NPR sends 'Islam expert' (not!) SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI to Montana

Sheesh! Just like the 60 Minutes ‘story’ I couldn’t bring myself to watch, I can’t listen to this B.S. from race- baiting NPR reporter SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI. See her bio.

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Shereen Marisol Meraji, NPR resident expert on Islam and self-described “caffeine addicted 90s hip-hop head.”

I traveled to Montana and met the truly wonderful people (the same ones she is disparaging) in the Flathead this past summer who have legitimate concerns about how the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program could bring unwanted change (dumped on them from Washington) to their beautiful rural community in far Northwest Montana.
(Do our tax dollars help fund biased NPR? If so, let’s make it our aim in January (when Trump is elected) to cut any funds they still get from us, the taxpayers, for next year. And stop listening to NPR!)
Ms. Meraji reports that everything she heard in Montana that was critical of Islam is “fiction.”  So what makes her an Islamic scholar?  Here is how she describes herself at her twitter page:

Exploring race and identity with @nprcodeswitch and reporting on everything in between. Persia-Rican Zumba dancing caffeine addicted 90s hip-hop head.

Alrighty then…sounds like an expert.
By the way, her disparagement of Act for America should make anyone who is not already a member, run over to their website and join right now!

Here is Act for America! Join now!

350 refugees a day entering US (less than three weeks in to the fiscal year); Texas is numero uno!

And at that rate we will have admitted 32,900 by Inauguration Day in January.  In that 350 a day stream are 47 Syrians (for a total of 852 so far).
Of the total (6,328) admitted in the last 18 days, 2,874 (45%) are some form of Muslim.
Of the 852 Syrians admitted, 837 (98%) are Muslims (mostly Sunni Muslims).

Texas tops the list by far!

This once more demonstrates that the governor, although apparently determined, has little power to slow the flow. In fact, I think the feds are shoving it down the throats of ‘unwelcoming’ governors, see Indiana below. Pence’s IN is not usually so high on the resettlement list.

Who has the power to slow the flow? Many members of the Texas Congressional delegation have the power if they wished to use it!

(Turning a red state blue with migrant colonists! How did it happen that Texas’s political leaders never saw this coming?)
 
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Map from the Refugee Processing Center shows where the 6,328 refugees have been distributed in first 18 days of Fiscal year 2017. (Hawaii is 3).

100 refugees approved for Northwest Arkansas

Arkansas, like West Virginia and Montana, has received very few refugees over the years, but all that will change with the Dept. of State’s (DOS) approval of a new resettlement agency that will ‘welcome’ 100 refugees beginning next month.
All of the new sites*** are needed because Obama has ‘determined’ that the US will admit a huge increase (to 110,000) in the number of refugees admitted to your towns and cities in FY2017.

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The Obama Administration is moving fast to get as many new refugee sites open as possible before January in case Donald Trump is elected.

The Obama DOS is on a crash program now to get as many placed in your towns as they can by Inauguration Day in January (in case Trump is elected) and place as many in the pipeline as they can making it more difficult for a new administration to put the breaks on.
There is only one entity that could slow the flow and they can do it next month and that is Congress (if there is a will)!  Congress (not Obama!) has the ultimate power to DEFUND the large increase in the number of refugees coming in. These contractors, like this new one in Northwest Arkansas have virtually zero money of their own!
The story, here, and below demonstrates how impotent Arkansas’s governor is to do anything to stop the migration to the state.
From KATV Little Rock:

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS (TALK BUSINESS & POLITICS) — The questions surrounding refugees from the Middle East and other parts of the world will soon come to Arkansas as Canopy Northwest Arkansas works to bring 100 or more refugees from around the world to the region.

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Emily Linn is the executive director of Canopy. She says Arkansas has great jobs in poultry plants (yippee!). How much is this resettlement being driven behind the scenes by BIG MEAT? LOL! BIG CHICKEN in this case! http://www.canopynwa.org/about/

[….]

In response to news publicity about the global refugee crisis, concerned residents in Northwest Arkansas (NWA) began meeting in January and formed Canopy Northwest Arkansas, a 501(c)3 non-profit with the mission of settling refugees in NWA.

“We consulted with refugee agencies operating nationally and we learned that there’s a need for new communities to open up to refugees. So we started looking into what it might look like for refugees to come to NWA and what we found is that our community has an incredible capacity to welcome refugees and help them really thrive here,” said Emily Linn, director of Canopy Northwest Arkansas.

Linn cited the growing economy in NWA as a reason refugees would do well.

Here comes the poultry industry! Surely, the Chamber of Commerce is not far behind. (I always wonder if they tell the incoming refugees that they are going to a meat or poultry plant town).

“We have great jobs for folks who don’t even speak English, for example, in the manufacturing or poultry processing industry or agriculture. We also have great jobs and we have a need for people to come and work in very high skilled jobs,” she said. “For instance, we have a brand new hospital opening up in Springdale, Arkansas Children’s and the Washington Regional Hospital is growing and expanding, and there’s a need for very highly educated individuals as well, and so we have this wide variety of employment options.”

I keep seeing this nonsense about skilled labor in the refugee flow. It is bogus. If there are doctors and engineers etc. in the flow they must become re certified in the US which is a long and expensive process. The closest any refugee doctor will get to a hospital is scrubbing the floors at night.
Canopy is a subcontractor of LIRS (see my previous post this morning, here).

Canopy Northwest Arkansas partners with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of nine national resettlement agencies that contract with the State Department to run the refugee resettlement program. LIRS is the agency that will assign refugees to Canopy after the refugees go through an extensive screening process, sometimes lasting more than two years.

Continue reading here.  I see no evidence, at least in this story, that there is any pocket of resistance in Northwest Arkansas.
***Here are some of the new sites we have learned about in recent weeks being set up to accommodate, among other ethnic groups, a large number of Syrian Sunni Muslims.  We heard that there are 47 of these new target sites:
Asheville, NC
Rutland, VT
Reno, NV
Ithaca, NY
Missoula, MT
Aberdeen, SD
Charleston, WV
Fayetteville, AR
Blacksburg, VA
Pittsfield, MA
Northhampton, MA
Flint, MI
Bloomington, IN
Traverse City, MI
Watertown, NY (maybe)
I just created a new ‘tag’ and I should have done it a long time ago, will try to keep it up going forward—New resettlement sites.  For new readers, here is the old list of sites Apparently the feds are not updating the list because they likely don’t want you to know where all of the new offices are located. Secrecy is the watchword of refugee resettlement in America!

Mormon church is getting on the refugee resettlement bandwagon

But, they aren’t a resettlement contractor (yet!).

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Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah. We have money to give to refugees.

I previously told you about the Mormon donation to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, here.  And, now here is more news (a puff piece) about contributions to the other eight contractors featuring Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.  I can only assume the Mormon church has run out of poor Americans to help as they are moving on to helping what is becoming a massive flow of needy Muslims from the Middle East and Africa entering the US.
When I read this story at Utah’s Deseret News, my first thought was to wonder if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was actually ultimately angling to become a resettlement contractor in order to receive lucrative government grants.
The nine contractors*** working for the federal government have a monopoly on the program at the moment. Are the Mormons attempting to buy good will?
In order to break in to the club, to become a contractor, an organization must prove it has experience with the program.  Is that what is happening here as we learn that the Mormons are being trained by LIRS in this case?
For new readers, the contractors are paid by the head to resettle the refugees and representatives of the nine meet in DC weekly to divvy-up the refugee cases coming in (they bid for bodies as one of our most astute observers quips). Do the Mormons want in?
Deseret News:

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — A flash flood of Mormon volunteers was a spring surprise for Lutherans who run refugee resettlement organizations in 25 U.S. states.

Motivated by statements of church leaders encouraging them to help refugees, the influx of Mormons prompted resettlement centers of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services to add volunteer training sessions in places like South Carolina, Colorado and Arizona.

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LIRS CEO Hartke is chomping at the bit about this new batch of money coming in. LIRS is 95% funded by you—the taxpayer! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/09/03/lutheran-immigration-and-refugee-service-is-95-funded-by-taxpayers/

On Tuesday, the budding relationship expanded again, as LIRS leaders visited Salt Lake City and received a check for $130,000 from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The LDS Church also pledged an additional $520,000 in commodities such as food and mattresses. [I would really like to understand this mattress thing because there were mattresses involved somehow in the resettlement that happened in my MD county back in 2007!—ed]

“We’ve been chomping at the bit on building this relationship, which is evolving on two levels,” said Linda Hartke, president and CEO of LIRS. “On the local level, we’re seeing greater interest and more volunteers coming forward.

[….]

Tuesday’s donation was part of $5 million in cash and commodities the LDS Church has pledged to the nine U.S. refugee resettlement agencies, which operate over 300 affiliates helping newly arrived refugees settle into local communities.

In August, the church gave $2 million to the two resettlement agencies that work in Utah — $1.25 million to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services and $750,000 to the International Rescue Committee.

On Monday, church officials will travel to the East Coast to give $2.35 million to the remaining six resettlement agencies.

Continue reading here.
If you are a Mormon and not thrilled with importing more unvetted Muslims from Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Burma (Esar Met!), you might want to start speaking up at church.
These are the nine members of the federal resettlement contractor club.  If the Mormons are trying to break in, I’m going to love reporting on the battle.