What are they going to do about it, apparently not much!
This is an exchange at the State Department’s daily press briefing yesterday about Iraqi refugees unhappiness and desire to go home to Iraq.
QUESTION: Do you have an update, perhaps, on Iraqi refugees asked about from yesterday?* Specifically, what can the U.S. Government do to help them here in the U.S. who are facing fears of losing their homes and —
MR. DUGUID (Gordan Duguid, acting department spokesman): Well, yes, I can tell you not what the government can do, but what the government is doing. Iraqi refugees receive the same resettlement benefits from the Department of State and the Department of Health and Human Services that are provided to all incoming refugees. All refugees are able to receive from the Office of Refugee Resettlement social services for up to 60 months, that is, five years. These services include employment services, employment assessment services and on-the-job training, English language instruction, vocational training, case management, translation and interpreter services.[Edit: I don’t see pay rent for 5 years in this list, most of this relates to finding work which, by all accounts, is nearly non-existent.]
QUESTION: If they do decide to return to Iraq, what can the U.S. do to help facilitate their return to Iraq or their re-integration into Iraq?
MR. DUGUID: I think that has to happen on a case-by-case basis. The question is what happens when they come to the United States should someone choose to return to their own country. That becomes an Iraqi question.
QUESTION: I mean, if someone has, you know, faced a fear, you know, letters threatening their lives or their families and they did come to the U.S. because of that with the assistance of the State Department and now wants to go back —
MR. DUGUID: I’m not in a position to adjudicate individual cases from the podium. I would refer you to the Department of Homeland – Health and – sorry, Health and Human Services to have a discussion on that.
Health and Human Services supplies the majority of the funding to the volags to care for refugees. Note, there is no mention of the logical answer. The State Department which brings the refugees into the country could easily turn the spigot off for awhile. But, if they do that they will get whacked by the 40 plus NGO’s who want more Iraqis in the US. No Iraqi refugees means less pay for some of those groups. It is a vicious cycle.
By the way, in reforms being urged by refugee promoters it is often stated that the volags (supposedly voluntary agencies) need a steady supply of refugees to keep their doors open. They cite the Vietnam era, the Cold War (Russia) era and Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war era as times when things were going well and their human supply lines flowed uninterrupted. Vietnam was a little differant though because this massive system of NGOs funded by the government was not fully in place. See the “reforms” spelled out in a UVA egghead law professor’s (David Martin) report here.
Where is AP reporter Matthew Lee? Long time readers will recall that Lee wrote story after story last year about the awful Bush Administration not allowing tens of thousands of the Iraqis into the US. Time for a follow-up story, Mr. Lee?
* Answers to questions yesterday are here. It appears to be a concise summary of many benefits refugees receive.