But, continue reading! There is good news too! Wait for it!
Remember that I told you herethat North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Burgum went down the wimpy middle and said the state would take more refugees if local jurisdictions agreed. So it looks like Cass County has given the governor his green light.
Cass County Commissioners Vote Yes to Refugee Resettlement
Unless the governor changes his mind, North Dakota taxpayers will be continuing to prop up a 4-decades-old federal program that was never supposed to be a burden on local and state taxpaying citizens.
If you are a new reader, be sure to see animportant post yesterdaywhere I explain what the Open Borders Left is doing to smash the President’s September Executive Order that gives state and local government an opportunity to opt-in or opt-out of being a refugee placement city or county.
Now to some good news!
Cass County might have caved, but the citizens of Bismarck came out in force to urge their county commission to say NO! to more refugees and the commissioners decided to postpone the decision.
Before I give you the news, know that it was 11 degrees in Bismarck last night! Can you pull this off where you live?
BISMARCK — People came from all over Monday evening in the hopes of making their voice heard to the Burleigh County Commission.
Bismarck Mayor Steve Bakken was in attendance.
With a heavy police presence, you could feel the tension in the air as most of the crowd was there to convince the commission to vote against giving consent to Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota for a refugee settlement.
The consent is necessary after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September that requires state and local governments to give consent to whether they will accept refugees or not.
Some people KX News spoke with did not want that to happen.
“124 people statewide does not have an impact, however, if the 124 do a chain migration that could easily be 1,200. And in a state of 750,000 people, 1,200 is a lot,” said local resident Phillip Cohen, who’s against allowing the consent.
The problem was so many people turned up to the meeting, they couldn’t fit everyone inside, so in the interest of fairness, the commission decided to table the matter until a larger venue could be secured in the near future.
County Commission Chairman Brian Bitner
Brian Bitner is the chair of the commission and said he also has reservations about granting the consent for financial reasons.
“I haven’t seen anything in this package, anywhere, that tells me that we’re consenting to five or 50 or 500 or anything. So North Dakota is already the highest per capita state for refugee resettlement in terms of number of citizens, so in the absence of any sort of number, there’s no way we could know the cost to the state or the county, and I simply can’t support that,” said Bitner.
Opponents of the news said an increase in refugees could lead to a drain on government services and an increase in crime, something the pro-refugee crowd overwhelmingly denied.
[….]
But with no decision Monday, the clock is ticking, because agencies must submit their written consent by Jan. 21 or lose federal funds that could be used to reunite families and place refugees in places with jobs, and other supportive means.
As for the January 21 deadline, it is for the nine resettlement contractors and their subcontractors to have their plans submitted to the US State Department in order to get their federal funding. At that time they need to have written permission from the governor and from the county government, or the city (if applicable), in hand.
They are shooting to get those approvals by Christmas, so you must get moving where you live! As I’ll tell you in an upcoming post, the Leftwing refugee contractors and others in the Open Borders movement are putting every county in play! (Not just those withexisting sites, like these.)
This is not just a bureaucratic exercise!
The Left has made it into a referendum on Donald Trump’s refugee policies in an election year. The President is correct that state’s can choose whether to be a resettlement state or not. For us it is a referendum on state’s rights and whether local citizens will have a say in whether their communities will be changed (forever!).
Editor: Thanks to David James for another excellent analysis of the vital question about the resettlement of refugees in the US—do states have any right to say no to the placement of UN/US State Department selected refugees within their borders?
James says yes, and explains that a Migration Policy Institute paper by a legal expert confirmed that in 2011.
Indeed the original Refugee Resettlement Act of 1980 foresaw an opt-in and in practice that opt-in has been ignored for nearly 4 decades, Trump is attempting to fix that as I have been explainingin recent days.
The primary reason you should be involved now is that you should have a say in how your state and local taxes are spent (not some federally funded NGO operating out of New York City, Washington or Baltimore).
Soros Funded Immigration Think Tank Said States Can Reject Refugees
The self-described non-partisan Soros-fundedMigration Policy Institute (MPI), was light years ahead of President Trump about the limited authority of the federal government to force refugee resettlement in states which say no thanks.
In 2011, the MPI issued apaper titled, The Faltering U.S. Refugee Protection System: Legal and Policy Responses to Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Others in Need of Protection, written by lawyer Donald Kerwin, Exec. Dir. of Center for Migration Studies and former ED of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, a subsidiary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The USCCB is also one of the busiest federal resettlement contractors whose last available financial statement in 2017 showed $50 million dollars in federal grants comprising 94% of the USCCB budget for migration and refugee services.
States have rights!
Kerwin wrote that states need to say yes to refugees before the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees & Migration (PRM) resettles refugees in any state:
Resettlement agencies (many affiliated with VOLAGs] meet with state and local officials on a quarterly basis regarding the opportunities and services available to refugees in local communities and the ability of these communities to accommodate new arrivals. They also consult with the state refugee coordinator on placement plans for each local site. PRM provides ORR and states with proposed VOLAG placement plans. If a state opposes the plan, PRM will not approve it.
During a 2010 U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, testimony from Fort Wayne, Indiana and Clarkson, Georgia city officials stated that they had never been consulted or given notice by resettlement agencies or PRM about upcoming resettlement plans.
There’s plenty of evidence that even if these consultations actually take place, they only happen between like-minded bureaucrats and not with say, state legislators on the finance committees.
Remember too, that in states which have withdrawn from the resettlement program, the state refugee coordinator is typically an NGO which has its own refugee resettlement program heavily dependent on keeping the federal cash flowing to its bank account.
Another dirty little secret about refugee placements is that decisions about “capacity” at the local level for resettlement is left up to the federal contractors whose financial well-being is directly tied to how many refugees they can bring in during the fiscal year.
The US General Accounting Office found that “capacity” can pretty much mean anything the contractor wants it to mean including its own “long-term funding needs.”
It’s not clear what Kerwin’s basis was for his concession to a state’s authority to reject a proposed refugee resettlement plan. But Tennessee’s lawsuit offers a legally viable and coherent explanation – the federal government’s admission to shifting the costs of its refugee program to state governments in violation of the Tenth Amendment and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
Not only that, but the refugee resettlement program was designed originally as an opt-in. The 1980 Act has no language authorizing a replacement after state withdrawal but is structured as an opt-in program for states just like other federal spending programs. It wasn’t until 1994, that the state withdrawal/ORR replacement provisions were added to the regulations.
When a state chooses to withdraw from the federal program ORR, gave itself, by regulation, what the enabling legislation didn’t – the authority to appoint a replacement state designee. Importantly, appointing a replacement state designee, is permissive, not mandatory. In each state that has chosen to withdraw, however, ORR has appointed an NGO resettlement agency as the state’s replacement designee. This has resulted in forced state participation and forced state expenditures for the federal program.
President Trump’s Executive Order reads as if a state can override consent by local governments to bring in refugees. However, the operating details won’t be known until HHS and the State Department issue their guidance on the consent.
Of course, the activist judge who will be deciding the lawsuitbrought by the VOLAGs challenging Trump’s order will have to choose between following the law or legislating from the bench.
Local activists would do well to explain the real fiscal implications to their state legislators and governor of the state being forced to pay the federal freight that Congress has chosen to shift to the state, taking state funding priorities away from the state’s most vulnerable citizens.
