Hebrew refugee contractor: Don't send money/supplies to Syrians, lobby Washington to bring them here

10/23/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the message going out from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (which has rebranded itself as HIAS Inc.)—put pressure on Washington to get more Syrian (mostly Muslim) refugees here faster. HIAS thinks Obama’s decision to bring in 10,000 and distribute them around the US is too low. They want 100,000!

Riva-Silverman — HIAS Veep Riva Silverman wants Jews to lobby Washington to bring more Syrian Muslims to the US (go figure!).

Charitable Americans think sending money and supplies for Syrians is a sensible and good thing to do—so that they might be comfortable until someday soon they could go home to Syria. Not HIAS, they want you to join their lobbying campaign to transport the Middle East to middle America and get them on the track for US citizenship.
But, surprise, surprise, no where in this article at Jweekly does it mention that HIAS and eight other contractors are paid by the head (out of your wallets!) to resettle refugees in unsuspecting towns and cities.
From Jweekly:

The best thing Americans can do to help Syrian refugees is not to send supplies or even cash, but to lobby the U.S. government to admit more of them into this country, Riva Silverman said last week at Stanford’s Ziff Center for Jewish Life.

“In 2015, the U.S. is committed to resettling 70,000 refugees [from all countries]. That number is less than half the number of refugees we resettled just 10 years ago, when the number of refugees worldwide was significantly less,” said Silverman, the HIAS vice president for external affairs.

Germany, she said, has offered to resettle 800,000 Syrian refugees in response to the crisis. HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has called upon the United States to admit 100,000 Syrian refugees in addition to the refugee slots it has already allocated.

Silverman was at Hillel at Stanford on Oct. 14 as part of a speaking tour with her colleague, Winnie Gacheru, director of HIAS Kenya, in order to raise awareness about the refugee crisis and the Jewish agency’s work in aiding and resettling refugees. Ten local synagogues and Jewish agencies, including the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley, were among the dozen or so co-sponsors of the event, titled “Yearning to Breathe Free: The Jewish Response to Today’s Refugee Crisis.”

[….]

HIAS was founded in the 19th century to assist Jewish immigrants who showed up on American shores impoverished and to rescue Jews who in danger around the world. The agency helped resettle Jews fleeing Europe, Russia and the Middle East, with the final wave from the former Soviet Union ebbing by the end of the 20th century.

“HIAS could have easily stated ‘mission accomplished’ and closed up shop” when the flow of Jewish refugees ended, Silverman said. “Instead, we took our experience and turned our focus to the millions of today’s refugees who find themselves fleeing their persecutors.”

The average American reading this next paragraph will think that HIAS is doing this by raising private charitable money!

HIAS now has field operations in 10 countries and is one of nine agencies sanctioned to resettle immigrants in the United States. Abroad, HIAS helps people attain refugee status and makes sure they have the documentation they need to be eligible for social services, to send their children to school, to work and to move forward with their cases. HIAS also provides counseling and job training.

[….]

“The most important thing for Americans to be doing now in this crisis is to make our government behave very differently,” Silverman said.

It is maddening, isn’t it, to know that they get millions of tax dollars every year and use some of it to lobby Washington!

Raleigh, NC: Federal resettlement contractor goes into the half-way house business, not enough subsidized housing?

10/22/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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).

Stacie Blake, a Washington DC ‘advocate’ for federal refugee contractor USCRI, gushes over new halfway house project in Raleigh, NC. http://www.refugees.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-staff/?referrer=https://www.google.com/

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.

Could you lose your gun rights as US refugee population grows?

10/22/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yes, gloats Adam Winkler at the Washington Post a few days ago. He says that the decline in the white American population that is happening before our very eyes will inevitably erode the numbers of those (mostly older, white, rural people he says) who strongly defend their second amendment rights. The growth in minority populations, he predicts, will be dooming the NRA’s chances of surviving for too much longer.

Obama is changing America by changing the people! That is a fact! Refugee resettlement is one of the myriad immigration programs designed to accomplish that. If Hillary follows him in office, the process will continue unimpeded.
I had to laugh, although it isn’t really funny, but the good professor Winkler mentions “whites” five times in this article—white voters, white rural, less educated, in sneering tones (he is really saying white hicks). Everyone else is “minorities”—no mention of blacks or browns—just Asians, Hispanics, etc. Why can’t we be called something other than our skin color?
We have a proud European heritage, but we are relegated to being labelled simply as “whites” by the erudite Professor Winkler.
LOL! If we referred to ourselves as ‘whites’ that often we would be accused of being white supremacists!
The Washington Post:

The National Rifle Association’s days of being a political powerhouse may be numbered.

Why? The answer is in the numbers.

Support for, and opposition to, gun control is closely associated with several demographic characteristics, including race, level of education and whether one lives in a city. Nearly all are trending forcefully against the NRA.

The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters. This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. While the decline of white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known, less often recognized is what this means for gun legislation.

Polls show that whites tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a significant margin (57 percent to 40 percent). Yet whites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.

Continue here.
I’m repeating my appeal from earlier in the month—young patriots please have more babies! And, if you needed another reason to demand a halt to mass migration into America, this is it!
One more thing, Professor Winkler begins his piece with a mention of the Oregon shooting—but no mention of the fact that the shooter was a brown guy!

FBI Director James Comey says it again: They cannot screen Syrian refugees entering the US

10/22/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

FBI comey — FBI Director Comey: Syrian refugees cannot be thoroughly screened. Trey Gowdy are you listening?

This time he says it before the House Homeland Security Committee in a hearing yesterday, here.
Which reminds me—whatever happened to the House Judiciary Committee hearing oversight hearing on the Refugee Admissions Program that had been planned for a couple of weeks ago and abruptly postponed. Did they chicken out?
Or are they now waiting for instructions from Rep. Paul Ryan who will be a disaster for us if elected Speaker?
When Rep. Trey Gowdy (chairman of the subcommittee responsible for the refugee program) gets past his big Hillary hearing today, he needs to turn his attention to the issue that will have a much greater impact on us than Hillary and Benghazi—that is changing America demographically forever!
Here is the Daily Caller on what Director Comey said yesterday:

FBI director James Comey said during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday that the federal government does not have the ability to conduct thorough background checks on all of the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the Obama administration says will be allowed to come to the U.S.

“We can only query against that which we have collected,” Comey said in response to a line of questioning from Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson .

“And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.”

Continue here.

Lutheran lobbyist says 100,000 Syrians is a responsible number for FY2016

10/21/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..State Department representative says it isn’t possible.

But, get this! We learn that the United Nations has 22,000 Syrians picked out for us already!

BrittneyNystrom_290 — Brittney Nystrom, chief lobbyist for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Since LIRS is almost 100% funded by US taxpayers, you are paying for most of her salary! Photo here: http://blog.lirs.org/brittney-nystrom/

By the way, one of the arguments Lutheran lobbyist Brittany Nystrom makes is that Lebanon has taken in tens of thousands of Syrians so far and so the much larger US should take in 100 million by comparison. It is a ludicrous comparison that they love to make. Remember that the Syrians going to Lebanon are there temporarily, in camps, and they will NOT become citizens of Lebanon.
Refugees who are resettled in America become permanent residents and citizens in a few short years—THEY WILL NEVER GO HOME EVEN IF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ENDED TOMORROW.
You need only look to the Somali resettlement (now three decades old!) we mentioned in our previous post to know that the flow, once begun, will never end.
You know what the problem is with events like this? Reporters and others in the audience don’t know enough about refugee resettlement so they accept the propaganda that Ms. Nystrom is only too happy to promote.
Please also be assured that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (97% funded by your tax dollars) is a sponsor of the big New York pow-wow we wrote about this morning (probably sponsoring with your $$$). The gathering is to get their marching orders for the 2016 Presidential election campaign.
Here is how the report from CNS News.com begins (emphasis is mine):

(CNSNews.com) – Of the world’s 16 million refugees, 4.1 million have emerged from the Syrian conflict alone, a United Nations refugee resettlement officer told a gathering at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington on Monday.

And as Europe deals with a refugee crisis of historic proportions, “We’d certainly like U.S. to do more,” said Larry Yunck.

For the fiscal year beginning in October, the United States has promised to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees. That number is “woefully inadequate,” Brittney Nystrom of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Center told the gathering.

Kelly Gauger representing the US State Department told the gathering that we simply don’t have enough money for 100,000 Syrians in one year, but Nystrom is quick to spread more propaganda—that refugees are self-sufficient in 8 months and are taxpaying members of society at that point. That is simply ludicrous (why would we be seeing stories like the one from Erie, PA yesterday about “impoverished” refugees then?).
Remember readers! The federal government defines self-sufficiency as being OFF OF CASH ASSISTANCE. Refugees can still get (and do get!) food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicaid, and education for the children paid for by you—the taxpayers—long after 8 months.
CNS News continues:

She (Kelly Gauger) said it’s one thing for refugee advocates such as Nystrom to be calling for 100,000 Syrians to come here in FY 2016, but “we need significantly more money than we’re getting now, and I’m not sure that many of us have confidence that we’re going to get that money from this Congress.”

Nystrom said she didn’t want to leave the audience with the perception that refugees are “just sucking up resources.” [LOL! Of course not!—-ed]

“That’s not the case,” she said. “Most of the refugees that we help resettle become self-suffienct very, very quickly…

“And we know that communities are made richer who resettle refugees,” Nystrom added. “They gain in resources from refugees who open businesses, who contribute to the economy of their community — and the amount of time that refugees are eligible for public assistance is very limited.

“There’s an 8-month window where a refugee receives cash assistance. After that period of time, they’re expected to become completely self-sufficient. So there is an outlay of resources at the beginning of the resettlement process, but the country as a whole benefits from resettling refugees.”

Again, apparently those in audience like this one don’t know enough to ask about ALL OF THE OTHER SOCIAL SERVICES REFUGEES RECEIVE FOR YEARS AND YEARS, or, how much LIRS is paid (out of the federal treasury) to resettle refugees.
Gauger reported that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has referred 22,000 Syrians to the US for resettlement. 97% of the Syrians admitted in FY2015 are Muslims from UN camps, so I guess we can conclude that the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is not concerned about saving Syrian Christians as a first priority.