In mid March we reported that the UN’s International Organization for Migration had halted refugee travel due to the virus crisis, so imagine my surprise this morning when I checked the data for the last two weeks of March and learned we admitted 221 regular refugees and 373 Special Immigrant Visas from Afghanistan in those two weeks.
For the entire month of March we admitted 1,110 regular refugees and 844 SIVs mostly from Afghanistan that are treated just like refugees except some can choose where they want to live in the US.
So we can’t safely fly, but nearly 2,000 ‘refugees’ were being flown into the US during March.
The refugee admissions program is scheduled (so far) to resume this week after April 7th, but it never really stopped!
Here is where the 1,110 were placed in March:
Top ten ‘welcoming’ states are: TX, OH, NY, IL, WA, KY, MA, CA, MO, and TN.
Now see this map (below) for where the 221 regular refugees were placed since the supposed suspension of travel. They must have been transported across America on near empty flights.
The vast majority of the arrivals in the last two weeks are from the DR Congo (161). See my post about how many we have now taken since Obama agreed to take tens of thousands of Congolese. We are way past 50,000 but they are still coming!
More unemployed and more hungry mouths to feed as America suffers…..
Editor: I’m not planning on posting anything today because I must try to answer some of your many e-mails and comments.
However, I just came across this information from the Refugee Council USA(the lobbying arm of the refugee industry) that explains in great detail (and with links) how trillions will be distributed and how immigrants and refugees can get their piece of the pie.
The first thing I thought of when I read this postby an Italian man who describes how Italy is gone was whatever happened to that proposed Chinese meatpacking plant in Montana?
As described by author Giacomino Nicolazzo the COVID disaster for Italy has its roots in the deals between the Leftists running the Italian government and the Chinese who were furiously buying up one industry after another primarily in the Italian north.
A recipe for disaster?
Along with those purchases of major industries they were sending in Chinese workers, many from Wuhan, to help run their new acquisitions. It is long, but well worth reading because it makes sense.
What Montana Chinese slaughterhouse you ask?
Senator Steve Daines
This one! I told you about it in 2017when Montana ranchers and their US Republican Senator Steve Daineswere cooking up a trade deal with China that would see the export of Montana beef to China.
But, someone figured it would be so much easier if the Chinese actually ran a meat packing facility right there in Montana.
Take the time to read what I said about the deal in 2017.
“It’s a really smart place for China to put in investment and to partner with Montana to have a really good packing industry and processing plant here.”
(Fred Wacker, rancher)
Here is one thing I said in that post:
I suppose there is one bright side–unlike Chobani Yogurtin nearby Idaho, I doubt the Chinese owners will approve of Muslim workers in light of their clear historical animosity to the ‘religion of peace.’ I can just see the mess when the Chinese company gets hit with some discrimination lawsuits when they say “NO” to Somali workers.
Heck, maybe they will insist on bringing in Chinese workers!
(Prescient wouldn’t you agree!)
So then what happened to the scheme?
I looked around today and the best answer I could find was that the deal began to fizzle when Trump’s trade war with China began.
Nevertheless in the summer of 2018, Montana cattlemen were still dreaming that they would see a giant Chinese meat plant in ‘Big Sky’ country.
Montana hopes for beef deal with China’s JD.com despite Trump’s trade
HELENA, Montana – Montana officials are hoping that a blockbuster deal with Chinese retail giant JD.com to export local beef will be possible despite the US Government’s escalating trade war with China.
“We are still talking,” Jay Bodner, executive vice-president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSA), said.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Tuesday, Bodner said the win-win deal inked last November in Beijing is not dead in the water, despite a 25-percent tariff on $34 billion of imports from China imposed by the Trump administration last Friday.
Beijing’s expected response – an additional 25-percent import tax on top of an existing 12-percent hike – was hard for Montana to digest, especially in light of the pending JD.com deal.
“There is a pretty high level of concern,” Bodner, a rancher from eastern Montana who has been with the MSA for 16 years, said.
Comparing JD.com to America’s Amazon.com, he said the Chinese internet giant’s commitment to spend up to $100 million to build Montana’s largest meat processing facility was still on the table.
There are some stories floating around that CEOs of some of America’s largest corporations are taking pay cuts to help keep more of their lower level workers on the job as the COVID-19 crisis continues. Here is one from Forbes published two days ago.
David Miliband President and CEO of the Manhattan-based ‘charity’ International Rescue Committee. Are they reducing salaries to help the refugees they brought to America?
At the same time we are learning that the refugee agencies continue to be shuttered (staff reduced) and refugees are struggling. See refugees struggling inBowling Green, KY and in Durham, NC.
So this morning I am wondering if ‘moneybags’ Miliband and other CEO’s of leading ‘charitable’ refugee agencies were giving up large salaries to help especially the refugees they have been dropping off across America for decades. And, to save some of their low level employees from getting the budget ax.
(If the Form 990 doesn’t open, visit Guidestar,here.)
If they and others of the nine refugee contractors have begun to reduce salaries of their top employees, let me know so I can report their humanitarian generosity toward the most vulnerable among us.
To be fair, David Miliband has the most outrageous salary of the ‘non-profit’ groups changing America by changing the people, but 6-digit salaries are the norm in the refugee industry.
As I have said on many previous occasions, salaries would be none of our business if the organization was not living almost entirely on taxpayer dollars.
That is the gist of this story fromProPublica (a Leftwing publication), which reports on how the virus is creeping into slaughterhouses across the country.
However, meat industry reps are optimistic that the virus will not slow meat production and that the virus won’t end up in the food supply.
Longtime readers know that Big Meat has been changing America one town at a time as it relies heavily on immigrant and refugee labor and as such has been a favorite topic of mine here at RRW since 2008 when I first learned that Bill Clinton was helping supply his meatpacking buddies with refugee labor from Bosnia.
What Happens If Workers Cutting Up the Nation’s Meat Get Sick?
As meatpackers rush to meet demand, their employees are starting to get COVID-19. But some workers say they’re going to work ill because they don’t have paid sick days and can be penalized for staying home.
Here’s what has happened in the meatpacking industry in the last week alone:
A federal food safety inspector in New York City, who oversaw meat processing plants, died from the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
A poultry worker in Mississippi, employed by America’s third largest chicken company, tested positive for the virus, causing a half-dozen workers to self-quarantine. Another worker in South Dakota, employed by the world’s largest pork producer, also tested positive.
In Georgia, dozens of workers walked out of a Perdue Farms chicken plant, demanding that the company do more to protect them.
Can they keep up with the demand? “Grocery meat sales, excluding deli meat, surged a staggering 77% for the week ending March 15.”
And Tyson Foods told ProPublica on Friday that “a limited number of team members” had tested positive for the disease.
As COVID-19 makes its way across the country, leading to panic grocery buying in state after state, the stresses on the nation’s food supply chain have ratcheted ever higher. But in industries like meatpacking, which rely on often grueling shoulder-to-shoulder work, so have the risks to workers’ health.
In interviews this week, meat and poultry workers, some in the country without authorization, noted with irony that they have recently been labeled “essential” by an administration now facing down a pandemic. Yet the rules of their workplaces — and the need to keep food moving — pressure them to work in close quarters, even when sick.
[….]
Many of the nation’s meatpackers declined to respond to specific questions about how they’ve dealt with infected workers or what they’ve done to try to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in their plants. Or they offered vague assurances that workers are being protected.
So far, only two meatpacking companies — Tyson Foods and Cargill — have announced companywide temperature checks to screen employees for signs of the virus. Two more say they have begun rolling them out.
But except for unionized plants, meat and poultry workers rarely get paid when they’re sick. At many companies, including Tyson, workers receive disciplinary points for calling in sick. Because points lead to termination, workers told ProPublica, they and some of their colleagues have continued to work even when sick, despite the coronavirus.
[….]
Even before the coronavirus, the meat industry had complained of a labor shortage as low pay and harsh conditions collided with a tight labor market, tighter borders and dramatic reductions by the Trump administration in the number of refugees, who make up the backbone of many plants’ workforce.
[….]
“Our primary focus is to keep our plants running so that we can feed America,” Tyson’s president, Dean Banks, said on CNN. “We’re running the plants as hard as we can.”
And some analysts note that even if an outbreak of the virus forced a plant to close, the industry — with more than 500,000 employees at 4,000 slaughterhouses and processing plants across the country — is big enough to absorb the loss.
There is much more, it is a long article, continuehere.
In the summer of 2016 I traveled around the midwest and west to have a look at meatpacking towns and how the cheap labor demands of Big Meat were changing America.
My conclusion:
If you can’t live without meat, my recommendation is to find a local producer so you know just where and how your food has been processed.
“Our primary focus is to keep our plants running so that we can feed America,” Tyson’s president, Dean Banks, said on CNN. “We’re running the plants as hard as we can.”