Day: January 23, 2020

Knowledge is Power VI: Secrecy is Standard Operating Principle for VOLAGs

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 5 Comments

Editor:  This is the next installment of my ‘Knowledge is Power’ series designed to help new readers and interested media get up to speed on how the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program works (because I simply can’t answer all of the incoming e-mails!).

As I told you in ‘Knowledge is Power I,‘ VOLAG stands for Voluntary Agency and is the acronym favored over the years by the nine federal refugee contractors*** that monopolize all refugee resettlement in the US.

This 2012 GAO study revealed that the VOLAGs were not holding regular stakeholder meetings to consult with local agencies and elected officials. https://www.gao.gov/assets/600/592975.pdf

My plan this morning was to expound on two things the VOLAGs don’t want you to know about and those are local “stakeholder” meetings and R & P Abstracts, but as I went back through literally dozens of posts over the years on those two supposed opportunities for citizens to find out what is happening to your resettlement sites, your towns (see the present sites here), I realized it is way too much for new readers to absorb.

Just know this about the quarterly stakeholder meetings that your local subcontractors are supposed to be holding in your community—you will have a helluva time getting into one!

The meetings are to ‘consult’ with various agencies that must interface with the new refugees—like the school system and the health department—but they don’t want you, the taxpayer, the ultimate stakeholder, to be in attendance.  Interestingly, they will often invite former refugees, leaders of local ethnic groups.

In ‘Knowledge is Power I’ I told you how to find your state refugee coordinator.  Call him or her and ask when the various subcontractors (call them refugee agencies) in your state will be holding their upcoming quarterly stakeholder meetings and try to get in.  The state coordinator is supposed to be the go-between for the state, the citizens and the feds (and their contractors).

If you can’t get in, if the meeting is barred to you, then make sure your county or city elected officials will be there.  If local elected officials are not attending these planning meetings, then it is a dereliction of their duty as your representative.

As a matter of fact, right now as you are contacting county commissioners about whether they will consider opting-out of the refugee program this year as part of the President’s reform initiative, ask them if they have ever attended a “stakeholder meeting.”

Use my search window for “stakeholder meetings” and see what I have said over the years.

Now to the R & P Abstracts….

You might call them planning documents that the VOLAGs must submit to the US State Department each year for your town or city.  Of course the contractors don’t want you to see them. But, they are fascinating because they actually list the amenities your community has to offer new refugees—one of my favorites is when they mention the great mental health facilities locally available.

Ask your state refugee coordinator for recent abstracts for each VOLAG working in your state.  You might get older ones, but if they give you a recent one, I would be stunned.

Or, if you know the refugee subcontractors working near you then call and ask directly for recent R & P Abstracts and when their next quarterly stakeholder meeting will be!

Just to show you how secretive the VOLAGs are, I’m posting a 2015 letter leaked to me in which contractor World Relief tells its staff to NOT give out any Abstracts to anyone who calls!

(Refugee Council USA is the lobbying arm for the refugee industry.)

From: Casey Leyva
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2015 5:07 PM
Subject: Potential Anti-Refugee Contacts

Dear Office Directors,

We’ve heard recently from other members of RCUSA (Refugee Council USA) that local affiliates have been contacted by individuals questioning the U.S. refugee program. This is a result of an interview Ann Corcoran, a blogger who runs Refugee Resettlement Watch, with a local news station in Minnesota. She has told her followers to to ask you for your R&P abstract – please do not send it. And please let us know if you are contacted.

Finally, please don’t go searching for this woman’s blog. I give you her information so you know if and when someone calls that this is the same topic. Here are Scott’s tips on interacting with these types of blogs:

Here is an important remember of how blog analytics work. Remember that what feeds the beast essentially are clicks. Ever hear the term “click-bait”? Seeing something in your Facebook feed that says “Velociraptor eats Skittles and your mind will be blown at what happens next!”, would be a dramatized example of that. In other words, while we all don’t really like anything this blogger has to say, every time we share the link, she gets a click. Bloggers have some very useful tools. They are able to tell when people read articles, what they are interested in, and what they search for on the blog. The more times this article is shared, the more the blogger will think they are onto something here and post more about it. Just as a news organization may hammer on a specific story, not because it is a great story, but because it builds up ratings and viewership. What can be done about this?

The best thing I recommend is if a blog such as this is posted by ForRefugees (Chris C.) or Refugee Resettlement Watch (Ann C.) and we believe it is worth sharing for FYI, that the person who locates it simply copy and paste the text from the blog into the e-mail. This will ensure that the clicks are limited. It will get 1 or 2 clicks from WR, versus 20 clicks. Those add up.

Casey Leyva
R&P Program Manager

7 E. Baltimore Street
Baltimore, MD 21202
T 443.451.1916
E cleyva@wr.org
www.worldrelief.org

Of course it made me laugh to see that they were telling their employees to NOT visit RRW because I wouldn’t get so many ‘clicks’ that way.  In fact, for me, the clicks don’t matter as RRW is not monetized (with advertising etc.).

I suspect the real motivation was to keep their staff from learning some things they might not know.

I’ve posted that letter to show you just how much the contractors want to continue to operate in secrecy—something they have enjoyed for decades.

After all, to them you are just a bunch of “deplorables” while they are the smart, elite, good people who know what is best for your community and for America.

 

***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.

A ‘religious’ message from CWS one of three federally funded contractors suing to stop the President’s effort to reform the UN-driven Refugee Admissions Program.

And, they do not limit their advocacy toward only legal immigration programs, but are heavily involved in supporting the lawlessness at our borders.

The question isn’t as much about refugees per se, but about who is running federal immigration policy now and into the future?  

(I plan to say this once a day from now on! Oops! I missed yesterday!)

I continue to argue that these nine contractors are the heart of America’s Open Borders movement and thus there can never be long-lasting reform of US immigration policy when these nine un-elected phony non-profits are paid by the taxpayers to work as community organizers pushing an open borders agenda.