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).
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!