Breaking news! Spartanburg, SC Christians have run out of "vulnerable" Americans in need of help!

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be so cynical, but honestly why are foreign-born poor people needier and more deserving than America born disabled, impoverished and struggling in the eyes of these ‘good Christians’? Is it somehow more charitable to care for immigrants than their own neighbors? Are ‘refugees’ somehow cooler than our own poor people (of all colors!)?
Let me be clear—-if they were using their own charitable dollars they can do whatever they want, within the law of course. But, this is your money and mine and so it becomes our business how they spend it.

Jason Lee
Lee spoke to the Spartanburg Interfaith Alliance this week. Beware ‘interfaith alliances’ as they are behind establishing and promoting new sites almost everywhere they get involved.

Here is the latest from Spartanburg, a year-old resettlement site that brought national attention to Rep. Trey Gowdy’s Congressional district. Even as Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration he was unable or unwilling to stop the flow of refugees to Spartanburg (he probably didn’t want to rock the boat with Speaker Ryan!)
Besides my perennial question about why we can’t help our own citizens (and vets!) first, I want to point out that a year ago Jason Lee said they would only bring a few refugees to Spartanburg, but now he says 120 will be arriving in the upcoming year. Will it be 200 the year after that?
You see, readers, that is how it works.  They get a foot in the door and then keep wedging it open wider and wider!
From GoUpstate.com:

The director of a local aid agency that assists refugees is urging the faith community to become involved in resettlement efforts in Spartanburg.

World Relief Local Director Jason Lee spoke about the process of bringing refugees to the area at a Spartanburg Interfaith Alliance meeting Tuesday morning at Temple B’nai Israel.

He said last year World Relief helped resettle 49 refugees fleeing persecution. This year the organization has been approved to resettle 120 refugees in Spartanburg, he said.

World Relief has 27 U.S. offices and is one of nine refugee resettlement organizations that partner with the U.S. State Department.

“We’re compelled by our faith. … We’re called to stand for the vulnerable,” Lee said.

As long as they are foreign born vulnerable!

Continue reading because it appears that they don’t have enough volunteers to handle 120 new refugees.
By the way, the refugee contractors, like this subcontractor of World Relief, need to have enough volunteers logging their hours to show that they have ‘skin in the game’ so to speak.  The feds expect the subcontractor to offer up something in their phony public-private partnership. Originally the subcontractor was supposed to be putting up cash, but as long as they have volunteers whose hours are measured in cash then they get the green light from the feds for the number of refugees they want.  Each refugee comes with a per head payment to the contractor.  Of course the payment is federal grant money (your money!) and thus there is never any incentive to slow the flow or reduce the number as they build their little fiefdoms.
For new readers, we have a yuge archive on Spartanburg, click here to learn more.

Speaker Paul Ryan complicit in Syrian migrant surge to America

Maybe my choice of the word “complicit” is being too easy on him!

Obama and Ryan 2
Pals! And, what was that beard all about?

Writer George Rasley at Conservative HQ puts the blame on Ryan for not halting the program in that now infamous Omnibus funding bill late last year when he had the chance.  Rasley also explains in ‘Paul Ryan’s Hijra‘ that Ryan knew all along what he was doing to make it look like the Republican House was on our side when he knew full well, the Senate would do the job for him!
Nice to see the word “Hijra” getting more attention these days.
Be sure to see Richard Falknor, here at Blue Ridge Forum admonishing national security leaders, but really every one of us, to learn the ten words (first published at Gates of Vienna) that many in our woefully uneducated national security apparatus don’t even know! Go there and see if you know all ten! (Hijra is third on the list)
Back to Ryan’s Hijra where Rasley reports on the revelation yesterday (headlined at Drudge) that the Syrian refugee surge is now full steam ahead (hat tip: Cathy):

…on Monday the State Department admitted 225 Syrian Muslim “refugees”, setting a single-day record, and on Tuesday a further 80 were admitted.  [This is why you are seeing so much activity by the feds/contractors trying to find new resettlement sites—ed]

cover to my book
My little book of last year with one of the ten words you need to know in the title! Hijra!

As our friend Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times put it, “the spike is stunning, with more people accepted Monday alone than in the entire months of January or February.”

As Dinen noted, Obama has promised to accept 10,000 refugees from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. As of Tuesday evening, the administration had approved 2,540 — an average of about 10 applications a day.

Less than 1 percent of these “refugees” are Christians, whose oppression is well documented, according to Dinen 97 percent are Sunni Muslims, the same Sunni Muslim who form the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

But, it isn’t just Obama we should blame!

In a rational world this dangerous piece of Obama’s plan to fundamentally transform America by importing jihad into our country would be stopped cold by a Republican majority in Congress.

But this is not a rational world, this is a world run by the personal whim of arrogant Washington insiders, chief among them being Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Ryan has made increasing Muslim immigration to America his special project and has steadfastly fought any attempts by conservatives to slow or stop what a large majority of American believe is an existential threat to constitutional liberty.

Ryan, as many conservatives demanded, could have included a defund in the must-pass Omnibus that would have effectively ended or temporarily halted the program.

You need to go to Conservative HQ and see how Ryan manipulated the vote to make it look like the Republican House cared about you and your security.
See all of our posts on the Syrian surge by clicking here.
And, finally for new readers, check out my book of last year ‘Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America.‘  I hadn’t been to Amazon for months and was surprised to see that there are 94 customer reviews.  Some day I’ll pull out some of the meanest comments (I bet they never even read the book!).

Testimony to the US State Department from Paul in Montana

Editor: I am still combing through my hundreds of e-mails to find the testimony you sent to the US State Department in response to the DOS request for public comment on the “size and scope” of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for FY2017.
The day before the deadline for submission of testimony I noticed (maybe you were all ahead of me and noticed!) that the dates were wrong in the Federal Register.  I happened to see a comment sent by lawyers to the DOS asking that the comment period be re-opened because citizens, who might like to have testified, didn’t think the notice was for a comment period this year, but for last year.   See here.
From Paul who says when the federal government demonstrates such incompetence in so many areas, how could we expect any competent fix for the complicated UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program:

To Whom It Should Concern:

The United States exists to benefit our own citizens, and public policy should be made with that concept foremost in mind, not based upon uninformed sentiment and emotion. In the current instance, this means ending the refugee resettlement program, for many irrefutable reasons.

First, going back decades and even ignoring the obvious concerns about terrorists embedded in “refugee” influxes, U.S. asylum programs have been fraud-ridden (which is the reason that quotation marks should usually enclose the word “refugee”). A notable example was the discovery in 2008, via DNA testing, that many “refugee” “families” from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana weren’t families at all, just unrelated people who’d spotted an opportunity to move to the U.S.

Then there’s the matter of costs. In the experience of many small cities around the country (e.g. Amarillo, Texas; Springfield, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire), the resulting local impacts can be daunting and onerous. After a spell, they find their schools and social-services agencies begging for relief from the influx.

Dinka dictionary
A Dinka dictionary is not adequate. Feds expected Manchester, NH school system to provide a Dinka interpreter when a student from S. Sudan acted up in high school there. Local taxpayers must foot the bill!

Consider, for example, the ordeal of Lynn, Massachusetts, a city of 90,000 just north of Boston with a school district serving 15,000 students. Lynn’s schools took in about 500 students from Central America between 2011 and 2014. One might think such an increase in school population of “only” 3.5 percent wouldn’t be a big deal, but that’s not how it’s worked out for the city.

As Lynn’s Mayor Judith Kennedy told an audience at the National Press Club in August 2014, her health department had to curtail inspection services to afford the surge in immunizations needed by the schools’ new arrivals. She had to end an effective, gang-suppressing community-policing program to free up resources for the schools. With many of the arrivals illiterate in any language, the schools needed many more classroom aides along with interpreters. (The school district’s website broadcasts the availability of translation services in Arabic, Creole, Khmer and Spanish.) Altogether, Mayor Kennedy had to shrink every other department’s 2015 budget by 2 to 5 percent from its 2014 level to accommodate a 9.3 percent increase in school funding.

(Yes, Lynn’s influx includes—besides “refugees”—illegal aliens and ordinary immigrants, but all three categories of arrivals from third-world countries impose comparable burdens on taxpayers.)

Such costs for translators and interpreters are an unfunded mandate the national government levies on states and localities, applicable to court proceedings, too. The requirement is open-ended. For example, in 2014 Manchester, New Hampshire, got in trouble with federal bureaucrats in a school-expulsion case by failing to provide an interpreter for Dinka, the language of South Sudan.

Dinka!!!

Finally, beyond the specific matter of refugee resettlement, our national government demonstrates seemingly universal incompetence, from Transportation Security Administration airport screeners’ 95 percent failure rate at intercepting test contraband to the slack immigration vetting of San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik to the Environmental Protection Agency’s flooding Colorado’s Animas River with orange, toxic mine waste. So who believes that, with hard-to-investigate “refugees,” suddenly the feds will perform?

In short, it’s time to end it, not try to mend it, as mending anything complicated is manifestly beyond the capabilities of the ever more feckless federal bureaucracy.

This is the sixteenth testimony in our series leading up to the deadline for comments to the Dept. of State on May 19th.  Go here for where they are archived to see what your fellow citizens have said.
I intend to keep posting testimonies, a few a day, until I have exhausted my long list! I had no idea so many of you would respond to my offer!  But, thank you for your hard work!
P.S. I should have mentioned it, but I have been adding photos and other images just to jazz up the plain text, I hope you all don’t mind!

It's getting testy in Tennessee over states' rights lawsuit on refugee program

Republican State Senator Mark Norris criticizes Republican Gov. Bill Haslam in exchange characterized as the ‘gloves coming off.’
Readers, it is astounding to me, there is so much incredible (and critical) news about the federal Refugee Admissions Program in recent days and weeks and nary a word about it on any mainstream or cable media that I’ve seen.
In fact there will be a big public meeting in Rutland, VT this week and I’m seeing nothing in the media about it!
Back to Tennessee and another report from Breitbart’s star refugee reporter, Michael Patrick Leahy.  For new readers, please go here to read the background of this hot issue involving a Republican governor refusing to go along with his Republican legislature.
Leahy at Breitbart:

NASHVILLE, Tennessee—State Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) is sharply rebuking Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam for mischaracterizing the Tennessee General Assembly’s Tenth Amendment lawsuit against the federal government for its operation of the refugee resettlement program to the state’s Attorney General, Herbert Slatery.

Mark Norris 2
TN Senator Mark Norris, standing up for the Tenth Amendment!

In a letter sent on Monday, Norris, the co-sponsor of Senate Joint Resolution 467, which passed both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly by wide margins, took the gloves off against the state’s Republican governor.

“I am troubled by the statement you released on Friday concerning SJR467,and I am uncomfortable with your mischaracterization of this important Resolution,” Norris wrote.

“The federal government must not do indirectly what it cannot lawfully do directly, and the Tennessee General Assembly must have the opportunity to approve, or disapprove, specific expenditures through the appropriation process,”

[….]

Norris then blasted Haslam for his poor understanding of the federal statutes and regulations upon which the federal refugee resettlement program is based.

Tennessee’s refugee lawsuit against the federal government “is not about ‘dismantling the Refugee Act’ as you said. It is about enforcing it,” Norris wrote….

There is much more here.
Come on governors of Wilson-Fish states, stand up for your states!!!  Where are you Chris Christie and Sam Brownback?

TB controversy continues as refugees and their advocates protest TV station in Fargo, ND

Questions surrounding the admission to the US of refugees with Tuberculosis are growing.
See last night’s latest report from Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.
We knew that refugees with latent TB were being admitted to the US, but we didn’t know that a significant percentage of those with latent TB become active TB cases.  Of course you are paying for their treatment (if they even get it!).
In a typical attempt to silence anyone in the media who dares to question our US refugee policy, a demonstration was mounted on Sunday against Valley News Live.

Del Rae Williams
Moorhead, MN mayor Del Rae Williams supports more refugee resettlement for North Dakota and Minnesota.

Here is a report of what happened!  Local elected officials joined the protesters who were removed by the police from private property. (Emphasis is mine)

FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) A small protest that was advertised as a “peaceful demonstration” by a local Somali activist group turned into a confrontation outside the Valley News Live studios on Sunday.

Protestors confronted a Valley News Live photographer as she attempted to shoot video of the event.

Fargo Police removed the protestors from the KVLY property.

Moorhead Mayor Del Rae Williams and Fargo’s Deputy Mayor Mike Williams also showed up for the event. Both support refugee resettlement in the area.

The group demonstrated because they said they were upset over reporter Bradford Arick’s story on the risk of latent tuberculosis in local refugee communities.

Our story presented data and facts from the CDC, State of Minnesota and State of North Dakota on the numbers of latent TB cases in the refugee population.

The State of Minnesota says 22% of refugees in that state carry latent TB while only active TB cases bars someone from entering the country.

The Fargo Forum newspaper criticized Valley News Live’s reporting as blatantly false. Forum Communications owns our competitors WDAY and WDAZ. [These competitors should just do their own investigation and report on the issue rather than encourage the silencing of any other media—ed]

Fargo Deputy Mayor Mike Williams addresses the crowd of protestors outside of the Valley News Live offices in Fargo, North Dakota, on Sunday, May 22, 2016. Nick Wagner / The Forum
Fargo Deputy Mayor Mike Williams (wants more refugees too) addresses the crowd of protestors outside of the Valley News Live offices in Fargo, North Dakota, on Sunday, May 22, 2016.
Nick Wagner / The Forum

The newspaper also interviewed Cass County Health Department’s Dr. John Baird.

Baird told the forum that TB is quote “not a major problem” in the area but later admitted that Cass County Health is treating active TB cases in the community.

[….]

Valley News Live stands by the story and we plan to continue looking into the issues surrounding refugee resettlement in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Good for Valley News Live!  

Don’t let them intimidate people and silence speech!
Here is Valley News Live’s contact information!  Maybe some of you should write to them and tell them to hang in there, that they are doing a great service for America!
Fargo Office 1350 21st Avenue South Fargo, ND 58103 mail@valleynewslive.com
We have written a whole lot about North Dakota over the years, it is one of the top states for refugee resettlement on a per capita basis, go here for our previous posts.  By the way, it is a Lutheran federal contractor running the resettlement program there.
About the photos:  Are these elected officials related or are there just a lot of people with the ‘Williams’ last name out there? Just wondering!