Editor’s note: There are so many stories like this one, warm and fuzzy stories, about how volunteers are jumping in to help third world refugees arriving in America, that I couldn’t possibly post them all. Nor, do I have time to take every one of them apart for you. That said, please see this news from North Carolina where apparently local churches have run out of America poor and homeless people and so are doing their Christian charity for third world refugees by furnishing half-way houses for them (and for a multi-million dollar federal resettlement contractor).
Here are some points to consider as you read through this puff piece (besides the fact that we can only assume there are no more needy Americans/homeless vets in Raleigh):
~USCRI (US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants) is a federal contractor (one of nine) which gets 99% of its “contributions” from you, the US taxpayer. See page 9 of a recent Form 990. They had gifts and contributions in the amount of $35,676,146 and received $35,429,570 from GOVERNMENT GRANTS (that is your money). Salaries are on page 7. They are not a poor and struggling non-profit group, but in reality a quasi-government agency.
~USCRI signs a contract (oopsy an “agreement”) with the US State Department promising to find apartments for refugees, so I am surprised that the US State Department is letting them put refugees in what amounts to half-way houses (described in this article). Are these contractors in the real estate business now?
~The good Baptists and other church folks helping should know that their volunteer time has a dollar value placed on it for the purpose of USCRI showing the feds that they have made a financial contribution, that USCRI has ‘skin in the game.’
Likewise the donation of furniture and other donations, like clothes, have a dollar value placed on them for the purpose, again, of showing the feds that they (USCRI) are holding up their end of the highly touted “public-private partnership” (which has become a joke) as the public contribution now far outweighs any private donations as you see in their Form 990.
~North Carolina has become one of the top states to ‘welcome’ refugees (don’t ask me how it got that way, except that I think when it was first targeted, the federal contractors found no resistance and there must be labor intensive industries looking for cheap labor). We learn that Raleigh has four of the nine major federal contractors working there and ‘welcomes’ 325 refugees a year.
Read it all.
Serious students of the refugee program might want to watch Ms. Blake in this 20 minute video in which she explains that 35 years ago, before the Refugee Act of 1980, everyone did “immigration work.” However, when the Act was signed into law it came with “money attached to it” for refugees and thus a division developed between immigration activism generally and those working on Refugees (with a capital R, she says). Now they are coming together again, reports Ms. Blake.
I think that is obvious when you see the line-up of the big NYC pow-wow, here, to prepare for the 2016 Presidential race.
