Obama makes it official! Wants 110,000 refugees admitted to US in FY17, starts in 18 days!

09/13/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update September 14th: Do we want to be Europe? This should be the theme of Election 2016! Here.
Update: Many more details here. Apparently it was Secretary of State Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson who delivered the (bad) news. The report has been printed, so look for it tomorrow. It is very useful. This is not the end of it. The Republican Congress must still fund it. Will they???
Senator Jeff Sessions, an advisor to the Trump campaign and a long time leader for immigration sanity on the Hill has just released this press release (here and below). Apparently the US State Department (Kerry? Richard?) delivered the Presidential determination and held a consultation with at least the Senate Judiciary Committee (we assume the House Judiciary Committee was present).

jeffsessions — Senator Jeff Sessions, a Trump advisor from the very beginning obviously believes that only with Donald Trump in the White House will we see any sanity return to the immigration issue.

The number is well short of what the contractors have been demanding, but not a surprise. Frankly, the money isn’t there in the budget for even 110,000. (Remember too, this is only the resettled refugees, not the other so-called humanitarian arrivals, like the unaccompanied alien children, the asylees etc.).
Obama had previously said he wants $2.2 billion for ORR alone (not including costs to the US State Department and Homeland Security) and his determination delivered today must have put the amount at $1.5 billion for everything (the numbers just don’t make sense).
Throughout the Obama Administration the ceiling for resettled refugees was set at 70,000 each year with 85,000 arriving in FY16 ending Sept. 30th. The contractors in the refugee industry were pushing for 200,000, here.

This is what Sessions said today:

Sessions: Obama Administration Endangers Americans With Reckless Plans To Admit 110,000 Refugees in FY 2017—A 57% Increase Over FY 2015

WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and The National Interest made the following statement regarding the Obama Administration’s plans to admit 110,000 refugees to the United States in Fiscal Year 2017:

“Despite opposition by the American people, a documented link between terrorism and individuals admitted to the United States as refugees, and over $19 trillion in debt, the Obama Administration has committed the United States to admitting 110,000 refugees during Fiscal Year 2017—a roughly 57 percent increase in the number of refugees the United States admitted as recently as FY 2015, and a roughly 29 percent increase from the Administration’s target for FY 2016.

The common sense concerns of the American people are simply ignored as the Administration expands its reckless and extreme policies.

Terrorists have announced that they will infiltrate the refugee population and have successfully done so multiple times in Europe over the last year. These asylum-seekers are overwhelmingly male who make the journey from hotbeds of terrorism to countries throughout Europe. Earlier this year, General Philip Breedlove, who served as NATO’s top commander, said that ISIS was ‘spreading like cancer’ among the refugee population. And unsurprisingly, there have been numerous terror attacks in Europe this year linked to the refugee crisis. Indeed, just this past weekend, Germany’s Interior Minister said that there are more than 500 terrorists inside Germany alone who are capable of carrying out terrorist attacks. It is all but certain that many of those potential terrorists exploited the refugee crisis to get to Germany, and that there are likely thousands more all across Europe today.

Here in the United States, we face the same risks. The Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have acknowledged that terrorists could infiltrate the refugee population. And for good reason—as it is clear that terrorists have done so successfully in the past. The Director of the FBI has testified that he cannot certify that every refugee admitted to the United States is not a security threat, and recently compared the FBI’s anti-terrorism mission to ‘looking for needles in a nationwide haystack’ while also figuring out ‘which pieces of hay might someday become needles.’ Regardless, President Obama and his Administration are now pushing their extreme policies even further by stubbornly placing the requests of the United Nations above the safety of the American people by surging refugee admissions to 110,000.

The Administration’s claim that the program costs roughly $1.5 billion drastically understates the true costs of initial resettlement—as it does not include costs for programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, or Supplemental Security Income, among others.

In addition to the very serious national security implications and the initial resettlement costs, admitting 110,000 refugees will result in an enormous long-term financial burden on the taxpayers. Robert Rector, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has estimated that the total lifetime cost of admitting 10,000 refugees —which includes all costs at the federal, state, and local level—is $6.5 billion. Using Mr. Rector’s numbers as a baseline, admitting the 110,000 refugees that the Obama Administration proposes to admit beginning on October 1 will result in a total lifetime cost to the taxpayers of $71.5 billion. This would be added every year that these levels are continued.

The simple fact is that it would be safer and more cost-effective to establish safe zones for refugees as close to their homes as possible—particularly for those from the Middle East. One estimate found that resettling one refugee in the United States was nearly 12 times more expensive than providing care for that refugee abroad. With the prospect for a cease-fire in the region, there is even more reason to focus on providing temporary support for displaced persons in the region.

The American people do not support these radical plans, which amount to a complete betrayal from their leaders in Washington.”

Keep a lookout for the State Department report to Congress that accompanies the official consultation. It is a treasure trove of information you need in your ‘pockets of resistance’.

And, this doesn’t change a thing—keep hounding your Washington representatives this week and next to cut the budget for the whole darn program. Let’s have a moratorium on bringing in tens of thousands of low-skilled workers who have not been properly vetted until the Refugee Admissions Program is overhauled!

Final thought….. Since the level set each year is a ceiling, it seems like it would be perfectly legal for a new President to come in in January and halt the whole program at whatever level they had reached by late January 2017 and still be perfectly legal. In the year following 9/11 we admitted only about 20,000 (don’t remember the exact number), so it is possible to stop this train in mid-year!

Obama refugee show at UN next week: Will it be a bust?

09/13/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, it is not me asking that. It is at IRIN (a news site aimed at a “humanitarian” audience).
After wading through the many paragraphs on what is expected to happen (not much) with the United Nations Refugee shindig on the 19th in New York, we come to the important section about Obama’s special propaganda show on the 20th. We expect him to use the gathering to lecture and guilt-trip Americans into “welcoming” even more of the third world to live in your neighborhoods.

samantha_power_obama_hillary_clinton_ap_605_605 — Samantha Power (left) put this show together. And, with any luck all three of these “humanitarians” will be has-beens come January 2017. https://geneva.usmission.gov/2016/06/06/ambassador-samantha-powers-statement-on-the-leaders-summit-on-refugees/

I have to laugh at one thing a few paragraphs into the article (below).
Only countries willing to help are invited.
So this is what I want to know, if Ethiopia is on the list, does that mean they plan to keep more of their people at home and not transport them to America as refugees?
From IRIN (hat tip: Joanne):

With hopes already dashed that anything substantial will come out of the UN summit, some are looking to the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees that President Barack Obama will convene on the margins of the General Assembly the following day to deliver more tangible outcomes.

But while there are relatively few unknowns associated with the UN summit, the leaders’ gathering on Tuesday, 20 September is one big unknown.

The stated aims of the leaders’ summit are: to double the number of refugees who are resettled or admitted through other legal channels to third countries; to increase funding for humanitarian responses by 30 percent; and to increase the number of refugees in school and who are granted the legal right to work by one million each.

julian — Director of Humanitarian Practice, Julien Schopp https://www.interaction.org/users/julien-schopp

Only states willing to make “new and significant” commitments have been invited to attend. The list of attendees has not been made public but it’s expected that between 30 and 35 countries will participate, including the co-facilitators, which are Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Sweden, and Jordan.

US State Department officials have also been tight-lipped about what the new commitments will consist of.

“The indications we’ve had is that it’s been a struggle to get commitments,” said Julien Schopp, director of humanitarian action at Interaction, a US-based alliance of international NGOs [and resettlement contractors I told you about here—ed] that has been leading the call for the leaders’ summit to be more inclusive of civil society – a call that has largely gone unanswered.

If countries do make substantial new pledges, one major concern is: whose role will it be to ensure they are actually delivered on, particularly given that the event is being hosted by an outgoing US administration?

“We’ve seen it in the past three years from the World Humanitarian Summit to the London pledging conference on Syria – everyone arrives with something that looks good and sounds good, but when you look at delivery six months later, there’s not much,” said Schopp.

Even if the leaders’ summit does deliver, Liebl points out that it’s a “one-off event”.

If you are new and don’t know who Samantha Power is, check our our archive here. See especially how she was tired of advocating for Christian Iraqis and wanted more excitement while in the White House. So she, Hillary and Susan Rice thought that ousting Libya’s President General Gaddafi might be fun, too bad the girls’ plan unleashed a migrant invasion on Europe.

Now they are after West Virginia as new refugee office planned for state capitol

09/13/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

West Virginia has been near the bottom of the list of resettlement states for the last 9 years that I’ve followed the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program, but all that could change.
Resettlement contractors are running out of housing and frankly ‘welcome’ where they have overloaded cities like Lancaster, PA (do you want WV schools to have to cope with this!) and Buffalo, NY so they are casting about looking for fresh territory (populated with lots of naive do-gooders!).
A couple of years ago the folks in Wyoming were able to hold off a program there. Montana couldn’t quite manage it and now has homeless refugees in Missoula. Rutland, VT citizens are working hard to turn back the plan to bring Syrians to their city. And despite what this story from the Charleston Gazette implies, a pocket of resistance is growing in Charleston, WV.

US Senator (Republican) Shelley Moore Capito. So is she for changing West Virginia by changing its people? She sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee. West Virginians need to ask her if she supports billions of your dollars going to import poverty? https://www.capito.senate.gov/

Most eastern states have not dodged a bullet (LOL! except for Joe Biden’s Delaware). West Virginia has always been near the bottom of the list of states being targeted. Not anymore. See my earlier post on Charleston, here.
Imagine in a state where the coal mining industry has been decimated by Obama, they are now being asked to ‘welcome’ impoverished refugees from mostly the Middle East and Africa with a new resettlement office in Charleston!
Where are West Virginia’s two US Senators? Where is Rep. Alex Mooney (a Freedom Caucus member) who represents Charleston? Are they o.k. with importing more poverty for the state?
And, don’t miss the fact that WV Rep. Evan Jenkins is on the House Appropriations Committee. All three, Capito, Mooney and Jenkins could bring this plan to a screeching halt if they wanted to!
From the Charleston Gazette earlier this month:

Of the more than 10,000 Syrian refugees placed in the United States this fiscal year, just five were resettled in West Virginia, but efforts persist to make the state a haven for Syrians fleeing the carnage of civil war in their country.

Charleston is still in the running to become one of the Episcopal Migration Ministries “resettlement communities.” The resettlement agency has 30 similar communities throughout the United States where local organizations assist the refugees with translation, finding work and health care, getting to know their community and other services.

This April 14, 2014 photo provided by the Congressional Campaign of Alex X. Mooney shows Republican Alex X. Mooney who is running for West Virginia's 2nd district Congressional Republican nomination in the May 13 primary. (AP Photo/Congressional Campaign of Alex X. Mooney) — Rep. Alex Mooney represents Charleston. He is of Cuban heritage, will that blind him when faced with a decision to fund Syrian Muslims (among others) to be placed in his district? (AP Photo/Congressional Campaign of Alex X. Mooney)

[….]

In November 2015, Catholic Charities of West Virginia, which, for 30 years, has assisted in resettlement of refugees, including Syrians, told the Gazette-Mail it had told the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that it had the capacity to help resettle 100 Syrian refugees. Catholic Charities’ Migration and Refugee Services Division typically helps resettle about 50 refugees per year, but it anticipated a greater need because of the crisis in Syria.

Patti Phillips, director of development and marketing for the nonprofit, said this week that, during the fiscal year, just a handful of Syrian refugees — a family of five — were placed in West Virginia. During the 2015-16 fiscal year, about 30 total refugees arrived in the state. Phillips said Catholic Charities only places refugees in West Virginia who have pre-existing ties to family or friends in the area.

Danna Van Brandt, public diplomacy and public affairs adviser for the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, provided a statement from Barbara Day***, domestic-resettlement section chief for the same bureau. Day said the State Department’s placement plan for refugees in West Virginia in fiscal year 2016 included up to 50 refugees from around the world and was “formulated in partnership with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities of West Virginia.”

Here we are with this family-tie trick. What they will do is start seeding new refugees into Charleston and next year they will be bringing the family members of that first group! So it never ends! Be sure to see my ‘Ten things your town needs to know’ by clicking here.
The Gazette continues…..

“Refugees are placed in West Virginia when they have family or personal ties in the state,” Day said. “Being resettled in a place where a refugee has personal ties is a crucial way to ease a refugee’s transition into life in the United States.”

[….]

In May, Episcopal Migration Ministries [one of nine major federal resettlement contractors.—ed] sent an employee and consultant to Charleston to learn more about the city, in hopes of establishing the city as a resettlement community. If Charleston is selected, a local organization potentially would assist in resettling 100 to 150 refugees each year in Charleston.

The West Virginia Interfaith Refugee Ministry, a group that started to create greater understanding of the plight of Syrian refugees and combat rising anti-Muslim sentiment, had encouraged the resettlement agency to consider the area.

See more here on the WV Interfaith Refugee Ministry and how they admit WV is poor and lacking in jobs, but what the hell, bring in the diversity anyway! Beware any ‘interfaith’ group where you live.
How many refugees has WV gotten over the years?
I just had a look at the numbers for West Virginia (Refugee Processing Center). Since Obama took office the state has resettled 176 refugees (a tiny number when you compare it to Texas’s over 7,000 a year). In 2008 only 5 refugees were placed in WV. This year there were 25 up until September 1.
In addition to the Syrians, the primary countries of origin of the refugees so far have been Iraq, Burma and Eritrea. The top resettlement city was Moorefield and a few went to Morgantown. Of course, as we said, Charleston, the capitol, got its first Syrians (99% of Syrians entering US are Muslims, we are not saving Christians!) and is now being considered for a new resettlement office to bring in up to 150 soon.
*** Day is another federal employee who rotated into her position from a refugee contracting agency. There should be a law against this! See more here.

House Appropriations Committee puts Dept. of State portion of RAP at 2015 levels

09/13/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, well, apparently this happened two months ago as the House Appropriations Committee finished its work on the budget for FY2017. I don’t understand the whole process myself and maybe this is in the House report only as a bargaining chip, but to assign the Dept. of State a 2015 spending level for the Refugee Admissions Program (RAP) would necessarily freeze the number that could be resettled at 70,000. Our so-called religious charities (over 90% funded by taxpayers) don’t work for nothing!

anne-richard-cspan — Just so you know! Richard is a political appointee, and as such, she should be out of the DOS at the end of January if Donald Trump is elected President.

Although it is too much money to suit me, it is no where near enough money to accommodate 200,000 refugees (or even the 100,000 Obama was yakking about previously for this coming year).
Here is what the report (published 2 months ago) says. When you look at the numbers below remember that the DOS sends your money elsewhere in the world for refugees too, but it is the Refugee Admissions Program portion that interests us in this discussion.
(Looking for an expert on the Hill to tell us that this is what will go in to the ‘Continuing Resolution.’)


The Committee recommendation includes $771,096,000 for
Migration and Refugee Assistance. When combined with additional
funds for Migration and Refugee Assistance provided under title
VIII, the amount recommended is the same as the fiscal year
2016 enacted level.
    Of the funds made available under this heading in this
title, the Committee recommendation includes not less than
$35,000,000 to respond to small-scale emergency humanitarian
requirements, $7,500,000 for refugees resettling in Israel, and
not more than the fiscal year 2015 level of $394,254,000 for
the United States Refugee Admissions Program.

Now go here where I previously reported on what the committee is recommending for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS), also well below the numbers needed to resettle 100,000 or 200,000 refugees.
The committee set the funding for ORR for FY17 at the 2016 level of $1.6 billion and not the $2.2 billion Obama is requesting.
Bottomline, if these numbers still hold (2 months after the committee report came out), the Administration (which ever it is in 2017) would only have enough to accommodate (dole out enough money to contractors) for 70,000 or less refugees.
No wonder the Open-borders-refugee-industry-post-card-dumpers on Thursday, here, are so worried. With no extra cash, can the contractors open all the new offices they are proposing? I doubt it!

Don’t you let up, tell your members of Congress and US Senators to DEFUND the whole Refugee Admissions Program until a new administration and a new Congress can begin to reform our entire LEGAL immigration system. A moratorium for a year is in order!