Amerasian immigrants and their family members):
(Editor: I have added the 2015 numbers in red for comparison)
The 6,000 unallocated refugee numbers shall be allocated to regional ceilings, as needed. Upon providing notification to the Judiciary Committees of the Congress, you are hereby authorized to use unallocated admissions in regions where the need for additional admissions arises.
Additionally, upon notification to the Judiciary Committees of the Congress, you are further authorized to transfer unused admissions allocated to a particular region to one or more other regions, if there is a need for greater admissions for the region or regions to which the admissions are being transferred.
Consistent with section 2(b)(2) of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962, I hereby determine that assistance to or on behalf of persons applying for admission to the United States as part of the overseas refugee admissions program will contribute to the foreign policy interests of the United States and designate such persons for this purpose. Consistent with section 101(a)(42) of the Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 (a)(42)), and after appropriate consultation with the Congress, I also specify that, for FY 2016, the following persons may, if otherwise qualified, be considered refugees for the purpose of admission to the United States within their countries of nationality or habitual residence:
Persons in Cuba
Persons in Eurasia and the Baltics
Persons in Iraq
Persons in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador
In exceptional circumstances, persons identified by a United States Embassy in any location
You are authorized and directed to publish this determination in the Federal Register.
BARACK OBAMA
If you are wondering what that last bit is about, it is this: refugees by definition are supposed to have left the country of their persecution. We are not supposed to be plucking them from the place they claim to be persecuted, but over time this list has expanded (like everything else with this program!).
Don’t forget, the first hearing (since 9/11!) to address refugee resettlement in either the House or Senate will be tomorrow. Click here for more.
We just mentioned a letter to the editor in Syracuse, NY that has stirred debate there about the mayor’s plea for the resettlement of more Syrian (mostly Muslim) refugees for that city.
Now, here (below) is a Letter to the editor from Montana in response to a cartoon featured at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle on September 22, 2015.
This is an excellent short letter that hits all the points you should be making where you live. People ask me all the time, what can I do? This is something you can do!
The issue is hot and this is your time to respond to any mention of the Syrian invasion about to arrive on American shores (and into your towns). In some ways, the outrageous demands (100,000, not properly screened, Syrians in one year) of the Hard Left (No Borders!) Resettlement Industry (quietly backed by RINO politicians looking for cheap immigrant labor for their big business donors), should be looked on as a blessing as Americans are waking up.
Please write letters to the editor in response to anything you see in your local papers on the issue. The media (even Fox News I’m sorry to say!) itself is not going to give us a fair report, so youneed to educate your fellow citizens. ***Update*** Be sure to check with your paper for the word count permitted!
From the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
It’s astonishing how much is wrong with the editorial cartoon concerning putative Syrian refugees that the Chronicle printed on Sept. 22. (The cartoon shows Uncle Sam idling in a motorboat labeled “USA” and telling “Syrian refugees” swimming nearby to tread water while we run background checks on them.)
First, refugees are officially defined as people who have a “well-founded fear of persecution,” but being caught in Syria’s civil war, while obviously hazardous, isn’t persecution. So such people aren’t actually refugees.
Second, most of them aren’t Syrians, either! As the Wall Street Journal reported (“Migrants Pose as Syrians to Open Door to Asylum in Europe,” Sept. 12), there’s a brisk trade in stolen and counterfeit Syrian passports. As few as 10 percent of this human tsunami may be Syrians; some come from as far afield as Afghanistan.
Further, if these were predominantly people fleeing a war zone, they wouldn’t be 69 percent men (primarily men in their 20s), as reported by the UN Refugee Agency. Instead, most of these people are simply illegal immigrants from all over the Mideast and Africa who are using the chaos in Syria as cover to exit their own dysfunctional countries and move to the gravy-train welfare states of Western civilization.
And what about those background checks? Well, the FBI admitted to Congress that it can’t confirm identities or investigate histories of most people arriving from the strife-torn Mideast. For an explosive example of what this means, recall Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen “refugees” who bombed the Boston Marathon.
So Europe should decline these faux refugees. The U.S. should too, especially considering that more than 90 percent of recent Mideast “refugees” here use food stamps and nearly 70 percent collect cash welfare.
Finally, your editors shouldn’t choose cartoons to publish based on uninformed sentimentality.
Brent Bledsoe
Bozeman
Incidentally Montana doesn’t have a refugee resettlement program at the moment, but efforts are underway there by the Lefties and their big business pals to get something started there. See our post here in June.
Update October 1:Michael Cutler tells us moreabout the SC meeting where the NYT reporter failed to mention what the meeting was about and that Cutler had come to speak. Hat tip: Paula
She says that perhaps the NYT reporter I was so critical of, here, might have inadvertently caused readers to do a little homework and find out more about the Islamic doctrine of immigration—the Hijra. Cutler (an expert on immigration and national security) was a featured speaker at the public meeting in Duncan, South Carolina (a town close to Spartanburg). His name does not appear in the NYT story. Why? Cutler bio here: http://cis.org/Cutler
Walker suggests, as we did, that the reporter was likely attempting to make the citizens of South Carolina look like paranoid hicks, but then says this (here at VDARE):
… the paper did include a surprising fragment of truth in the second paragraph — a mention of hijrah by a local citizen in a South Carolina audience.
Have you noticed this too? The word Hijra is creeping into coverage of Muslim migration. Go here to read Walker’s excellent analysis.
By the way, a discerning NYT reader might have noticed that NYT reporter Fausset left out of his narrative any reason for the meeting in South Carolina in the first place.
Citizens had gathered to hear a former federal agent, an expert on terrorism and immigration, (among other speakers) who had traveled to SC to speak. It wasn’t just a gab-fest for crazy people as the reporter makes it sound—they were there to hear from experts like Cutler!
Why didn’t Fausset report anything Cutler said?
We told you,here, the other day about Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner inviting more*** Syrian ‘refugees’ to Syracuse, but it appears her constituents are not thrilled.
Here is a portion of a letter to the editor (Mayor, how will we fund refugee resettlement?) that appeared at Syracuse.com in response to theirearlier article. I suspect that all over the country citizens are asking the same questions!
The most interesting thing is the huge number of comments the letter received, most also critical of the mayor. Reader PistolPete wanted to know how many refugees the mayor was taking into her home. This is not the mayor’s home, but this is pretty funny. Apparently while campaigning for the job, the candidate took photos of ‘code violations’ (like this one) and posted them. Why not take photos of code violations that will surely be found in the slums where the refugees are living and post those on facebook. The refugee resettlement contractors (and the politicians that support them) must be called-out for causing the further decline of already impoverished minority neighborhoods. Photo: http://syracusesearch.pbworks.com/w/page/6360859/Syracuse%20Search%20%231%20-%20%235
Let’s take care of our own first! seems to be the common theme.
To the Editor:
This letter is in response to Mayor Stephanie Miner’s letter to President Barack Obama in her call for an increase of Syrian refugees. I currently work with refugees and have worked in a number of human service agencies. I commend her commitment to help those in need.
Last year Americans committed to resettle 70,000 refugees, and we fell short of meeting that number. This next year we have taken on an additional 10,000 refugees from Syria alone. With the ongoing dire circumstances in Syria and those around the rest of the world, we should absolutely do our part to help.
However, with all the letters and articles I have been reading lately, I have not seen a proposal of how we plan to financially support the resettlement of more refugees. How can we support those in need outside the United States if we cannot take care of our own? How does one decide whose life is worth providing resources to?
More….
Candice Fry
Now, check this out. Someone in the Syracuse area is doing his/her homework!
Do the same where you live! Go on the offense and make them answer to you. (Gino, get in touch with us to join with like-minded people in the growing grassroots network around the country!).
From commenter GinoChalupa (emphasis added is mine):
Stephanie Miner and her friends at the Catholic Charities and Interfaith Works are talking out of both sides of their mouths. A few weeks ago they expressed collective shock and outrage that Syracuse has one of the nation’s highest poverty rates and that the number of census tracts with concentrated poverty tripled in a matter of a few years. It just so happened to be that the census tracts on the north side where these organizations have settled the vast majority of its refugees all had the highest poverty rates in the city with nearly 80% of the population below the poverty line. These north side census tracts had much lower levels of concentrated poverty in the 2000 census before the Catholic Charities and Interfaith Works began tripling the number of refugees settled in Syracuse. Beth Broadway, Executive Director of Interfaith Works told local reporters that the high rates of concentrated poverty among blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in Syracuse was unacceptable and a sign this community has much work to do. Stephanie Miner and a host of other groups which claim to share the same goal of alleviating poverty claimed the community would address this issue.
What Ms. Broadway of Interfaith Works, the Catholic Charities, and Stephanie Miner fail to acknowledge is that the high rate of poverty is driven in part by the influx of 10,000 refugees to the City of Syracuse since 2000. The vast majority of refugees settled by these organizations are from countries in Africa and Asia. It should come as no surprise that the percentage of black residents living in poverty and the percentage of black residents living in high poverty census tracts increased as thousands of the refugees settled from Africa are “black.” The 52% poverty rate among Asians in the City of Syracuse in the latest census should also come as no surprise as a plurality of the refugees settled are from Asian countries. The percentage of Asians living in poverty in suburban Syracuse is in the single digits (with the exception of the Town of Salina which has seen an increase in Vietnamese families relocating there due to the rapid deterioration of the north side).
According to monthly data posted on the website for the NY Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the number of welfare caseloads in Onondaga County has nearly doubled since 2007. In June 2015, the most recent month data is available, a total of 7,468 families in Onondaga County received temporary assistance. This is the equivalent of 16,054 people. In one month alone, the number of families receiving assistance increased by more than 200 from 7,237 families in May 2015 to 7,468 families in June 2015. The number of Medicaid caseloads has more than doubled in 10 years (this number had doubled before the Affordable Care Act was implemented, so the increase cannot be attributed to the increasing number of needy residents enrolling in Medicaid). Onondaga County had struggled with a growing welfare caseload in the 1990s and was able to whittle down the number of families enrolled in temporary assistance by the year 2000. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s, that welfare caseloads began to increase again. This increase was more than 3 years prior to the Great Recession of 2008. When comparing Onondaga County to other upstate counties with large urban populations (Albany, Erie and Monroe), Onondaga County is the only major upstate county that has not experienced a decline in the number of families receiving temporary assistance, Albany, Erie and Monroe Counties have seen declines during the past two years and the number of families receiving assistance is now back down to levels seen prior to recession. In Onondaga County, however, the number of families on welfare is at its highest level since records were posted online in 2001. Compared with the other major urban counties, Onondaga County has seen a much larger settlement of refugees. The latest census estimates also show that the percentage of residents lacking any formal education and the % that don’t speak English has increased significantly. Local governments and service providers that are already stretched thin are going to have to provide additional services that the community can ill-afford.
Interfaith Works [a subcontractor of the far Left Church World Service—ed] recently paid $1,024,520 for an office building on the 1000 block of James Street. The previous owner was a financial services company which left for the suburbs. It would appear that these organizations are heavily dependent on the $1,000+ administrative fee they are paid by the federal government for each refugee they settle. The City of Syracuse and Onondaga County cannot afford to allow these two organizations to balance their books and generate revenue at the expense of an already stretched social safety net. If Interfaith Works and the Catholic Charities were genuinely concerned about reducing poverty, they would not continue to exacerbate the situation by settling 1,200 to 1,400 refugees each year.
LOL! Another reader PistolPete wanted to know how many refugees “Steffi” (the mayor) was taking into her two homes!
We have written a lot about Syracuse over the years,click here, for previous posts (Diversity is so beautiful! Catholic Church becomes a mosque, African Americans beat up Burmese refugees, convenience store fraud by Palestinians, refugees booted from sub-standard housing in which they were placed, etc.).
*** Syracuse has already started resettling Syrian refugees according to US State Department data, here.
