More on Sunday rally in DC: goal is to increase refugee numbers for FY2017

And, here Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies reminds us of the huge cost of resettling each refugee to your town or city.  It is far less expensive to find safe places in the Middle East for the Syrians, says Krikorian.

Safe zones!

In fact, Donald  Trump has remarked in the past that he would like to see “safe zones” established where refugees could be protected until the conflict is over in Syria.  I’m thinking one such safe zone could be in Saudi Arabia!
Maybe Trump could make a deal with the Saudis who at present do not take care of their fellow Muslim refugees (a fact that we have chronicled over the years) to establish a safe zone in the kingdom.
From the Daily Signal about Sunday’s Rally for Refugees (see our earlier post here).  Emphasis below is mine:

Are you concerned about the plight of international refugees? Would you like to see the U.S. government take decisive, constructive action on behalf of displaced persons across the globe who have been forced to flee their homes?

Mark-Krikorian
Krikorian points out that there are much more fiscally responsible ways to care for Syrian refugees than to scatter them through hundreds of American towns.

If so, you’re invited to “stand up against the voices of intolerance” this Sunday in Washington, D.C., where you can join forces with other concerned Americans.  [If you are concerned about the costs and social upheaval for both refugees and for Americans when refugees are secretly placed in your towns, you are intolerant! Get used to it!—ed]

But if you do participate, policy analysts who have examined the refugee crisis want you to know they have good reason to believe the rally is a highly politicized event organized for the purpose of lobbying the Obama administration and Congress to allow more refugees into the U.S.—including those from war-torn Syria and Iraq who may have ties to terrorism.

A major contributor to causes on the left, the Tides Foundation, is collecting contributions for the rally.

[….]

High Costs of Resettling Refugees

A report by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies found that it costs 12 times as much to resettle a refugee in America than it does to provide for services and relief to the same refugee in the Middle East.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan research outfit included State Department expenditures, welfare use rates, and other figures and benefits from the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and other U.S. agencies. Its report says:

Based on that information, this analysis finds that the costs of resettling refugees in the United States are quite high, even without considering all of the costs refugees create. We conservatively estimate that the costs total $64,370 in the first five years for each Middle Eastern refugee. This is 61 times what it costs to care for one Syrian refugee in a neighboring country for a single year or about 12 times the cost of providing for a refugee for five years.

“The organizers, funders, and the supporting groups are putting this rally together to exert pressure to ensure that the Obama administration increases the admission of Syrians into the U.S.,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Signal.

[….]

Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said he sees more than mere happenstance at work in the timing of the rally: Obama is set to play host to a refugee summit at the U.N. on Sept. 20. The president also is expected to release his fiscal year 2017 plan for refugees by the end of September.

The rally is not only “to exert pressure to ensure that the Obama administration increases the admission of Syrians,” Krikorian said, but “timed to influence the number of refugees the State Department is trying to settle.”

And, it is my view that it is also to exert pressure on Congress to loosen the purse strings on funding for the program as Congress addresses the budget this fall. The nine federal contractors*** who resettle refugees in your towns and cities want to expand their operations to even more towns and they need your money to do that!
We have talked about this before, but I’m going to be a broken record on it!  Your focus for the next couple of months should be on pressuring your Member of Congress to grow a spine and oppose the expenditure of your money on resettling ever larger numbers of refugees.

Don’t focus your anger at Obama and the Progressives, they are doing what they always do—focus on someone you can change—your member of Congress and US Senators up for re-election in a little over two months.

***The nine federal resettlement contractors (participating in the rally Sunday) which are almost completely funded with your tax dollars:

Refugees boosting the TB rate in Nebraska

I recently traveled through Nebraska to meet citizens and see some of the meatpacking towns under stress from large numbers of refugees who have been placed there mostly by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Church World Service, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Ethiopian Community Development Council to supply multinational meat giants with a steady supply of cheap immigrant labor.

Nebraska capitol 2
I loved this engraving above the door of the Nebraska state capitol building in Lincoln.

In addition to the economic, social and cultural strains on the communities there it seems that now worries about the increased rate of active Tuberculosis will be concerning residents.
Here is Michael Patrick Leahy today at Breitbart with another of his investigative reports on Tuberculosis in American towns.  Add the cost of treating sick people to the burgeoning cost of refugee resettlement.

Eighty-two percent of the active tuberculosis (TB) cases diagnosed in Nebraska in 2014, that’s 31 out of 38, were foreign-born, according to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.

Only six percent of the 1.9 million residents of the Cornhusker State are foreign-born.

2014’s 38 active TB cases represented an 80 percent increase in active TB cases in the state in one year, up from 21 in 2013.

[….]

The Tuberculosis Program Report 2014, published by the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, explains the role the state’s foreign-born population played in this increase in active TB in the state and the difficulties involved in dealing with that population when it comes to TB control:

Although Nebraska has an overall low incidence of TB, the cases continue to be difficult to treat because of the high percentage of foreign-born population that comprise Nebraska’s TB morbidity and also because of the complexity of the cases. The language and cultural barriers of the foreign-born population require a tremendous amount of public health resources to ensure a successful TB treatment outcome.

[….]

As many as 10,000 of the foreign-born residents of the state originally came as part of the refugee resettlement program and work primarily in low wage jobs in the burgeoning local meat-packing industry. Recently, the countries of origin for those refugees, the number of which increased from 764 in FY 2012 to 997 in FY 2013 to 1,076 in FY 2014, have had high rates of TB.

The vast majority of these new arrivals came from countries with high burdens of TB. Six hundred and sixty-two refugees in FY 2012 and 785 refugees in FY 2013 came from two such countries, Burma and Bhutan. Nine hundred and forty-eight refugees in FY 2014 came three countries–Burma, Bhutan, and Iraq.

Earlier refugees arrived from Somalia and Sudan.

Continue reading here.
And then go to our ‘health issues category’ here for much more on TB and other diseases and mental health problems associated with refugees.

Syrian refugee numbers expanding, but hard to pin down why

It is easy enough to follow the US State Department data reported at the Refugee Processing Center that keeps the numbers on resettled refugees and tells us where they have gone. (It doesn’t archive successful asylum seekers or any other legal program.)
So, people are looking around and saying there sure are more than 10,000 Syrians here already.  One immigration researcher thinks Obama is using ‘Humanitarian parole’ on the sly, others disagree.  But, they all agree that other methods are being used to bring Syrians to our shores (or letting them stay) in ever larger numbers.
Here is some useful information at LifeZette:

A discrepancy in statistics provided by the Department of Homeland Security has led an attorney for a Washington-based legal group to question whether administration officials are waiving Syrians into the United States by other means.

ferrise_portrait_400x400
Beth Ferris a Georgetown professor has said they will use additional methods to get Syrians planted in your towns. No surprise, see her bio. She once worked for one of the nine major federal resettlement contractors. https://www.brookings.edu/experts/elizabeth-ferris/

Ian Smith, of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. It shows that U.S. officials as of Jan. 25 had interviewed 9,800 refugee applicants since fiscal year 2014. That is nearly twice as many people as the combined number of approvals (4,774) and denials (417) during that time.

“The discrepancy is very, very large, and they go back quite a ways.”

Smith speculated that the Obama administration is using “humanitarian parole” to admit Syrians who do not meet the eligibility requirements for refugees. That is the same method by which the Obama administration has allowed entry to the unaccompanied minors who have arrived en masse at the U.S.-Mexican border over the past few years.

“I really think that’s the case, because that’s what we’ve been seeing with the Central American Minors programs,” Smith said.

Some think that they don’t need parole as they are finding other creative ways to bring in thousands and thousands more.

[Nayla] Rush [Center for Immigration Studies] said she believes some Syrians will end up coming through other ways, however. She pointed to a conference in February in which Beth Ferris, a Georgetown University professor and humanitarian refugee policy adviser to the United Nations secretary-general, said there are “alternative safe pathways” that could inflate the number of fleeing Syrians entering America to 200,000. Possibilities include giving scholarships and extending the ability of Syrian-Americans to sponsor relatives beyond their immediate family members to include aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

In addition, some 8,000 non-refugees from Syria who are already in the United States — both legally and illegally — have been allowed to remain under a program called Temporary Protected Status. The Department of Homeland Security recently renewed that status for another year.

More here.
Temporary Protected Status is a one (of several!) legal immigration programs that need to go! There is nothing temporary about it.  Click here for our archive on TPS.
I haven’t said this in awhile, but the next time you hear someone (a politician maybe) say that LEGAL immigration is good but illegal isn’t. Tell them they don’t know what they are talking about because we have some egregious LEGAL programs that need to be scrapped!
BTW, I have just added a new tag that I think will come in handy from now on: ‘where is Congress.’

Georgia mosque plan: Commissioner asks will it bring refugees here?

Yes, it most likely could, mosques are part of the hijra (the migration), however a resettlement contractor spokeswoman quickly said, NO.  She doesn’t believe refugees can be successful in this county.
Hmmm! Wonder where all the new Muslims (enough for a big new mosque and cemetery) are coming from then?
Here is the news from AP at Fox News (is Fox calling CAIR a civil rights group in its headline?):

ATLANTA – A proposal to build a mosque and Muslim cemetery has so angered some residents of Newton County outside Atlanta that their commissioners have temporarily banned all building permit approvals for religious institutions.

amy crownover
Crownover: Newton County need not fear it will become a refugee magnet. Refugees could not be successful there she said. Photo: http://www.pointsoflight.org/blog/2014/10/10/how-dose-reality-made-me-leader

The moratorium prompted the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the NAACP to request a federal civil rights investigation in Newton County. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Horn confirmed receipt of this complaint Tuesday, but declined comment.

Mohammad Islam, the religious leader behind the proposal, said he doesn’t intend to take any legal action; instead, he met Tuesday with local leaders of other faiths in Newton County, seeking their support for a fresh start.

[….]

One commissioner questioned whether the project would make Newton County “a prime area for the federal government to resettle refugees from the Middle East” in an interview with The Rockdale Citizen, a local newspaper. Two public meetings were held, both crowded with angry opponents who clapped and cheered when people expressed fears about global terrorism.

[….]

But places like Newton County need not fear becoming magnets for refugees, said Amy Crownover, spokeswoman for New American Pathways. The organization is one of five refugee resettlement organizations in Georgia that are contracted with the federal government to assist refugees arriving in the United States.

“We work in partnership with communities, looking for communities where refugees can be successful,” which requires easy access to public transportation, jobs, English classes and other services. Newton County “isn’t an ideal setting,” Crownover said.

I’m wondering if she is implying the folks there are unwelcoming? But, of course, we know that hasn’t stopped the contractors in other locales.
Georgia has been a real hot bed of controversy and is one of the original pockets of resistance to the Refugee Admissions Program, click here for our Georgia archive.

NC Rep confirms it: The buck stops with him and others in Congress

I’m not sure that Rep. Mark Meadows’ goal in holding the town hall in the Ashville area last night was to direct his constituents right back to him and other members of Congress when it comes to stopping, slowing, or putting on steroids the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, but that is what he did with these comments.

Meadows answers questions
Rep. Mark Meadows answers questions about refugee program in his district. Will he be one of the leaders to remove funding for refugee resettlement in funding battles this fall?

The President, Obama, can make determinations all he wants about how many refugees the US tax payer will pay for next year, but it is Congress that supplies the cold hard cash for the federal agencies (both the US State Department and the Dept. of Health and Human Services).
Bringing in large numbers of refugees obviously requires more money!

So, the question this fall will be this: Will Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republicans fully fund the Obama invasion or not?  It is that simple!

Here is the news about the town hall meeting.  The article doesn’t say it, but it sounds like most of those present OPPOSE more refugees for the US (and none for their community!).

FLAT ROCK, N.C. — Congressman Mark Meadows held a town hall Tuesday night to discuss efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in our area.

International Rescue Committee, a resettlement agency, said it is still looking at Asheville. Meadows said Saint James Episcopal Church in Hendersonville is backing off the idea, in part, because of the community reaction.

[….]

One man said the money was better spent on Americans. [A sentiment we hear everywhere.—ed]

“I just feel that we have enough people now that we have to take care of,” Tom Mcrary Jr., from Brevard, said.

Meadows explained the money for refugees comes from the U.S. State Department. Once the money is budgeted to the State Department, it cannot be moved to another department.

Well, Rep. Meadows don’t give it to the State Department this fall! The State Department doesn’t grow it on trees, you appropriate it to them!

Meadows informed the crowd refugee resettlement is a federal program, and state legislators cannot prevent refugees from coming. 

But, you can Mr. Meadows!  Will you?

See Refugee program is major issue for November election!  Your member of Congress is home right now (for the next two weeks) and every one of them is up for re-election.  Find them and ask them if they will be funding Obama’s invasion or not!