The structure of the US Refugee Admissions Program as designed by then Senator Ted Kennedy (with his sidekick Joe Biden) and signed in to law by Jimmy Carter in March 1980 is crumbling (crumpling, whatever) and I want to know—
Where is Congress?
The original concept—non-profit groups being paid by the head to place refugees—is flawed. How do you run an organization and create an annual budget when the program is almost wholly dependent on that per head government payment?
Any legitimate advocate for refugees, should be asking Congress to reform the entire program.
But, of course the leadership (with fat salaries!) of the nine non-profit contractors*** isn’t urging Congress to reform the program and instead is working tirelessly, through the media, to show how mean Donald Trump is to have reduced the number of paying clients (aka refugees) with the assumption that in a few years they will get rid of him and go back to the good ol’ days. Continue reading “Trump refugee admissions slowdown shows US refugee program built on budgetary quicksand”→
It has been missing for awhile! What is up with that. I thought we were going to have more transparency for communities that are (or might become) refugee placement towns and cities. This is former State Department Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Larry Bartlett, proudly standing in front of the site map that PREVIOUSLY was posted annually at Wrapsnet along with a directory list of sites.
This morning I saw this brief mention about Ann Arbor that had been fingered as a possible new resettlement site at the end of the Obama Administration when his State Department was planning as many as 40 new sites (older ones getting overloaded?). Michigan Live:
Samaritas, Michigan’s largest refugee resettlement agency, had planned to open an Ann Arbor office and that’s now on hold because there are not enough refugees coming to the area any more, according to John Yim, supervisor of new Americans in Michigan for Samaritas.
(For new readers Samaritas is the Lutheran resettlement agency. Why did they change their name? Who knows.)
You might want to visit this post in which I reported on the State Department’s “New Site Development Guide” published under Bartlett’s leadership.
The Ann Arbor mention reminded me to check Wrapsnet for the:
R&P AGENCY CONTACT LIST EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION
The most recent map (like the one Bartlett is showing-off in the photo) is from FY16, but the full contact list is missing.
It hasn’t been available for awhile, so how is anyone supposed to know if their town or city has a refugee office? I suspect its absence is also hampering the refugee industry activists. Don’t we all have a right to know where refugees are being placed and which of the hundreds of subcontractors are still open for business?
The old list ishere at my blog.
We have been hearing that as many as 100 of the 350 or so offices are to be closed, and we would like to know which ones!
Where is the transparency?
Come on State Department, what are you hiding? There are really only two reasons for not making this information available: incompetence or they want to hide something.
From time to time someone tells me that they can’t sign up to receive the e-mails that are automatically generated to RRW followers each time I post. I got a request yesterday to sign someone up as a subscriber, so I thought I best explain the problem….
I don’t know enough about the technology that goes on behind the scenes with perhaps your own server, or perhaps with WordPress. But, I want you to know that I can’t sign you up. And, I can’t re-sign you up if for some reason you have stopped getting e-mails from RRW. Visit RRW every few days! Why bother with subscribing?
In fact my subscriber list is virtually at a standstill and hasn’t been growing for months.
I have questioned WordPress about why people are dropped without warning, and they never have an adequate explanation. The best thing to do is to just come visit every day, or every few days and scroll back to see what I have written. It is very simple, plus there is more useful information at RRW itself. So please visit directly, if you can’t for some mysterious reason subscribe!
Commenting?
Readers should know that I moderate comments and do not post anything where violence is threatened, or comments that reveal personal information (I take off phone numbers often). If you send me just a bunch of links with no explanation about how they relate to the post, I usually don’t post those. And, finally, I don’t post unnecessary foul language (an occasional word might slip in when it is part of a more informative comment).
I apologize for not posting comments as fast as you might like, but I usually head out to my farm chores or other activities and don’t get back to RRW sometimes until the following morning. I can’t post your comments for you!
Recently an incident occurred where I was accused of posting a chain of personal e-mails in a comment thread to a post three years ago.
After discussing the issue with WordPress, I was told it was a “pingback” from something I had linked. I was reminded by the WordPress tech people that I cannot post a comment for someone else.
Occasionally people tell me they can’t get a comment to post for some reason and they send it to me to post. The problem is (and WordPress re-confirmed) that if I post the comment for you, it will be posted under my name and not yours!
I explained all of that to my accuser who very publicly charged (after I explained what happened) that I posted an e-mail discussion from a private e-mail group that I am not even a member of.
And, when my accuser brought it to my attention, I immediately took down the whole post because it was impossible to remove only that exchange.
With ‘friends’ like these….
It was never clear to me what my motive might be in purposely posting an e-mail thread that would have looked like gibberish to my readers.
My accuser also charged that I should have seen the chain of e-mails sooner. I never posted/moderated them, so I never saw them. As of yesterday I have written 9,206 posts in nearly 11 yearsand am not in the habit of revisiting comment threads at posts from years ago (or recent ones for that matter!).
So to my faithful readers and wannabe readers…. I’m sorry if you can’t subscribe, or are having difficulty getting comments to come through to me. I have no control, or even any great understanding, of what goes on behind the scenes with my WordPress host.
And, LOL! I so much prefer researching and writing posts that might increase your understanding of a complex issue, then to figuring out the mechanics that make it possible for my work to reach readers!
Thanks for continuing to read RRW!
Italy is headed to the political right and George Soros can’t stand it!
Soros’ worldwide push to eliminate borders is backfiring as citizens with national pride push back through the election process!
Of course the driving force for that rightward political swing is the increased anger by the electorate there about how Italy is carrying an unfair (yes!) burden as a key landing zone for the invasion from Africa.
Buy them off! Send money, says Soros, who just recently has abandoned his efforts to ‘change’ his former home country of Hungary. Viktor Orban’s very public campaign (backed by the electorate there) against Soros has succeeded. Continue reading “George Soros wants EU to pay-off Italy to influence Italian voters in migrants controversy”→
Don’t you just love it when the Left leaning media pounces on a number given by a Senator they obviously despise, does a “fact check,” proclaims him “wrong” in a headline and proceeds then to reveal some facts to show that he was pretty darn close when he said 56% of Australian Muslims are not in the labor force. Here is the story at ABC News Australia with some very interesting facts about the pathetic numbers of Muslims working in that country. Conclusion: Muslim women (home cranking out babies) are dragging their numbers down! Continue reading “Media "fact checks" Senator who said more than half of Muslims in Australia are not in the labor force”→
