Month: March 2017

Refugee resettlement contractors "whipsawed" says New York Times

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Of course, the New York Times could be expected to help the US Refugee Resettlement contractors wail about their loss of paying ‘clients’ (aka refugees).
As I have said (more than seven times), the contractors*** have only themselves to blame if they can’t maintain staff and offices during a pause in refugees entering the US.  They have gotten fat (with big salaries!) on the US Treasury teat and long ago stopped doing any serious private charitable fundraising.
Here is the NYT:

Last month, in anticipation of the Trump administration shutting down the flow of refugees entering the United States, Church World Service, one of the groups that handles resettlement, took drastic measures. It laid off all but 40 of the 600 employees at its African center that prepared refugees for travel.

My first question is WTH! did CWS need 600 employees in Africa for? And, since many were probably low-paid jobs for Africans, did the Reverend McCullough take a pay cut to keep some of those poor people employed?

Doing well by doing good! The President and CEO of CWS pulls down a cool $316,714 in annual compensation. Will he and other top execs take a pay cut to maintain some of their staff? BTW, I wouldn’t care what they paid their CEOs if they weren’t largely funded by taxpayer dollars. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/03/04/church-world-service-announced-yesterday-that-it-is-launching-anti-trump-campaign-to-raise/

Then on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Hawaii temporarily stayed the executive order that would have, among other things, halted refugee resettlement for 120 days and cut the total number of refugees admitted in the 2017 fiscal year by more than half, to 50,000.

First, Church World Service and the other organizations that resettle refugees cheered the news. Then they wondered, what now?

“We just simply do not know,” said Erol Kekic, the executive director of the immigration and refugee program for the agency. “There’s no guarantee that this, well, hold, will hold between now and Sept. 30,” he added, referring to the end of the fiscal year. [See our previous post which indicates that they better get used to a lower paying client flow—ed]

But one thing was clear, he said: “You can’t just play games with people. You can’t just lay off 500 people and then hire them back and lay them off again. We’re going to need some answers from the federal government.”

The judge’s decision was just the latest dramatic twist in six weeks of whipsaw changes faced by refugees and the agencies that work with them.

[….]

More than 60,000 refugees were already in various stages of approval before Mr. Trump’s first order went into effect on Jan. 27. The State Department, realizing that the new cap meant that there was only room for about another 17,000 refugees, slowed down the machinery to space out arrivals to 400 per week.

But the slowdown meant the agencies faced budget cuts. The State Department pays each refugee agency $950 per person to cover administrative costs, with another $1,125 going directly to the refugee or to cover expenses like rent.  [But they are paid, much much more! See below—ed]

Readers who are researching the refugee program where you live might see slightly different numbers involving the split of the $2,075 per head payment. Some of the contractors keep a larger chunk of the State Department’s per head payment which represents a perverse incentive to never stop the flow no matter how over-loaded a community becomes.
Also, I repeat!  This is not the only funding the contractors get from you.
They get myriad grants totaling in the millions of dollars for such things as building community gardens for refugees, training refugees to do ‘culturally appropriate’ daycare, handing out micro-enterprise loans to refugees, and teaching them English (something I have maintained could be done at local community colleges). And, in the case of CWS, running programs in Africa.
Continue reading here for more of the wailing at the NYT!
Can’t these lazy biased reporters ever take a few minutes and get all the facts! 
Look at how much CWS is getting from you! This is one page at USA Spending.  In the last 8 years they are approaching a half a billion $$$ from the US Treasury!
 

 
If anyone sees a report about the top execs at the nine contractors taking a voluntary pay cut, let me know and we will give them credit!
*** The nine contractors that monopolize refugee resettlement in America:

 

Trump may increase funding for refugees in FY18 budget…..

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….but before you panic, as I did when I read Breitbart’s headline (‘Trump Budget Includes ‘Significant Funding of . . . Refugee Program’), some of the funding proposal likely involves humanitarian help abroad and development of the ‘safe zones’ (abroad!) concept.

President Donald Trump salutes after laying a wreath at the Hermitage, the home of President Andrew Jackson, to commemorate Jackson’s 250th birthday, Wednesday, March 15, 2017, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Here is Michael Patrick Leahy with an inside look at Trump Administration funding plans:

The blueprint for the Trump administration’s FY 2018 budget released on Thursday “allows for significant funding of humanitarian assistance, including food aid, disaster, and refugee program funding” in the State Department.

“This would focus funding on the highest priority areas while asking the rest of the world to pay their fair share,” the blueprint states.

“Taken together with the executive order, it looks like the president will keep the refugee program with a lower annual number, like the 50,000 limit specified in Executive Order 13780, and when the annual determination is released, identify countries of concern in a way that excludes Somalia, and other countries of concern that are known to harbor terrorists,” a source familiar with the federal refugee resettlement program tells Breitbart News.

[….]

“As long as he keeps the refugee program going, we are going to get more people from countries related to real security issues and regardless, the program needs to be legislatively reformed and regulations that have caused Constitutional violations repealed before restarting in FY 2018,” the source adds.

So, the Trump team is aware and is aiming to “legislatively” reform the program which we have been insisting is the only way to permanently fix (if possible!) the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.

Otherwise, if there is no legislative fix, then in 4, or 8, years the whole huge, uncontrolled, flow could begin again with a new president. (See ‘Where is Congress?’ here)
Reform of “regulations” is the Administration’s job!
Regulations do not need “repeal” (implying Congress gets involved), they need only be trashed or re-written by Trump’s people. (Could they trash the “regulations” that were written for the Wilson-Fish amendments? As I understand it, those regulations wrongly authorized a non-profit group to run a refugee program in a state that had withdrawn from the program.)
Leahy continues….

The language of the blueprint, however, could be interpreted to suggest that the Trump administration’s “significant funding of . . . [the] refugee program” defines the program broadly to include safe zones in other parts of the world in addition to the federal refugee resettlement program. As such, a further reduction of refugees resettled in the United States in FY 2018 could be entirely possible.

Leahy goes on to discuss the recent court decisions in Hawaii and in Maryland, noting that the judge in Hawaii did place a restraining order (we believe completely illegally) on Trump’s reduction of the Obama PROPOSED CEILING (see ceiling discussion here).
Then at the end of his informative piece, we get a laugh!  Leahy wraps up with this….

As to the number refugees who will be resettled in the United States during the balance of FY 2017, President Trump may take a page from President Andrew Jackson, whose tomb he honored during his visit to Nashville on Wednesday.

“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” President Jackson said of an 1832 Supreme Court decision unfavorable to his policies issued by the Marshall Court.

President Trump’s attitude to the unfavorable decision issued by Judge Watson regarding a president’s Constitutional and statutory authority to limit the number of refugees arriving in the United States, a decision Judge Chuang [in Maryland case—ed] may agree with on March 28, may well be something like this:

“Judge Watson has made his decision; now let him pay for it.”

To read more and follow links, continue here.
See my FY17 and FY18 timeline here.  See my proposed areas to cut funding, here, yesterday because FUNDING IS POLICY.
All of my posts relating to the USRAP and President Trump’s efforts to restrain and reform it, are posted in my Trump Watch! category.
And, don’t miss Tennessee sues the feds! over Wilson-Fish program.

Brazil: JBS and another BIG MEAT company raided in tainted meat scandal

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

So how does this affect you in America? It doesn’t directly, but it gives me another opportunity to educate new readers!
The story, which I first heard on my regular early morning scan of CNN, is about JBS, the Brazilian meat giant, that is changing American small cities because of it voracious desire for refugee labor!
Meatpacking companies get the cheap labor.  American towns get the cultural upheaval.

I took this photo of JBS headquarters in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns. JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!

For new readers I have contended for years that the US Refugee Admissions Program is more about supplying large global corporations with cheap/captive labor than it is about ‘humanitarianism.’ 
Wages are low and we (taxpayers) subsidize the workers’ families through welfare. What a business model!
JBS (BIG MEAT) and other companies it owns (BIG CHICKEN) are changing towns like Greeley, Colorado where a large influx of Somalis have moved to the area to work for the global corporation, or have been directly resettled there by federal refugee resettlement contractors.
Be sure to see this story by Bloomberg about BIG MEAT and the Trump refugee slowdown.
Although this happened in Brazil, it places, once again, front and center the question of our food safety!
From the New York Times (emphasis is mine):

Brazil’s Largest Food Companies Raided in Tainted Meat Scandal

RIO DE JANEIRO — Federal agents raided the operations of Brazil’s largest food companies on Friday over accusations that their employees oversaw a scheme that included bribing inspectors to allow rotten meals to be served in public schools and salmonella-contaminated meat to be exported to Europe.

The investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police, an agency similar to the F.B.I., deals yet another blow to the country’s business establishment, which is struggling to recover from colossal graft scandals around Petrobras, the national oil company, and Odebrecht, a huge construction company.

In the newest corporate scandal, investigators said that employees at two food-processing giants, JBS and BRF, paid federal inspectors to ignore the adulteration or expiration of processed foods.

Inspectors also falsified sanitary permits, and bribes were channeled to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party of President Michel Temer, according to the authorities.

Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at Tendências, a consultancy in São Paulo, called the meatpacking inquiry “one more element that will add to the picture of political instability.” Brazil’s political establishment was already reeling from an array of other graft cases.

The meatpacking investigation also casts doubt on Brazil’s agribusiness industry, a relatively resilient pillar of the nation’s weak economy. JBS is one of the world’s largest meat producers, with the United States chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride among its foreign subsidiaries. BRF is a major exporter of meat to the Middle East and Asia.

Continue reading here.
See my tag ‘meatpackers’ for many more stories on the industry that once paid a decent salary and employed Americans.
You should know that then Senator Jeff Sessions (now Trump AG) called out meatpacking lobbyists behind the ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty legislation in 2013, here.
Endnote: If you live in a state with a lot of meatpackers/refugee labor, be sure to investigate how much your elected officials are getting in campaign donations from the meat/poultry companies.

Flow chart for refugee admissions shows where Trump team could downsize program with funding cuts

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor: This is a post (updated for today) that I wrote nearly two years ago, but yesterday when a reader needed some information, I was reminded of it.  I think it is very useful for our thousands of new readers.
I found this flow chart (below) this morning (April 11, 2015) while researching my earlier Texas post and thought it might be useful for all of you asking what the steps are for refugees to enter the US.

President Trump and Sec. of State Tillerson have several ways to ‘skin the cat’ on refugees through funding cuts!

Pay attention to the fact that the ORR chart lists war as a reason one could be a refugee, but in fact war itself is not a trigger for the internationally understood definition of “refugee” which says one must be PERSECUTED (and prove it!).   Here (below) is the definition of refugee (the word “war” is not mentioned).

Obama bastardizing the refugee definition!

It should be noted that ‘economic migrants,’ or people fearing crime in their home country, are also NOT refugees, but Obama is further bastardizing the definition to include the “children” from Central America!  ***Update*** we have admitted over a thousand phony ‘refugees’ from Central American countries in only the first 5 months of FY2017.
From Geneva Academy:
The Definition of a Refugee

International legal protection of refugees centres on a person meeting the criteria for refugee status as laid down in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Under Article 1(A)2, the term “refugee” shall apply to any person who:

“…owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

Thus, according to this provision, refugees are defined by three basic characteristics:

* they are outside their country of origin or outside the country of their former habitual residence;

* they are unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted; and

* the persecution feared is based on at least one of five grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.

It is important to stress that the term “asylum seekers” refers to persons, who have applied for asylum, but whose refugee status has not yet been determined.

See that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees controls the intake! By cutting funding for the UNHCR, President Trump can moderate that intake.
Besides the UNHCR, the federal contractors (VOLAGs), which monopolize the program, also control one of the steps. By cutting their many ridiculous grants—like hundreds of thousands of dollars for refugees to plant gardens—the Trump Admin. can also shrink the program. The VOLAGs simply can’t raise enough private money to function well—to function at all! Why is that? Because the public isn’t interested enough to open their private wallets!
They could also limit the number of USCIS officers sent out around the world to do the in-processing.
The bottomline is that I don’t know why on earth Trump had to flag the Refugee Admissions Program in the travel pause Executive Order. So much more could have been done behind-the-scenes. (See also my discussion yesterday on the ‘ceiling’ here)
From the Office of Refugee Resettlement:
(Be sure to see that mention in last step about timing, “varies by circumstance”!  No mention of 18-24 months!)

Hawaii: Muslim Brotherhood-backed imam dictating US refugee policy

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

… instead of banning the Brotherhood, the U.S. is letting a Brotherhood-backed imam dictate U.S. refugee and visa policy.

(John Guandolo)

The Hawaiian judge (a personal friend of Obama) might have issued the order, but the drive to stop Trump’s travel and refugee admissions pause comes from Egyptian imam Ismail Elshikh.

Egyptian imam Ismail Elshikh is a co-plaintiff in case blocking Trump’s refugee pause.

See our previous two posts on Hawaii, here and here.
This is a must-read story from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:

The main plaintiff in the Hawaii case blocking President Trump’s revised temporary travel ban is an imam with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The irony is hard to miss: Trump has talked about declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and now it is a Brotherhood-backed imam who is playing a key role in blocking his executive order on immigration.

Imam Ismail Elshikh, 39, leads the largest mosque in Hawaii and claims he is suffering “irreparable harm” from the president’s executive order, which places a 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from six countries.

One of those six countries is Syria. Elshikh’s mother in law is Syrian and would not be able to visit her family in Hawaii for 90 days if Trump’s ban were allowed to go into effect.

Hawaii’s Obama-appointed federal judge, Derrick Watson, made sure the ban did not go into effect, striking it down Wednesday while buying Hawaii’s claim that it amounts to a “Muslim ban.” The state’s attorney general, along with co-plaintiff Elshikh, claims the ban would irreparably harm the state’s tourism industry and its Muslim families.

[….]

The vast majority of Hawaii’s roughly 5,000 Muslims attend Elshikh’s mosque, the Muslim Association of Hawaii, which is located in a residential area of Manoa, Honolulu. The mosque, despite its ties to what many believe is an extremist and subversive organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, may now hold the key to whether the Trump travel ban passes muster in the federal court system.

Elshikh was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, the home base of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated goal is to spread Shariah law throughout the world.

The proof that his mosque is affiliated with the Brotherhood is found in the court records for Honolulu County, which lists the deed holder as the North American Islamic Trust.

John Guandolo spoke at MDCAN in Maryland a few years ago. I was there. Guandolo’s website is here: https://www.understandingthethreat.com/

John Guandolo, a former FBI counter-terrorism specialist and now private consultant to law enforcement at Understanding the Threat, said all mosques under the “Muslim Association of” moniker are typically affiliated with the Brotherhood.

But the clincher in this case is that the mosque property is traced to NAIT, “confirming it is a Muslim Brotherhood organization,” Guandolo told WND in an email.

The Trump administration has said it is considering banning the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. by including it on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Hohmann continues…..

… instead of banning the Brotherhood, the U.S. is letting a Brotherhood-backed imam dictate U.S. refugee and visa policy, Guandolo said.

Judge Watson, who was a Harvard law classmate of Barack Obama’s, issued an injunction halting Trump’s executive order from going into effect, agreeing with Hawaii’s claim that the temporary ban, 90 days on visa travelers and 120 days for refugees, would irreparably harm the state’s tourism industry and its Muslim families.

As for refugees, Hawaii takes very few. Of the 49 states participating in the federal refugee resettlement program, only Mississippi has taken in fewer refugees than Hawaii since 2002. Only 127 refugees have been sent to Hawaii since 2002, and nearly zero have been Muslims from the six nations on Trump’s list. The vast majority sent to Hawaii have been from Burma and Vietnam.

For more, and to follow links, continue reading here.

You gotta hand it to Trump, he is flushing them out, but the big question is, what will he do with those he flushes!