They are changing America by changing the people
Editor: From time to time I post comments more prominently that I think are important but would get little notice otherwise. This is a comment I received about my post two days ago, here.
Update October 19th: Don’t miss all the breaking news on St. Cloud today, here.
From St. Cloud Guy:
See more comments worth noting and guest posts, here.
That is a rally partially sponsored by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to be held in Washington, DC this coming week. (As of this writing they have 847 confirmed planning to attend, here.)
I told you about it here when the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was pushing its groupies to attend.
Curious about whether the other eight federal refugee contractors (some receiving nearly all of their funding from the US Treasury)*** were involved, I asked in that post if anyone knew.
I got my answer just now at twitter when the lobbying arm of the refugee industry (Refugee Council USA) put out this message:
So who are the members of the refugee lobbying consortium. Here they are:
***Check out those logos, below are the nine contractors. Where is Congress? Shouldn’t there be a law that if you take most of your funding from taxpayers, you shouldn’t be marching in the streets against the President and us!
Think about it! All nine contractors (the Catholic church included!) are telling their people to march against the President and for CAIR!
LOL! I’m on a roll today, energized by Ms. Wolfe!
Yesterday it was St. Cloud, MN and today it is Rutland, VT!
Getting the monkey off their backs!
Mayors and Councils across America, when confronted by citizens with questions and concerns about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, brush off citizens with the usual garbage line—it is a federal program and they have no role in it.
Yes, they do! The Refugee Act of 1980 did give local governments a role.
And, repeatedly the State Department has said they don’t send refugees to places where they are not wanted. Mayors and councils could go on record with their opinions, but at minimum they should be attending QUARTERLY STAKEHOLDER MEETINGS. And, they should be involved in preparing the annual R & P ABSTRACT (see post yesterday).
Here we have news from Rutland, VT where the previous mayor was ousted by voters for working secretly with a refugee contractor and the new mayor depends on getting his news from a state bureaucrat. Does he attend their meetings? I bet he is not even aware of the plan the contractor in Vermont sent to the US State Department not too long ago, let alone have seen it.
Shame on any mayors who are not intimately involved in preparing the plans submitted to the State Department each year for the city or town he/she is responsible for!
From the Vermont Digger
RUTLAND – Rutland has recently received word that the number of refugees an agency plans to resettle in the city in this fiscal year has been reduced from 100 to 75.
[….]
Rutland Mayor David Allaire said Thursday that litigation and court action nationally associated with the president’s immigration orders raises uncertainty over just how many refugees will actually be resettled in the city this year.
In the prior fiscal year, three families, totaling 14 refugees, resettled in Rutland. The plan had called for up to 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to resettle in the city by Sept. 30, about a year after the city had been designated a resettlement site by the U.S. Department of State.
Why weren’t the mayor and aldermen in on the planning process? Do they even have a copy of the final R & P Abstract? Denise should give it to them! Or, do they have it and aren’t sharing it with the public. Either way it is not good!
Denise Lamoureux, state refugee coordinator, recently sent an email Monday to leaders of community organizations in Rutland discussing the change.
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration “has approved a preliminary revised plan with an objective of 75 rather than 100 refugees for Rutland for federal fiscal year 2018 (10/1/17 to 9/30/18),” the email stated.
[….]
The issue of refugee resettlement had been a hot-button topic in Rutland during the mayoral election in March that saw Allaire win the job over longtime incumbent Christopher Louras.
The former mayor had been a strong supporter of the refugee resettlement program, while Allaire, then a veteran member of the city’s Board of Aldermen, had opposed it, citing a lack of transparency in the process. [Where is the transparency now?—ed]
For the past several months there has been little, if any, debate or discussion about refugee resettlement at city meetings.
“My feeling about this right along has been if indeed there are more families that are coming into Rutland, refugee resettlement families, I would welcome them as I would anyone else,” Allaire said Thursday. “This is a federal program, the Rutland government has no control over the numbers or anything else.”
See my Rutland archive, here. The major federal contractor operating in Vermont is USCRI. You will see a lot about them when you visit previous Rutland posts. Of all the arrogant contractors, they are near the top of my list!
And, don’t miss: Swamp not being drained so local citizen action required!
If they succeed they will be placing 27 more than they did in FY17 which ended on the 30th of September.
Checking Wrapsnet, here is a summary (below) of the refugees (mostly Muslims) who were placed by a subcontractor (Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota) of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service mothership located in Baltimore.
Refugees who went to St. Cloud in direct resettlement (there are no reliable numbers on secondary migrants) last year are below.
Secondary migrants are refugees placed elsewhere who migrate (legally!) on their own to another town or city.
Minnesota does have the highest number of secondary migrants in the country as we learned a few years ago when such information was published.
In FY17 St. Cloud received 198 of the 1,623 refugees resettled in the entire state.
Burma (4)
Ethiopia (19)
Iraq (9)
Somalia (166)
St. Cloud had the second highest Somali resettlement after Minneapolis (364).
This is the document that should be made available to the public BEFORE it goes to Washington. These numbers are determined by Lutheran Social Service in Minnesota (Harpstead’s organization) with the help of “stakeholders.” Stakeholders should include your local elected officials!
(See my post on St. Cloud yesterday)
Normally this document is kept from the general public, but we were fortunate enough to obtain it. Knowledge is power and that is the primary reason there is so little transparency with refugee resettlement. The feds and the contractors don’t want citizens to have all the facts!
Below are screenshots of the pages. Serious students should go to this post where I explained some of the numbers, categories etc. But, I am far from an expert!
Documents like this (reporting the capacity of your town to ‘welcome’ refugees and from where) come in to Washington from hundreds of towns and cities and are put together to become the basis for the Presidential determination which we know is a maximum 45,000 refugees for FY18 (which is now underway as of Oct. 1).
Again, knowledge is power!
I leave it to you, again with the help of this post to examine the plans that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in conjunction with the US State Department and the US Department of Health and Human Services have in the works for St. Cloud.
LOL! Do you see that line in the last chart about voluntary hours/miles? What that represents is the number of hours and the miles that volunteers put on their own vehicles converted to a cash value. The contractor uses that figure to show the federal government that they have put some skin in the game (it is supposed to be a public-private partnership after all). I wonder do volunteers know that they are worth money to the contractor?
Check out the actual cash from foundations/corporations in FY16 and the enormous jump estimated for FY18. Is that realistic? Can they just make up numbers?
Housing specialist? So the refugees get a housing specialist? Do just regular poor Americans get one from LSS of MN?
The most recent Form 990 for LSS of Minnesota is here (or see LSS financials page):
file:///C:/Users/Ann/AppData/Local/Temp/Lutheran%20Social%20Service%20of%20MN%20-%20Public%20Inspection%20Copy-1.pdf
Other contractors are operating in other cities in Minnesota. See here:
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/acb67-publicaffiliatedirectory1-6-17.pdf
Citizens in St. Cloud, see my complete archive on what I’ve reported about your city since 2008.
Concerned citizens elsewhere, go to the list of contractor/subcontractors I linked above. Call one near you and ask for the FY18 R & P Abstract (Reception and Placement Abstract). Ask your local elected officials—mayor and council—if any of them have ever seen the plans for their town/city?
Addendum! If you get a runaround complain to your elected officials in Washington—your member of Congress and US Senators. If they can’t (or won’t!) get it for you, then you have even more to complain about!
I confess I didn’t read the whole opinion piece in the New York Times as carefully as I should have (I have so little patience for this sort of excruciating hand wringing analysis).
But, I read far enough to know that the gist of the schism, between our two major political parties, has to do with the rapid racial and ethnic diversification of America with the Dems on the side of the ‘new Americans’ and showing little interest in helping white working class American citizens.
In fact one of those pontificating about how the Dems should proceed suggests that the Dems don’t hesitate to move in the direction of more catering to their immigrant base and forget the white working class altogether.
And then author, Thomas Edsall, mentions Paul Begala (remember him from the Clinton inner circle, Rush calls him the “forehead”) who is on the side of trying harder to reach the white working class.
Begala says something that I know many readers here will relate to (after you get past his painting of some whites as drunks and drug-addled).
Edsall at the NYT:
Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant and adviser to Bill Clinton, also comes back to the cultural breach between upscale Democrats and the white working class and poses this basic question:
If you look at the Democratic platform, or Hillary’s speeches on the economy, Democrats have a raft of good ideas, loads of sound policies that would make life better for the white working class. So why have they rejected us?
White working-class Americans are “dying before their time,” Begala wrote in an email, specifically citing the rise in alcoholism, cirrhosis, drug addiction, overdoses, suicide and poisoning:
Ain’t it the truth!
This post is filed in my ‘Laugh of the day’ category, here.
I have lived in St Cloud for a long time and I can’t believe how fast the city is going down. The housing market in St. Cloud is falling way behind all the surrounding cities because of the excessive refugee population. Also the schools have become some of the worst ones in the entire state of Minnesota. The Star Tribune estimated over 30% of St Cloud Apollo High School is Somalian now and the other high school St. Cloud Tech has a larger refugee population in its area. They have only been coming to St. Cloud in large numbers the last decade and a half. What will happen in another 10 years? Plus all the extra kids they have? 80%?
It’s very upsetting and frustrating that St. Cloud was a nice normal town that we could raise families here and go to decent schools. Now that is all gone and we have to take huge losses to sell our houses to get out of here. I really wish we would have a say in this since tax money is used for it. We almost have to move out of state, because any decent size city in Minnesota has or is starting to have problems with excessive refugees and poverty.
I don’t care if people want to migrate here but we need to stop paying for it with our tax money and let them get over here on their own and take care of themselves. That’s what all our ancestors did and that’s what made America so strong. At least that way the people that do migrate here on their own will be hard working and motivated to live the American dream not just sit at home collecting welfare checks and having babies.