Another exciting week with Donald Trump in the White House! Never a dull moment! Right!
And, welcome to all of you new subscribers this past week!
At the end of each week (most weeks) I report on what the Top Three most-read posts of the previous week were so everyone can see what interested readers here in the US and in over 100 countries worldwide! Besides educating yourselves here at RRW, the most important thing you can do is to let Donald Trump know that you have his back. We must make sure he knows we want the Refugee Admissions Program trashed or reformed. There will never be a time like this again for a very long time, if ever. See what else you can do here: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/02/04/comment-worth-noting-what-one-reader-said-to-president-trump/
But, first big apologies for my very outdated Fact Sheet in the header above. I know many of you clicked on it this week. I just don’t have time to keep it up, plus I have a hard time motivating myself when there is so much more interesting stuff to write about each day.
You might want to try the Frequently Asked Questionswhich leads you to some other places where you can find information.
See also recent monthly round-ups for instructions on getting the most out of RRW (at the end of both the October roundup, here, and at the end of the November roundup, here.) I’ve been writing RRW since the summer of 2007, so there is a lot of information here (over 8,000 posts). I recommend that you just follow along for awhile and eventually you will catch up. I do try very hard to link back to older posts in each article I write. Also, you might want to try the search window (upper left hand column). It is pretty good. If you are really new to the issue, start with typing in your state and see if I’ve written about it over the years.
Enough of that. Here are the Top Three Postsof the week ending on Friday, February 3rd (top daily posts are in the right hand side bar):
If you are on twitter maybe you saw some of those criminals whose mugshots I tweeted from that #1 post above. I did individual tweets in a series one evening and had hundreds of thousands of impressions that night! I am @RefugeeWatcher if you would like to follow me.
That is the time frame they estimate they have before the latest legal wrangles are resolved.
So look for another big rush of refugees in the coming days. US Together in Ohio is one of Hetfield’s subcontractors.
And, if they don’t materialize, contractors will have to start reducing their federally-funded staffs. From CNN:
Washington (CNN) For the second weekend in a row, nonprofits tasked with welcoming refugees to the United States are reacting to a sudden, major shift in the policies that govern their work.
A week ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending resettlement for 120 days and initiating a review of the vetting procedures used to approve applicants to come to the United States.
Then Friday, a more welcome surprise for refugee groups: A federal judge in Washington reversed several key provisions of the executive order, paving the way some refugees to enter the country.
US Together is the Ohio subcontractor for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
I feel like our whole world has been turned upside-down,” Danielle Drake, community relations manager at the Cleveland*** nonprofit US Together, told CNN Saturday.
“The executive order came in so quickly, no one was prepared for it,” she said. “We had zero notice.”
Why can’t leftwing media like CNN be completely honest about this funding and explain how contractors are paid by the head out of the federal treasury to do their ‘work.’ As subcontractors of the big nine contractors, groups like US Together are almost exclusively funded by taxpayer dollars! I am sure that the average American reading this has no understanding that they are talking about mom and pop taxpayer paying for all of this. Henshaw is a career federal employee obviously running the show and giving guidance to the DOS refugee contractors. Trump must appoint his replacement.
Funding for resettlement groups is also in question as the administration and the courts each consider the future of the US refugee program.
If the administration is given the go-ahead to move forward with its four-month suspension, Drake estimates US Together will have to lay off at least half its staff.
“One of the other very difficult aspects of the executive order was the financial implications faced by the local resettlement offices,” Sarah Krause, a senior director for the national resettlement agency Church World Service, told CNN. [See my funding analysis of CWS, here.—ed]
Busy, busy bureaucrats!
The State Department has been coordinating with CWS and other agencies to provide guidance on what Friday’s court ruling means for them in practical terms.
As of Saturday afternoon, CWS had been advised that flights were expected to resume early next week and continue for at least the next two weeks.
The cap of 50,000 refugees for this fiscal year remains in effect. See herewhere we explained why this was still too high! Bush had 4 years under 50,000, so this does not represent any big slowdown! Even 50,000 is going to cost taxpayers several billion dollars!
But for refugees still awaiting approval to go to the United States, the uncertainty created by the executive order and subsequent legal challenges has left them in limbo.
That’s due, in part, to a provision of the Trump administration’s order that was not overturned in Friday’s court ruling — a provision capping total refugee admissions at 50,000 for the 2017 fiscal year, which ends October 1.
More than 30,000 refugees had already been admitted to the US before the new policy went into effect, according to State Department data, leaving just under 20,000 spots open.
Continue reading here.
Church World Service and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society areorganizing demonstrationsagainst Trump. There should be a federal law prohibiting federal contractors from such overtly political activities.
*** Interested readers might want to visit my 2013 post about when ‘Welcoming America’ came to Cleveland to push for changing the city by seeding it with more third worlders.
“I think he’s doing a lot, every day I’m turning on CNN to see what he did and who he pissed off.”
Mainer Jim Nelson
They may not be protesting in the streets, but voters in towns seeing their communities transformed by refugees almost overnight, support Donald Trump’s efforts to rein-in immigration from certain countries.
No time to thoroughly analyze both reports, but here is a bit of the story from Lewiston, Maine where many residents are happy with President Trump’s temporary slowdown of refugees from certain countries. I don’t know this guy, but he speaks common sense, and I know exactly how he feels about watching CNN!
From Maine Public Radio:
I think he’s doing a lot,” says Jim Nelson. “Every day I’m turning on CNN to see what he did and who he pissed off.”
As we reported here years ago, it was generous welfare in Maine that drew the first Somalis up from places like Atlanta, GA. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2009/11/22/somali-migration-to-maine-its-the-welfare-magnet-stupid/ (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Nelson says he voted for Trump and he’s happy he did. He says doesn’t always like how the president acts, but that Trump is quickly fulfilling campaign promises.
That includes the president’s recent travel ban, which affects immigrants from seven countries, including Somalia.
“This country was made on immigrants. I mean, that’s exactly why the United States exists. We’re a melting pot. We can’t lose sight of that,” Nelson says.
But he says he’s truly mystified by the local protests sparked by Trump’s order.
“On the front page of yesterday’s paper you got this little girl crying, and she’s a Somalian (sic) and she can’t see her grandmother, and ‘Oh, my God.’ You know, she can’t see her grandmother for six months. What about the people that got blown up down in Florida? What about those people? They can’t ever see their people again.” Nelson says.
Here is the Minneapolis Star Tribune about reactions in Faribault, another small city being overloaded with Somali refugees. By the way, the population of Faribault was 23,594 in 2014, and Lewiston was 36,299 in 2014 (it had lost 293 residents since 2010, wonder why?).
FARIBAULT, MINN. – In her years of selling burgers and omelets in the heart of downtown Faribault, Janna Viscomi has seen changes she never expected.
[….]
For Viscomi, the new travel ban ordered by President Donald Trump that suspends refugee resettlement for 120 days and blocks entry for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries comes as mostly welcome news.
“I think slowing things down would be good,” she said this week, taking a short break after the lunch rush. “I don’t want to see families separated, but in the other regard, there needs to be somebody saying, ‘Hey, Let’s breathe here. Let’s breathe.’ ”
Like so many other towns I’ve visited in Minnesota, large meat and poultry companies are transforming small cities as their desire for cheap legal immigrant labor drives refugees to the area.
Reporter then describes pro-immigrant rallies in big cities. (Faribault is Trump country as was Lewiston on November 8th!)
Yet in other places, such as Faribault, the move has been welcomed by residents who feel the cost and pace of immigration is too much too fast. Trump won Faribault’s precincts with 50.4 percent of the vote in November, compared with 41.5 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Faribault, like other small- to medium-sized cities throughout Minnesota in recent years, has seen its mostly European ancestry make room for new arrivals from Cambodia, Laos, Mexico, Central America and Somalia.
And, of course, like much of Minnesota we see Somalis are supplying the cheap labor for BIG MEAT!
In many places, it’s the food processing plants that draw immigrants eager for work. It’s no different here, where the Jennie-O Turkey Store operates.
Continue reading here.
See ourprevious post on the welfare costs of refugee resettlement. Somalis are among the greatest users of welfare including benefits provided at the state and local level.
So next time you are tempted to say that you want your meat to be cheap, remember it isn’t! Your tax dollars for refugee welfare subsidize the meat industry!
I told you recentlythat the Office of Refugee Resettlement had published its 2015 Annual Report to Congress (a year late, but much better than when it was three years late earlier in RRW’s history). If any of you citizen investigators want a winter research project, study the whole document and see what other information you can find. (Look back at some previous reports too, see here).
Below are some charts from the report (beginning on page 16) that are very instructive. And, remember readers they survey refugees and often don’t hear back from them, so I expect the numbers could even be worse then they are here (from “responding household,” those willing to talk)—and here they are bad!
By the way, when the Leftist Open Borders gang publishes economic studies that claim that refugees bring economic boom times to struggling communities, they surely don’t factor in the cost of welfare use by refugees (or the education costs, or the criminal justice system costs). LOL!, maybe they figure federal welfare dollars (grown on trees in Washington) flowing to certain communities are income to the community.
Let’s take SNAP for example (that is food stamps). Note that 92.5% of refugees who arrived in 2015 went on food stamps, but of those admitted in 2011, 60% are still on food stamps 5 years later!
Interesting too is the figure for housing assistance. Newly arriving refugees get very little, but after they have been here for awhile (see 2011) they find the housing assistance.
Also, note that as they are here longer, more refugees find SSI (for aged, blind, disabled or poor people generally).
Are you listening ‘welcoming’ communities?
“General assistance” is described as ‘benefits’ provided by state and local governments (taxpayers!).
Take special note of the 23% who used that state and local aid. Aren’t we told REPEATEDLY that refugees do not cost state and local taxpayers anything! (And, this figure likely does not include the cost of educating the children).
There is graph on page 18 worth looking at which shows the same numbers in a different way.
Then here on page 19 we see a comparison between various ethnic groups and their use of welfare.
Although we are admonished by ORR to not compare statistics by country of origin, I ask, then why bother reporting this data yourself since it begs comparison? Welfare use was highest for refugees arriving from predominantly Muslim countries in 2015—Iraq and Somalia—as shown in this table from page 19. See that they sure knew how to suck up the state and local “general assistance” as well.
(If you are wondering, the Bhutanese are mostly Hindu, the Burmese mostly Christian, but we are admitting Rohingya Muslims from Burma now, Cubans of course are mostly Christians, Iraqis mostly Muslim, and Somalis all Muslim).
It is confusing and hopefully later there will be more clarity, but reportedly, overnight, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered both sides (the Washington State court that stopped Trump’s temporary halt of certain migrants and the US Justice Department) by tomorrow to prepare briefs supporting their arguments. Double standard by the Left! (and CNN!) Obama could, with a pen, control who comes and who stays in America, but don’t dare let Donald Trump use that Constitutional authority!
So, if those bureaucrats working in the US State Department attempt to resume bringing refugees in to the US, they risk leaving refugees stranded in airports (again)—pawns for their political agenda.
From the Daily Mail:
President Donald Trump has lost an appeal against a court ruling blocking his travel ban on certain travellers and all refugees.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco instead asked both the state of Washington and the Trump administration early on Sunday to file more arguments by Monday afternoon.
More hereand we can add more links as the day goes on.
As usual CNN this morning was on the side of stripping President Trump of his power to control immigration, while during the Obama Administration they were overjoyed and supportive as Obama said immigration was his prerogative under the Constitution. The double standard is maddening to behold.
And, to further my annoyance level this morning. They are blasting Trump for saying something derogatory about the US in his O’Reilly interview when they said not a peep when Obama went on his apology tour of the Middle East and Africa early in his Administration.
By the way, where is Congress? We have three branches of government. Can’t they do more there to support the President?
