Month: July 2020

Virginia: Ethiopian Community Development Council Prez Speaks Out Against Trump Admin

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“We are disheartened by the policies of the current administration.”

(Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the Ethiopian Community Development Council)

The legacy media is filled these days with stories about how refugees are having a tough time in America coping with the Chinese Virus—so commonsense would dictate that we don’t bring anymore until Americans are back on their feet. Right!

What interested me in this news from Arlington, VA isn’t so much about how refugees are coping, but that it features the Ethiopian Community Development Council one of the nine major refugee contractors operating in America.

I’ve been writing this blog for 13 years, and they have hardly made a blip on my radar screen because they seem to have chosen to keep a low profile.  I haven’t seen them out protesting Donald Trump, filing lawsuits against him or otherwise whining to the media about how they have to fire staff and close offices until now.

The ‘Our man in Arlington’ column by Charlie Clark (whoever he is) at the Falls Church News Press featured ECDC yesterday in a column about how (you guessed it) refugees are coping with the COVID lockdown.

The Supreme Court on June 25 okayed the Trump administration’s policy of limiting the number of asylum seekers in the country by denying them court appeal rights.

That decision came just days after the worldwide marking of the United Nations-sponsored World Refugee Day, June 20. And it comes after President Trump spent the past three years aiming to reduce total refugee levels to zero.

Most likely to feel the impact locally is the Arlington-based Ethiopian Community Development Council Inc., the refugee-support and State Department-authorized transition agency with offices just off Columbia Pike.

I was alerted that this sub-sector of Arlington’s diverse population is among those hit hardest by the coronavirus lockdown. So I logged on last week to several Zoom conversations with the nonprofit’s far-flung constituents.

Today’s immigration landscape is a far cry from the 1970s when Arlingtonians (mostly) opened our doors to refugees from the Vietnam War. And the current push to restrict America’s benefits to those born here distances us from our classic international role as a beacon for victims legitimately escaping violence and tyranny.

A rare public comment about our President by Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the “donation-supported council”:

In 2012 Obama named Teferra a CHAMPION OF CHANGE! https://theethiopiantimes.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/white-house-highlights-dr-tsehaye-teferra-as-a-champion-of-change-and-trailblazer-in-american-diaspora-communities/

“The current policy of the Trump administration with regard to refugees represents a departure from the foundational ideals that established this country as a place of refuge for those that are in need of protection and safety,” said the statement from Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the donation-supported council. “We are disheartened by the policies of the current administration.”

Teferra founded the counsel in 1983, focusing at first on Ethiopians in the Washington area, but eventually expanding to all refugee groups for help in resettlement, languages, employment and education.

I take issue with the columnist’s characterization of ECDC  being a donation-supported council unless you consider tax payer funding as a ‘donation.’

So, I did what I normally do under these circumstances and headed to Guidestar  to have a look at their most recent Form 990.  Gee, what a surprise! ECDC  is almost completely federally funded and Dr. Teferra pulls down a comfy salary thanks to US taxpayers and Donald Trump.

$12 Million in Government Grants! Total income $13 Million!

 

Nice work if you can get it!

 

 

CIS: No Evidence of COVID Screening or Quarantine for Arriving Refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, as of June 17th, the UN/IOM has begun processing refugees to be distributed throughout the west after a brief suspension of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.

Checking the data at the Refugee Processing Center, I see that we have admitted another 121 refugees in the two weeks since the hold on resettlement was lifted. In another couple of weeks we should be seeing that number jump as plane tickets are distributed in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Central and South America.

Just so you know the largest ‘welcoming’ states were California, Illinois and Florida.  Here is where they went:

During the worst health and economic crisis America has faced in many of our lifetimes, more poor and possibly sick refugees are being flown into a town near you!

 

Now to Nayla Rush’s excellent analysis of the health and economic consequences of moving more third worlders to America amid the arguably unprecedented time in US history when every American is worried about getting sick and terrified about being unemployed.

The whole issue of refugee health has been given short shrift throughout the entire time I’ve been writing RRW, so it is no surprise that health concerns are not given serious consideration now! 

I have 376 posts in my ‘health issues’ category and figured that it would take some rich peoples’ kids coming home with TB before the public would wake up to what we are doing.

From the Center for Immigration Studies:

Refugee Placement and Medical Concerns Amid a Covid-19 Pandemic and an Economic Crisis

Contagious diseases are key in the determination of inadmissibility to the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires all refugees applying for U.S. immigration to receive a medical screening to determine inadmissibility on health grounds.11 Specific health-related conditions that pose a threat to public health (called Class A conditions) are grounds for inadmissibility when identified during the medical examination overseas. One class A condition is pandemic flu. New diseases can be added to the list by executive order of the president of the United States. President Trump has yet to update that list with the Covid-19 virus.

Quarantine regulations apply to everyone trying to enter the United States — whether legally or illegally — including refugees. Federal isolation and quarantine are authorized for several communicable diseases, including “severe acute respiratory syndromes; and influenza caused by novel or re-emerging influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic.”12 (Emphasis added.)

There is no indication that refugees are being tested for the Covid-19 virus overseas or placed under quarantine upon arrival. We know, for instance, that no special pre-departure Covid-19 precautions or testing seem to have been put in place for those refugees coming from Manus Island and Nauru. When asked about this issue, the Australian Home Affairs spokesperson remained vague, referring to general U.S. mandated pre-departure preparations. Father Giorgio Licini, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Papua New Guinea & Solomon Islands, said that “the men did not undergo coronavirus isolation in preparation for their departure.”13 We can assume this to be true of all refugees admitted during this crisis.

But even if they were, why welcome thousands of refugees in the midst of a health and economic crisis?Especially when we know that, on top of being vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus, refugees have specific health needs since they usually come from situations of poor hygienic conditions and health systems with a wide range of unmet health needs (including nutritional deficiencies, hepatitis B infection, tuberculosis infection, parasitosis, etc.) and mental health concerns such as alcohol and drug abuse.14 These health concerns can strain U.S. health and social systems, which are already overwhelmed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Resettlement agency representatives determine where refugees are resettled in the United States (usually, and for practical reasons, in states that host their local affiliates). They decide in which state to place a refugee, officially, in an attempt “to match the particular needs of each incoming refugee with the specific resources available in U.S. communities.”15 But how can states like New York, Michigan, and others (who had to deal with stringent stay-at-home orders, large numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths, rising unemployment, and limited medical capacity and resources such as hospital beds, ventilators, testing etc.) embrace the arrival of refugees into their communities? Were state and local health officials notified of the placement of refugees? Were state residents — who are being asked to continue making enormous sacrifices — informed of such arrivals and risks?

Moreover, how can refugees achieve “self-sufficiency” in the United States when states are just now coming out of lock-down, businesses are going bankrupt, and the employment situation for both immigrants (legal and illegal) and the native-born is disastrous following April and May employment figures?16 Are they just to rely on parts of the relief funds and resources of the CARES Act that are made available to refugees?

[….]

This report will cover the following points:

Refugee arrivals by nationality and destination since the creation of the president’s Coronavirus Taskforce;

Timeline of announcements by world health authorities and the U.S. government in response to Covid-19;

Placement of refugees in American communities: who gets to decide in which states refugees are resettled;

State and local say in the resettlement process, especially when state residents are asked to make important sacrifices amid a health and economic crisis;

Medical screening of refugees before and after resettlement: inadmissibility to the United States on health-related grounds, overseas medical examination of refugees to determine admissibility, domestic medical examination for newly arriving refugees in the United States, medical examination for adjustment of status;

Refugees’ specific health needs;

Access to healthcare and benefits in the United States; and
Relief funds and resources available to refugees following the CARES Act.

You know intuitively that this is insane—welcoming poor/unhealthy people to America right now—but, if you are looking for some facts go here to read Rush’s whole heavily-footnoted report.

Refugee Resettlement Watch is 13 years old today!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
This is the artwork the Southern Poverty Law Center commissioned when they labeled me an ant-Muslim extremist in 2016. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/04/20/splc-takes-down-their-field-guide-to-anti-muslim-extremists/

It’s kind of crazy isn’t it—for 13 years I’ve been working to inform the American public about the US Refugee Admissions Program on almost a daily basis.  I say almost because as many of you know the speech police succeeded in forcing RRW off the internet about this time last year for a brief period.

I’m too lazy to write anything new.  What do I say? When I started this effort in the summer of 2007 I assumed it was something that would last a few months.  9,487 posts later, I’m still doing this!

So, because I am lazy and want to get onto the news of the day, I figured I would post my ‘About’ page here because I suspect most of you don’t visit RRW directly and may not have ever seen it.

About RRW…..

Prior to 2007 I had no interest in the refugee issue, heck, I had no idea there even was any controversy.

Of course I knew there were refugees moving around the world, but I had no clue that the US government was actively working with the United Nations to select refugees from third world countries and then was quietly placing them in small and medium-sized cities in most of the fifty states.

That is, until a stir was created in the rural county where I live in Western Maryland.

To make a very long story short, I learned that the Virginia Council of Churches , working for New York City-based Church World Service, had been quietly placing refugees in our county.

I wanted to know if the people of Washington County had any say in the matter, and who told a Virginia church group that they could place an economic burden on a Maryland! county that had a lot of burdens already.

Our local paper, the Herald Mail, had no interest in explaining to our citizens how the program, which I had just learned was the US State Department’s US Refugee Admissions Program, worked.  I implored the paper to investigate and report facts to help tamp down a growing anger as more people had questions about how the decision was made and who would pay for the needs of the impoverished refugees.

Click here for a post I wrote in 2007 explaining how I asked the Herald Mail to publish a thorough report on the refugee program.  I think you will see that the questions I asked were reasonable and ones any sensible person would ask.

Ultimately a public meeting was held, Hagerstown city and Washington County citizens were not happy, and within weeks the US State Department sent the Virginia Council of Churches back to Virginia.

All of that history (and subsequent mentions of those early days) is cataloged in a category I called ‘September Forum’ for anyone who is interested in the history.

I launched Refugee Resettlement Watch in July 2007 simply as a place to archive everything I was learning (after the Herald Mail refused to inform citizens) about a subject that had so intrigued me.

If you are new to RRW, you need to know that I don’t work for anyone!  And, I am not paid for my volunteer work!

I’m just a citizen who believes that taxpaying Americans have every right to know how a government program works and so have spent the last 12 13 years (writing almost every day!) on this one very dysfunctional and frankly destructive program.

By the way, I didn’t start out thinking the program itself was dangerous for the future of our country, I was initially only concerned with how dysfunctional and unfair it is.

Unfair because local people had no say in how their community was being changed by bureaucrats in Washington!

I have nearly 9,000 posts [today it is 9,487] archived here in which I explain the program, educate about what is happening around the US, and report on refugee problems around the world.

Then in late 2018, I became discouraged.

After the President had been in office for nearly two years, I didn’t see the major reforms being initiated that I had hoped for.  Yes, he drastically cut the numbers of refugees arriving, but he left the structure of the program firmly in place.

And, he signaled that no major changes would be made by continuing to fund all nine federal refugee contractors (like the arrogant and politically Progressive Church World Service responsible for refugee placement in my county) even as they had many fewer refugees to ‘care for.’

I posited, and still do, that if no major reform of the program is made during Trump’s tenure in the White House, the program will be put on steroids as soon as he is gone. [Biden is eager to make that happen, see here yesterday.]

Indeed, the refugee industry will demand of the new President that the numbers being admitted should be increased tenfold to make up for what they will call the “lost Trump years.”

In the fall of 2018, I figured it was time for me to do something else, so at the first of the year (2019), I launched a new blog—Frauds, Crooks and Criminals—in order to write about a broader range of issues that appealed to me.

If I was going to write every day, I figured I might as well have fun!

Although relatively inactive, Refugee Resettlement Watch was still available for citizens seeking an education about the refugee program, or so I thought!

In June of 2019 the blow came—a reader reported that RRW had been taken down!

I had no warning from my host of more than a decade— WordPress.com—which was destroying years of my work, and when I inquired they refused to tell me why now, after nearly 12 years of using their services, I was being kicked off of their platform.

This is censorship, plain and simple. I wrote about it here at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’

It was obvious that the speech police had finally found me as the Leftists and Open Borders Agitators (in the run-up to the 2020 elections) go about silencing anyone with views other than theirs—anyone who isn’t supportive of their mission of changing America by changing the people.

WordPress.com allowed me access to my posts in order to host my own blog, but I was not provided access to my subscribers or sadly not to most of my photos, graphs and charts that illustrated my posts.

I needed help!  What did I know about taking a hodge-podge of nearly 9,000 posts and putting them all back into some usable format?

However, thanks to help from Elbel Consulting Services, LLC, I rebuilt the blog and am hosting it on a secure server. I’m back!

Thanks for being here with me!

See my ‘Welcome Back’ post when I relaunched RRW on September 2, 2019.

Endnote:  Perhaps the greatest casualty of being removed without notice from the internet was my subscriber list.  Prior to being censored, I had thousands of subscribers.  WordPress.com did not give them back to me.  RRW is also increasingly hard to find via search engines so rebuilding a readership is a daunting task.