Carrot-tasting classes for refugees cut due to 'unaccompanied minors' taking all the federal cash

Update: No sooner had I posted this then an update arrives: The money has been restored and carrot-tasting class will resume! (Click here for the happy ending!)

One thing we have to thank these ‘unaccompanied alien minors’ for is exposing the three-decades-old Refugee Resettlement program of the US State Department to public scrutiny.

Here is yet another whiny story, this one featuring refugees in Washington state under the care of contractor World Relief. I bet you didn’t know you were funding classes so that new refugees could discover the joys of eating carrots in America. And, now this special program may be cut because the invading “children” are gobbling up all the federal cash.

This is my question—are there no Evangelical Christians (World Relief is an Evangelical federal contractor) or Catholics who could use their charitable time and teach refugees the vital information about carrots and thus leave the federal taxpayer out of the loop?

From the Inlander:

“We came here because we have to save our lives,” she says, sitting next to her husband. Now, they’re tasting raw carrots from a paper boat, seated at a long table surrounded by posters about the Founding Fathers, with people chatting in four languages. [Where is Saturday Night Live or Jon Stewart!—ed]

Refugees like Farwah Rubab and Syed Mubashar Abbas from Pakistan come here, to World Relief’s headquarters in Spokane, for answers. Not only do they get help finding housing, schooling and jobs, but they can attend workshops on the essentials: banking, interacting with law enforcement and today, cooking healthy food.

[….]

Though the much-covered influx of unaccompanied children at the southern border is 1,500 miles away from this classroom, the two are unavoidably linked by a pot of federal funding increasingly under stress.

Last month, the federal government halted funding to states for “refugee resettlement assistance” — the money that pays for these classes — because it needed that money to address needs at the border. In Spokane, World Relief, a nonprofit that helps resettle refugees, uses its $89,500 allotment to pay staff to help refugees apply for permanent residency and to organize these classes. The nonprofit Catholic Charities gets $35,500 from the contract to provide similar services. About $1 million in funding was cut for the current quarter.

Boo-hoo-hoo! If this keeps up there may be staff layoffs! Offices may close and the trickle down could crash the economy of Spokane (and refugees will not enjoy the culinary delights of America, the healthy delights of course!).

As I have said previously, no sympathy here for the contractors***. They lobbied Congress for amnesty for illegal aliens, what did they think might happen if tens of thousands of new ones arrived overnight. Did they think that the Washington money tree would just grow more money?

***The federal refugee resettlement contractors (I suspect grant recipient big dogs Baptist Child and Family Services and Southwest Key Programs are now devouring all the federal cash):