It sure doesn’t sound like it.
Due to a shortage of time, I am going to urge all of you, especially in new ‘pockets of resistance,’ to read this thorough article (albeit biased in favor of refugees going to Ithaca) because it has a lot of useful information about the process of setting up a new resettlement site (this one is a Catholic Charities site).
Here is one little bit of the Ithaca Voice article that answers a question many of you have had:
After arrival in Ithaca, working-age family members are required to be self-sufficient within six months. Within a year they will apply for Green Card status. According to Spear, Catholic Charities will receive $2,025 per person. This is broken down as $900 per refugee arrival for administration and $1,125 per refugee for “client direct” assistance. This money comes from the State Department (PRM) as part of the “Reception and Placement Program” that covers the first 90 days’ costs of resettling each refugee.
Other funds are organized by federal offices such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Administration of Children and Families (ACF), and Refugee and Entrant Assistant funds via the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The refugees “immediately qualify for public assistance and we are the ones that will help them with the application process,” says Chaffee. “They are going to be working and contributing to our tax base within six months. Many refugees become home owners within five or six years.”
Read it all, there is so much I would like to say about it!
First self-sufficiency is a joke. Refugees are considered self-sufficient even if they are still on certain forms of welfare including housing assistance and food stamps. In fact, if they go off all welfare the ‘Work Opportunity Tax Credit’ would not be available to prospective employers (and as we have said repeatedly, the driving force for the refugee resettlement program is not humanitarianism, but to provide cheap, federally subsidized, labor to certain industries!).
The original State Department tranche of money includes in this case $900 per refugee head for Catholic Charities income, however, Catholic Charities receives other grants from other federal agencies to supplement their phony Christian charity. This per head payment gets higher and higher every year! And, since there is a per head payment, there is no incentive to slow the flow in subsequent years if the town gets overloaded.
“Public assistance” is the nice way of saying WELFARE. Yes, they get welfare right away (including SSI for the elderly and disabled refugees) and Catholic Charities job (the federal contractor here) is to get them signed up ASAP.
And finally, even if refugees get menial jobs, they will not be taxpaying members of the community because their income will be so low that they won’t have to file.
I would really like to know the percentage of refugees who buy homes that quickly (even with a special government savings program just for refugees to buy homes!). Some groups of refugees even enter the country with enough money to purchase property which begs the question—are they the poor downtrodden people we are led to believe they are?