The political Left-wingers, like those at Church World Service, don’t like LOUD when it comes from the people who don’t want their towns and cities changed without their consultation.
I had to laugh when I saw this headline at NPR:
Opposition To Refugee Arrivals Keeps Getting Louder
Don’t you know! Loud is bad if it doesn’t come from the Left!
And, it is funny, just last night I was so irritated by Leftwing commentators always referring to Rightwing “dog whistles” when along comes a story with some dog whistles from the Left!
If you don’t know what the heck dog whistles are (in the political sense), it is when a supposedly secretive message is being sent to one’s own political base.
Before I give you some juicy bits on this NPR story, you might want to revisit my reports on Poughkeepsie here.
In the waning months of the Obama Administration (before November) hopes were running high. Obama had set a refugee admissions ceiling for FY17 at 110,000, the highest in years and certainly much higher than any of his previous 7 years, and they all thought that Hillary was headed to the Oval.
So the US State Department with its contractors*** set about finding lots and lots of fresh territory in which to place refugees (older sites were getting overloaded and tensions were building). Poughkeepsie was one such new site.
Then along came Donald J. Trump to mess up their big plans….
Thus this National Public Radio story:
A few days after Donald Trump was elected President, more than a hundred people packed into a church sanctuary in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. to hear a presentation about refugee resettlement in their town.
It didn’t go well.
This was after Trump had campaigned on refusing Syrian refugees, citing security concerns. In the church that night, staffers from the non-profit organization Church World Service laid out their plan to open a refugee resettlement office in Poughkeepsie, and bring in about 80 refugees, mostly from the Congo, Iraq and Syria.
The audience had questions. A lot of them. They wanted to know, would they be safe? And could Poughkeepsie afford to care for these new residents?
“As a resident of this town, of this city, I can look out my window any time and find someone in need,” said Poughkeepsie resident Steven Planck, to vigorous applause.
I have seen this comment dozens of times and ask this question: If Church World Service is a Christian ‘charity,’ why not focus on the poor people in every American city? Why are we importing more poverty?
The head of Church World Service’s refugee program, Erol Kekic, spent more than an hour trying to respond to the questions.
“We had to do a lot of truth-telling, and dispel some myths,” says Kekic. “From ‘the value of my property will go down because refugees will be resettling next to me,’ to ‘are we bringing terrorists?’ to ‘why are we bringing people who don’t all look like us?'”
It’s getting harder for refugees to find a welcoming home in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut the number of refugees allowed into the country. In cities and town across the nation, citizens are protesting refugees being resettled in their neighborhoods.
In Poughkeepsie, the debate got ugly. On social media, people called opponents of the refugee plan racists and Islamophobes. The staff of Church World Service received death threats. [Ho hum! Death threats, so what else is new—ed]
[….]
Until recently, refugee resettlement in the U.S. had wide bipartisan support. The U.S. State Department, along with nine large non-profit groups, decides where to resettle refugees fleeing persecution, war and violence. They look for communities where there are volunteers to help.
The reason the refugee industry had “wide bipartisan support” and still does is that the Republican establishment wants the cheap labor for their big business donors and the Dems want the voters. And it is only in the last few years that this secret program has been exposed to the American taxpayers who shell out the bucks for it!
NPR continued:
“We all wondered, why? Why Poughkeepsie?” says David Cole, 37, a lifelong resident of the town who helped mobilize opposition to Church World Service. Cole insists he has nothing against Muslims or other refugees. But he says Poughkeepsie isn’t a wealthy town; unemployment there is higher than the statewide average.
Why Poughkeepsie? Because Church World Service thought a banner year was coming with a slew of Obama/Clinton paying refugee “clients,” and they figured Poughkeepsie would be a pushover!
“I looked at people that I knew,” Cole says. “And I said, OK, well, why aren’t these people getting help? Why are we trying to help, you know, people from war-torn countries in an area where there’s people looking for jobs? Like, they’re scavenging for jobs around here. I don’t get it.”
[….]
“Yes, there are loud voices in every community,” Kekic says. “But they’re usually not the majority, and they’re usually just a very loud minority.”
So what is the lesson here: Louder wins!
There is much more and it is worth reading here.
To learn more about hard Leftwing Church World Service, click here.
***These are the nine major US taxpayer-funded NGOs responsible for (secretly) placing refugees in hundreds of American towns.
- Church World Service (CWS)
- Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) (secular)
- Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM)
- Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
- International Rescue Committee (IRC) (secular)
- US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular)
- Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS)
- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
- World Relief Corporation (WR)