Day: January 18, 2018

Long time refugee advocate and refugee agency CEO is gone

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This isn’t exactly breaking news!
Lavinia Limon stepped down as head of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) last October according to a statement by the head of its board of directors. However, it may not have been a voluntary retirement. Someone recently reported to me that she was “forced” out during a period of growing “panic” among the nine federal contractors who are seeing their budgets shrink as refugee arrivals slow.
USCRI is presently being led by her longtime sidekick, Eskinder Negash.
This is a portion of the statement (about her ‘retirement’) from Board Chairman attorney Gene DeFilice:

Message from the Chairman of the Board of USCRI

Dear USCRI staff and partner agencies,

Lavinia Limon, CEO and President of USCRI has decided to retire from USCRI effective October 13, 2017. The Board appreciates Ms. Limon’s over four decades of service to refugees and immigrants, and her contribution to USCRI, thanks her, and wishes her the best in her future endeavors.

lavinia-and-chobani
A picture worth a thousand words. Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of ORR and here she is with Mr. Chobani Yogurt. USCRI is the agency bringing refugee labor to Twin Falls, Idaho which benefits globalist Chobani!

The Board of Directors has appointed Mr. Eskinder Negash as acting Chief Executive Officer. The Board is currently in the process of conducting a national search, which includes the consideration of Mr. Negash.

Mr. Negash, a refugee himself, has devoted his entire distinguished career to addressing the needs of refugees and immigrants. Mr. Negash brings nearly 40 years of experience working on behalf of refugees and immigrants and managing non-profit social service agencies. Prior to joining USCRI, Mr. Negash served as Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), within the Administration of Children and Families, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2009-2015. With a budget of over 1.5 billion, the ORR is the largest government-funded refugee resettlement organization in the world. During Mr. Negash’s tenure, the ORR provided essential services to more than 850,000 vulnerable people through its Resettlement Program, Rescue & Restore anti-trafficking campaign, and the Unaccompanied Children’s Program.

Additionally, Mr. Negash served as Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of the International Institute of Los Angeles for 15 years, and the Chief Operating Officer of USCRI from 2002-2009.

[….]

As we thank Lavinia for her service, say good-bye, and wish her well, please join me in congratulating and supporting Eskinder as he assumes the position of acting Chief Executive Officer of USCRI.

Sincerely,

Gene DeFelice

Chairman of the Board of Directors of USCRI

(There was no mention of retirement party or farewell gala.)
If you are a longtime reader of RRW, you know that both Lavinia Limon and Eskinder Negash have been gracing our pages for years.

Lavinia-Eskinder-Full-e1450277904628
Negash and Limon in happier days!

Click here for a huge archive on Limon and here for Negash.   I don’t have the time (or patience) for a rundown on their whole careers.
However, just a few key bits of information on Limon.
She was Bill Clinton’s Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and I believe a key player in promoting the idea of refugee labor for BIG MEAT (and eventually BIG YOGURT) that began with Clinton admitting large numbers of Bosnian Muslims for his friends in the Iowa beef industry during her leadership of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in HHS.
It is actually a clever scheme: Bring in cheap captive labor ($$$) for your industry pals and wear the white hat of humanitarianism as you do it!
Michael Leahy at Breitbart chronicled Limon’s career here (a must read!).
As for Negash, he left his post as Director of the ORR (note both of them revolved in and out of government) under strange, never explained, circumstances, see here.

Again, I have no idea why this shakeup at USCRI, but it is more evidence that Donald Trump’s refugee policies are breaking up old alliances and power structures in the swamp.

USCRI’s finances….

You can imagine that they are hurting.  They are one of the nine federal contractors*** that is almost completely federally funded.  See a discussion of their finances here from last March. I put them (at that time) at about 94% funded by the government (you).  Limon was making a largely federally funded salary/related income of over $300,000!
And then see here when I analyzed all nine contractors a few months later, I put them at 98% government funded.  I was using facts provided by Charity Navigator which told me that this agency could not be evaluated because:

This organization is not eligible to be rated by Charity Navigator because, as a service for individual givers, we only rate organizations that depend on support from individual contributors and foundations. Organizations such as this, that get most of their revenue from the government or from program services, are therefore not eligible to be rated.

Go here to find an USCRI subcontractor office near you.

And, this reminds me, speaking of CEOs leaving, I wonder what is happening over at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service that was undergoing a shake-up at about the same time, see here. 
Did Hartke survive?
*** These are the nine federal contractors largely funded by you. In parenthesis, after each, is the percentage of their income funded by Congress out of the US Treasury.  They are paid by the head to resettle refugees, so as the Trump Administration slows the flow into the country, their budgets are being strained to the breaking point.

Trump Administration cuts funding for special UN agency for Palestinian 'refugees'

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

International refugee industry heads are spinning as the Trump team has withheld funding for UNRWA.  That is the United Nations special agency that we have funded for more than 60 years that supposedly takes care of those who were displaced when the modern state of Israel came into being.
They should have long ago been resettled in other Sunni Arab countries, but their demand for a “right of return” to the land Israel occupies is responsible for the continued unrest in the Middle East.

yossi Beilin
The New York Times found one-time liberal politician Yossi Beilin to refer to Donald Trump as “ignorant.”   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yossi_Beilin

If they want a “right of return” then Christians and Jews can demand a “right of return” to all the places (they once lived) that have been taken over (through violence) across the Middle East and North Africa by marauding Muslim hordes.
As I said in a previous post on the topic—tell me at what time in world history were the lands of the world fairly distributed.
Believe it or not, the New York Times has a fairly balanced article on the subject once you get past the usual sob-story about a hungry ‘refugee.’  (Is this J-school 101: start with a sob-story to emotionally soften up readers?).
Here are a few paragraphs, you can read the rest yourself. Of course they found someone willing to call the President “ignorant.”

The United States, its [UNRWA’s] biggest donor, announced this week that it was withholding $65 million from a scheduled payment of $120 million. The Trump administration said it was pressing for unspecified reforms from the agency, while also seeking to get Arab countries to contribute more. [US taxpayers want to know why any of this is our financial responsibility!—ed]

[….]

The Trump administration’s move, which added to a deficit of around $150 million on the agency’s budget of nearly $1.25 billion, brought new attention to a sprawling agency that functions as a quasi-government in some areas of the Middle East and has courted controversy throughout most of its history. And it revived politically loaded questions about just who should qualify as refugees — and what is the proper role of the organization charged with caring for them.

The agency, known by the acronym Unrwa, was set up in 1949 to aid those who fled or were expelled from their homes during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Meant to be temporary, it defined refugees loosely and expanded that definition over time. One key difference between it and the office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, critics say, is that the agency routinely allows refugee status to be passed down for generations. Another is that it does not remove people from its list who have acquired citizenship in a new country, so the number always increases.

Further down there is an explanation about why Lebanon won’t give citizenship to Palestinians.

Very few have been granted Lebanese citizenship for fear that taking in so many Sunni Muslims would upset the country’s delicate sectarian balance. And many Lebanese have long argued that giving them rights and services would lessen the pressure on them to return to what is now Israel.

That is it in a nutshell! No country (either Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Shiite) wants large numbers of Sunni Muslims as citizens! 

Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia don’t take them either, why…..
….because by leaving the Palestinian Arabs in perpetual limbo the pressure continues on Israel.
Read the whole story here.
In my view, it is this type of dramatic move by the Trump Administration that could finally force a resolution to the conflict. At least it is worth a try!
See my whole category ‘Israel and refugees’ here.