RRW is ten years old!

And, as the saying goes, time flies when you are having fun (maybe!).
As America turns 241, RRW turns 10!

Refugee Resettlement Watch‘s first full month was July 2007 and for the whole month we had 1,161 views.  Fast forward to the top month of all time—November 2015—when we saw a one day high of 18,445 views.
The average visitors for 2007 were 131/day and since 2015 we have averaged over 5,000 visitors a day.

Artwork thanks to the SPLC: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/10/27/a-great-honor-splc-names-me-one-of-15-anti-muslim-extremists-in-america/

That isn’t a huge number compared to big blogs, but is a respectable number for the very narrowly focused blog this is.  With the help of a few other writers, there are 8,544 posts archived here (that is an average of 2.3 posts a day over ten years!).
From time to time, I report the top posts of the week or month, but thought you might be interested in knowing what the top most-visited posts of all time, the last year and the last month have been.

The Top Three Posts of all time are these:

Watch the death of Europe in 19 minutes…. (November 2015)

Amarillo, TX being destroyed by refugee overload (January 2016)

Why so many Somalis in Minneapolis? (January 2011)

By the way, I should mention that the Fact Sheet linked at the top of this page always does well, but it is somewhat out of date and I haven’t the time or interest to update it.  For new readers, see Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS Finding Stuff) also under the header above.

The Top Three Posts of the last year are these:

HUGE! Food stamp fraud bust in Baltimore, check out the names, see a pattern? (August 2016)

Stunning news: Trump State Department opens the flood gates, refugee admissions will explode in coming weeks (May 2017)

This is insane! Taxpayers pay rent for Somalis who feel the need to visit Somalia (for months!) (October 2016)

The Top Three Posts of the last month are these:

“My hometown (Utica) is gone” (June 2017)

A picture worth a thousand words, civil war coming to Europe? (June 2017)

“…an authentic immigrant invasion” is underway, as record breaking number of migrants make it to Italy in two days (June 2017)

Every day RRW welcomes visitors from over 150 countries and territories, but here are the Top Ten countries from which visitors arrived for all time. (WordPress has not kept this data for RRW’s whole life, and I don’t recall how many years ago they began supplying this information.)
In descending order and excluding the US:

Canada

UK

Australia

Germany

South Africa

France

Sweden

Netherlands

India

Norway

Some quick facts for new readers:

~RRW is a blog, a news source, not an organization.
~RRW is a charitable project for me, I work for no one. No one pays me to write this blog.
~Thus, I screen your comments and exclude those that express any violence, use foul language or I simply don’t want to post for some reason.
~Blogging is opinion writing, but I work very hard to back my opinions with facts.
~RRW is on twitter @RefugeeWatcher (over 11,000 followers at the moment)
~RRW is on facebook—Refugee Info. Resource, here. (Over 45,000 likes)
~I recommend that you use the excellent search engine here using key search words before e-mailing me. (I apologize that I cannot answer the hundreds of e-mails I get daily).
~I wrote a small book a couple of  years ago, here.
~My first Youtube video has almost 3 million views as of this writing.
~All of my weekly and  monthly round-ups (including more information for new readers) can be found in the category ‘blogging’ by clicking here.
It has been ten years! Will there be another ten? I doubt it, because right now the best window of change we have ever had is open, and if there is no reform, ten years more will be too late.
Thanks to all of my devoted readers for your hard work where you live to educate fellow citizens about this program and pushing for it to be abolished (or reformed), for your kind words, and for your much appreciated small donations that I see as validation for my work.  I don’t thank you often enough!

Happy Independence Day!

Refugee contractors planning lawsuits: are resettlement contractors 'bona fide entities?'

So far, the US Department of State says no….
Justice Clarence Thomas (Alito and Gorsuch) were right that the Supreme Court’s effort to ‘split the baby,’ with its decision on Trump’s ‘travel ban’ and refugee moratorium, will invite litigation through the remainder of the summer.
I wasn’t planning to write today (except maybe a post about this being RRW’s Tenth Anniversary) because it is Saturday of a big holiday weekend, but I want you to see that, yes, the contractors*** are getting in gear to sue the feds claiming that since refugees are assigned to them for placement in your towns, they are bona fide entities.
They sue while we pay their salaries!
Longtime readers know that it is my contention that the system in place for decades, where a federal contractor is hired to place refugees in your towns and the contractor is ostensibly a non-profit (some are ‘religious’) charitable organization being paid with your tax dollars yet can file lawsuits and lobby Congress, is an outrage.
Congress could do something about this, if it had the will (the Labrador bill is insufficient), but since leading Congressional Republicans are in the pockets of lobbyists (Tyson Foods for instance!) and the Chamber of Commerce in need of cheap labor, no real reform ever happens.
Carving itself out as the leader of the pack for political advocacy is the politically aggressive Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). HIAS was a litigant in one of the cases before the Court.

I just checked USA Spending and found that HIAS got over $104 MILLION from taxpayers since FY08. 
And, what do you know, the feds paid them over $4.1 million in the 5 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated.
Here, about 3 weeks later, HIAS organized a NYC  rally against Trump featuring speaker Rep. Keith Ellison.  How much of your money was used for their protest?
Yesterday we learned a lot about what they plan to do next—sue!
And, LOL!, the Christian Post says not one word about how the do-gooder organizations are paid per refugee head to do their good works!

Refugees with connections to the nine refugee resettlement organizations in the United States should be allowed to enter the country in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday that allowed a limited version of President Donald Trump’s travel ban to go into effect, advocates argue.

[….]

After the nation’s high court decided Monday that it would allow a scaled-back version of Trump’s March 6 executive order on immigration to be enacted, opponents of the travel ban were left wondering whether the the Supreme Court considers relationships with a refugee resettlement organization to be the type of “bona fide” relationships necessary to allow them to enter the country, once the 50,000 refugee cap set for fiscal year 2017 is met in July.

In 2016, Nezer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was the chair of the Refugee Council USA (this lobbying consortium of the refugee industry has revolving chairmanship). RCUSA in August of 2016 said they wanted Obama to set a ceiling of 200,000 for FY17. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/08/02/lobbying-arm-for-refugee-resettlement-contractors-wants-us-to-take-200000-refugees-in-fy2017/

As the travel ban — which bans immigration from six Muslim majority countries for 90 days and refugee resettlement for 120 days — took effect on Thursday, the Trump administration explained in guidelines sent to U.S. embassies and consulates what it considers to a “bona fide relationship.”

[….]

As for entities, the guidelines state that people seeking access to the United States must show formal proof of their relationship with the a business or educational institution. However, an administration official declared in a press call Thursday that “the fact that a resettlement agency in the United States has provided a formal assurance for refugees seeking admission is not sufficient, in and of itself, to establish a bona fide relationship under the ruling.”

[….]

Legal action has already been filed to seek clarity on the Supreme Court’s order, which was somewhat vague about what constitutes a “bona fide” relationship. On Thursday, the state of Hawaii asked a federal judge to clarify the ruling and argued that the administration’s interpretation is too narrow and violates the ruling.

On a press call Friday, leaders of resettlement agencies authorized to resettle refugees in the United States decried the administration’s interpretation of the ruling.  [You see how deceptive the press is—“authorized”—how about “contracted and paid!”—ed]

“Our argument is that under an interpretation of a clear reading of the Supreme Court decision is that a relationship with a resettlement agency does establish a ‘bona fide’ relationship for purposes of the ban,” said Melanie Nezer, the senior vice president of public affairs for HIAS, which was founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.  [They dumped “Hebrew” from their name a few years ago. I guess when you are resettling large numbers of Muslim refugees, the word Hebrew was an impediment.—ed]

[….]

“We also imagine the debate about this in the administration, thinking that there was significant debate among people who really do understand resettlement in the administration and those who don’t,” Nezer said. “It seems pretty clear that this decision was made by people who don’t know or don’t much care about how resettlement works.”

[By the way, I don’t think the Supreme Court knew much about resettlement either or perhaps they wouldn’t have been rewriting refugee law, but that would be the fault of whoever presented the case for the Justice Department.—ed]

[….]

Director of the lobbying arm of the refugee industry Naomi Steinberg says 26,000 refugees are in the pipeline. What a convenient number. We are at 50,000 and Congress has appropriated enough money to admit 75,000 this fiscal year. If we hit 75,000, it will be about 10,000 ABOVE the average for the last ten years!

Around July 6 is when the United States is expected to hit the 50,000 refugee cap for fiscal year 2017 that Trump set in his executive order. After that, the “bona fide” standard will be going into effect for refugees, Nezer explained.

See my post yesterday about July 6th.
As of today we are at 49,225 refugees admitted this fiscal year.  We may not see new numbers reported at Wrapsnet until the 5th or 6th.

[….]

Naomi Steinberg, the director of Refugee Council USA, added that there are over 26,000 refugees total who have gone through security vetting and have been approved to the come the United States and be resettled around the United States.

More here.
All of my posts related to what the Supreme Court ruled last week are archived in my category—Supreme Court.
*** For new readers, these are the nine contractors that monopolize refugee resettlement in America. Saying they are “authorized” to resettle refugees is a media deception.  They are paid out of the US Treasury per head for every refugee they resettle. The incentive is always to bring more while they pretend to be doing this work completely from humanitarian motives!
The UN/US Refugee Admissions Program will never be reformed until we stop paying non-profit groups to advocate and lobby for their vested (Leftist!) interests.