10/12/2017 - Refugee Resettlement Watch

jodi harpstead — CEO Harpstead pulls down a salary and benefits package of over $300,000 annually to head the $91 million a year operation. Link to Form 990 below.

If they succeed they will be placing 27 more than they did in FY17 which ended on the 30th of September.

Checking Wrapsnet, here is a summary (below) of the refugees (mostly Muslims) who were placed by a subcontractor (Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota) of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service mothership located in Baltimore.

Refugees who went to St. Cloud in direct resettlement (there are no reliable numbers on secondary migrants) last year are below.

Secondary migrants are refugees placed elsewhere who migrate (legally!) on their own to another town or city.

Minnesota does have the highest number of secondary migrants in the country as we learned a few years ago when such information was published.

In FY17 St. Cloud received 198 of the 1,623 refugees resettled in the entire state.

Burma (4)

Ethiopia (19)

Iraq (9)

Somalia (166)

St. Cloud had the second highest Somali resettlement after Minneapolis (364).

Here (below) is the FY18 R & P Abstract for St. Cloud.

This is the document that should be made available to the public BEFORE it goes to Washington. These numbers are determined by Lutheran Social Service in Minnesota (Harpstead’s organization) with the help of “stakeholders.” Stakeholders should include your local elected officials!

(See my post on St. Cloud yesterday)

Normally this document is kept from the general public, but we were fortunate enough to obtain it. Knowledge is power and that is the primary reason there is so little transparency with refugee resettlement. The feds and the contractors don’t want citizens to have all the facts!

I maintain that if the program is a good one for the community, they should be able to sell it with all the facts on the table!

Below are screenshots of the pages. Serious students should go to this post where I explained some of the numbers, categories etc. But, I am far from an expert!

Documents like this (reporting the capacity of your town to ‘welcome’ refugees and from where) come in to Washington from hundreds of towns and cities and are put together to become the basis for the Presidential determination which we know is a maximum 45,000 refugees for FY18 (which is now underway as of Oct. 1).

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Again, knowledge is power!

I leave it to you, again with the help of this post to examine the plans that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in conjunction with the US State Department and the US Department of Health and Human Services have in the works for St. Cloud.

LOL! Do you see that line in the last chart about voluntary hours/miles? What that represents is the number of hours and the miles that volunteers put on their own vehicles converted to a cash value. The contractor uses that figure to show the federal government that they have put some skin in the game (it is supposed to be a public-private partnership after all). I wonder do volunteers know that they are worth money to the contractor?

Check out the actual cash from foundations/corporations in FY16 and the enormous jump estimated for FY18. Is that realistic? Can they just make up numbers?

Housing specialist? So the refugees get a housing specialist? Do just regular poor Americans get one from LSS of MN?

The most recent Form 990 for LSS of Minnesota is here (or see LSS financials page):

file:///C:/Users/Ann/AppData/Local/Temp/Lutheran%20Social%20Service%20of%20MN%20-%20Public%20Inspection%20Copy-1.pdf

Other contractors are operating in other cities in Minnesota. See here:

https://refugeeresettlementwatch.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/acb67-publicaffiliatedirectory1-6-17.pdf

What can you do?

Citizens in St. Cloud, see my complete archive on what I’ve reported about your city since 2008.

Concerned citizens elsewhere, go to the list of contractor/subcontractors I linked above. Call one near you and ask for the FY18 R & P Abstract (Reception and Placement Abstract). Ask your local elected officials—mayor and council—if any of them have ever seen the plans for their town/city?

Addendum! If you get a runaround complain to your elected officials in Washington—your member of Congress and US Senators. If they can’t (or won’t!) get it for you, then you have even more to complain about!

I confess I didn’t read the whole opinion piece in the New York Times as carefully as I should have (I have so little patience for this sort of excruciating hand wringing analysis).

minnesota somalis on fox

But, I read far enough to know that the gist of the schism, between our two major political parties, has to do with the rapid racial and ethnic diversification of America with the Dems on the side of the ‘new Americans’ and showing little interest in helping white working class American citizens.

Much of the current polarization is driven by difference of opinion on issues of race and immigration.

In fact one of those pontificating about how the Dems should proceed suggests that the Dems don’t hesitate to move in the direction of more catering to their immigrant base and forget the white working class altogether.

paul-begala-new — Begala is in favor of trying to get the white working class back in the fold

And then author, Thomas Edsall, mentions Paul Begala (remember him from the Clinton inner circle, Rush calls him the “forehead”) who is on the side of trying harder to reach the white working class.

Begala says something that I know many readers here will relate to (after you get past his painting of some whites as drunks and drug-addled).

Edsall at the NYT:

Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant and adviser to Bill Clinton, also comes back to the cultural breach between upscale Democrats and the white working class and poses this basic question:

If you look at the Democratic platform, or Hillary’s speeches on the economy, Democrats have a raft of good ideas, loads of sound policies that would make life better for the white working class. So why have they rejected us?

White working-class Americans are “dying before their time,” Begala wrote in an email, specifically citing the rise in alcoholism, cirrhosis, drug addiction, overdoses, suicide and poisoning:

If the life expectancy of, say, Somali immigrants in Minnesota suddenly took a dive, Democrats would be falling all over each other trying to ascertain the causes and advocate the cures. We owe white working-class Americans no less.

Ain’t it the truth!

This post is filed in my ‘Laugh of the day’ category, here.

Day: October 12, 2017

Lutheran Social Service planning to seed 225 additional refugees into St. Cloud this year

Here (below) is the FY18 R & P Abstract for St. Cloud.

I maintain that if the program is a good one for the community, they should be able to sell it with all the facts on the table!

What can you do?

NYT Op-ed: hand wringing about future of Democrat Party; Somalis mentioned

Much of the current polarization is driven by difference of opinion on issues of race and immigration.

If the life expectancy of, say, Somali immigrants in Minnesota suddenly took a dive, Democrats would be falling all over each other trying to ascertain the causes and advocate the cures. We owe white working-class Americans no less.