Category: Comments worth noting/guest posts

Personal Story From a Reader Reminds Me! It is now up to YOU!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When a reader sent me a link the other day to a story I had just written about, and another said the following in a comment:

States need to take it upon themselves to regulate immigration and refugee resettlement ..D.C. can not tell states what to do unless weak politicians allow it.

I knew that it was time to take a break from writing this blog.

It became clear that people aren’t reading and aren’t doing what they need to be doing if they really want to slow immigration and save their communities from becoming a depository for needy people from the third world.

We all want someone else to save us.

We expected President Trump to save us, but he could only do so much.

I’ve been here before.  I don’t want this post to get too long, but decades ago I became a conservative when the National Park Service working with preservation groups and local politicians wanted my farm and others nearby to be added to a national park.

Long story, it took years, but we prevailed. It required hard work gathering facts, publicizing them, and we had to weather a lot of public acrimony.

For a number of years, in the late 1980s into the early 1990s, I wrote a newsletter, LOL! the old fashioned kind that needed printing and mailing before we had such an easy way to get information out.  It was called Land Rights Letter and I wrote about the federal (communist!) land grab that was happening everywhere at the time.

Eventually I had to stop because people all over the country would call and ask me to help them save their land from the federal government.  I was here to give advice, but it would be up to them to do the work. And, I discovered that they really didn’t want to do what they needed to do, they wanted me to do it for them.

I don’t mean to pick on the reader who sent the comment above, but what the heck have I been writing about for these nearly 14 years at RRW?  And, who is electing weak politicians at all levels of government?

The Socialist Democrats have been working diligently at the local and state level to put their people in place and now here they are at the top of the heap almost everywhere.

So, I better get to my point!

It is now up to you! 

Update!  See my tutorial on how to compete with the Left!  I am going to add to it weekly and it will be available in my sidebar here at RRW and at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’

RRW is a resource for your education and hopefully the nearly 10,000 posts I’ve written since 2007 will be a resource as you do your local organizing.  If you are new, start researching my category ‘Knowledge is Power’ because having facts is the first requirement of local community organizing.

Local organizing is the only way you are going to slow the demographic change the Left has in store for you.  We lost Trump, Congress is a total waste, most governors are chickens, but maybe there is hope for your state legislature and your city government.

The most important place for you to get politically active is in your own home town where exposing what the local politicians have in store for you is the first action step you must take.

That brings me to Stephen’s story.  Stephen is a reader who sent me this report on what happened in his Texas home town.

He posted his comment to this post:

Court of Appeals Rules: YOU Have No Say in Whether YOUR Town Will Accept Refugees

Stephen….

I’m going to see if I can make this a quick story as alternatives to fighting this stuff seem slim.

I was aware of your site during the Obama years and there were other articles out there about the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule when this took place.

I received a letter from the zoning committee informing me that gas station/carwash/food mart was going up kitty corner to my property and if I wanted to object I had, I believe 10 days, to show up at the next meeting and make the objection. I was the only homeowner that had to be legally notified because of the proximity to the proposed building site.

We live in a small city of approximately 3,000 people and for the most part zoning laws are strict. You have to build on 3/4 of an acre lot minimum to get in or buy an existing home which is set up the same way. Anyway we have a gas station nearby where they wanted to build and another not far from it and both sell convenience items so this didn’t seem to make sense to add a third in between the two.

I went to the city’s web page and looked up the minutes from the city council meetings and, lo and behold,  I find a 55-page power point presentation for the building of what equates to small college-sized campus looking thing. Nice, snazzy looking plan and made up by a local college from the big city.

Essentially it’s about 10 large-sized apartment buildings with a proposed train station. (They’ve been trying to get light rail in this area for years but it keeps getting voted down, if this went through it might of been enough to revive that project).

The zoning change for the gas station/carwash/food mart thing is on the very edge of the foot print for this large development, not part of it, but they had to know about it, especially since they are from the west coast and this is Texas.

Also the only people who know about this here are a small handful that were at that city council meeting and no one else. Additional information on this: it is right across the train track is an industrial park so it’s kind of obvious that who ever was going to fill those apartment buildings would likely be working at that industrial park.

The major concern was that city was about to allow lower income people into the city. This new population would add about an easy one third to our population and could easily change the demographics of our city and instead of being a red district this could of been enough to change it to blue.

Word went out pretty quickly. No talk of race, refugees or anything like that because it was never mentioned by them so not by us either, but we fought this and beat it back based on a variety of issues, the foremost being how the city hadn’t really good answers for what they were trying to rush through.

The train station wasn’t a firm thing, sewer would be required, traffic congestion would become a problem and more. Basically people were just saying hell no, we live here to get away from the city and don’t want a city moved to us, which is what this was.

Bottom line is pay attention to what’s happening in your zoning and city council meetings. Raise the flag early or these things become unstoppable.

I’m not sure how a Biden EO would of effected this if it was announced up front, what the construction was for.

Currently the land is still undeveloped but the city has put together a master plan to avoid most of our concerns though there are still small cottage sized units of housing planned for (about half of the original plan) with out developers yet, so we could find ourselves back in the same or similar situation. [Stephen will be watching, I am sure!—ed]

 

Stephen told you the most important thing you can do now is to find out what is being planned in secrecy in your community.  It might not be a plan for refugees yet, but the housing he describes will, you know!, be back as long as the Dems control all levers of government. See Biden housing initiative described at The Federalist.

If you live anywhere near any of the towns and cities on the maps in this post below, or even within a hundred mile radius of one of them, they will place more refugees in your community.

Getting the information early, spreading the word to your fellow citizens, and creating a public outcry, as Stephen did, is all you have going for you at the moment. The resettlement agencies tend to stay away from potential resettlement sites if there is sufficient public opposition (I know that from personal experience), but the trick is to find out as early as possible what the plan is for your community. 

Hint! One thing you can do is to religiously follow your local government meetings and have someone join your local Interfaith group to get information because they will be the first to lobby for refugees for your town or city.

And, you better get to work booting the Dems from office, especially at the local level, or move to another part of America where you will be free of them (at least for now).

See the maps in this post:

During Trump’s Presidency Many Refugee Agency Affiliates Closed

 

I am not going away completely.  I’ll post here if something strikes me as vital, or of interest to me, to post. And, I’m still at Frauds and Crooks where I have more readers and more leeway to write on a variety of subjects because frauds and crooks are everywhere!

Comment worth noting: You never answer my e-mails and tweets

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 15 Comments

Reader Marcus says I never answer his e-mails and tweets.  He does have a point and it is something I feel awful about—it is just me here and if I answered every e-mail I receive every day, I would have no time to research and write stories and I would have no life at all.

So for that I continue to apologize and to be honest it is the fact that I can’t answer all of your e-mails that every day makes me want to hang it up after nearly 13 years of continuous posting either here or at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’

Here is Marcus (he says I won’t post his comment!).  By the way, I screen comments and I am awfully slow at getting to that job too. This is from yesterday.

We need a National Mandate on forced deportations for refugees and illegal aliens.

PS.. to the lady who runs this site, thanks for never answering my tweets and email.

You’re exactly like a politician, you care nothing about the people that support you.  [Support? How?—ed]

I know you’ll delete this comment too, liberals like you don’t like criticism.

He is right about twitter. I’ve slacked off on twitter lately.  It is all just a competition for who can post the most titillating tidbits aimed at a small segment of America.

As a volunteer writer I could hang around twitter or facebook for a big chunk of the day, tweeting, retweeting, commenting and so forth, or I could research and write posts.

Now, I’ll see what I think would be something that readers might like to hear about (would find useful) and at the same time is something I want to write about (whether I have readers like Marcus or not!).

Original Refugee Act: States have a Right to Opt-in or Opt-out of Refugee Admissions Program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

Editor:  Thanks to David James for another excellent analysis of the vital question about the resettlement of refugees in the US—do states have any right to say no to the placement of UN/US State Department selected refugees within their borders?

James says yes, and explains that a Migration Policy Institute paper by a legal expert confirmed that in 2011.

Indeed the original Refugee Resettlement Act of 1980 foresaw an opt-in and in practice that opt-in has been ignored for nearly 4 decades, Trump is attempting to fix that as I have been explaining in recent days.
The primary reason you should be involved now is that you should have a say in how your state and local taxes are spent (not some federally funded NGO operating out of New York City, Washington or Baltimore).

 

Soros Funded Immigration Think Tank Said States Can Reject Refugees

The self-described non-partisan Soros-funded Migration Policy Institute (MPI), was light years ahead of President Trump about the limited authority of the federal government to force refugee resettlement in states which say no thanks.

In 2016 George Soros pledged to give $500 million to promote migration. Forbes reports that one of the beneficiaries is the Migration Policy Institute. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerenblankfeld/2016/09/20/billionaire-george-soros-earmarks-500-million-for-migrants-and-refugees/#7815e75b3888

In 2011, the MPI issued a paper titled, The Faltering U.S. Refugee Protection System: Legal and Policy Responses to Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Others in Need of Protection, written by lawyer Donald Kerwin, Exec. Dir. of Center for Migration Studies and former ED of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, a subsidiary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCB is also one of the busiest federal resettlement contractors whose last available financial statement in 2017 showed $50 million dollars in federal grants comprising 94% of the USCCB budget for migration and refugee services.

States have rights!

Kerwin wrote that states need to say yes to refugees before the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees & Migration (PRM) resettles refugees in any state:

Resettlement agencies (many affiliated with VOLAGs] meet with state and local officials on a quarterly basis regarding the opportunities and services available to refugees in local communities and the ability of these communities to accommodate new arrivals. They also consult with the state refugee coordinator on placement plans for each local site. PRM provides ORR and states with proposed VOLAG placement plans. If a state opposes the plan, PRM will not approve it.

During a 2010 U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, testimony from Fort Wayne, Indiana and Clarkson, Georgia city officials stated that they had never been consulted or given notice by resettlement agencies or PRM about upcoming resettlement plans.

There’s plenty of evidence that even if these consultations actually take place, they only happen between like-minded bureaucrats and not with say, state legislators on the finance committees.

Remember too, that in states which have withdrawn from the resettlement program, the state refugee coordinator is typically an NGO which has its own refugee resettlement program heavily dependent on keeping the federal cash flowing to its bank account.

Of course, there is no accounting for the state taxpayer dollars being forcibly taken to pay for the federal program, even if a state has already withdrawn.

Another dirty little secret about refugee placements is that decisions about “capacity” at the local level for resettlement is left up to the federal contractors whose financial well-being is directly tied to how many refugees they can bring in during the fiscal year.

The US General Accounting Office found that “capacity” can pretty much mean anything the contractor wants it to mean including its own “long-term funding needs.”

It’s not clear what Kerwin’s basis was for his concession to a state’s authority to reject a proposed refugee resettlement plan. But Tennessee’s lawsuit offers a legally viable and coherent explanation – the federal government’s admission to shifting the costs of its refugee program to state governments in violation of the Tenth Amendment and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Not only that, but the refugee resettlement program was designed originally as an opt-in. The 1980 Act has no language authorizing a replacement after state withdrawal but is structured as an opt-in program for states just like other federal spending programs. It wasn’t until 1994, that the state withdrawal/ORR replacement provisions were added to the regulations.

When a state chooses to withdraw from the federal program ORR, gave itself, by regulation, what the enabling legislation didn’t – the authority to appoint a replacement state designee. Importantly, appointing a replacement state designee, is permissive, not mandatory. In each state that has chosen to withdraw, however, ORR has appointed an NGO resettlement agency as the state’s replacement designee. This has resulted in forced state participation and forced state expenditures for the federal program.

President Trump’s Executive Order reads as if a state can override consent by local governments to bring in refugees. However, the operating details won’t be known until HHS and the State Department issue their guidance on the consent.

Of course, the activist judge who will be deciding the lawsuit  brought by the VOLAGs challenging Trump’s order will have to choose between following the law or legislating from the bench.

Local activists would do well to explain the real fiscal implications to their state legislators and governor of the state being forced to pay the federal freight that Congress has chosen to shift to the state, taking state funding priorities away from the state’s most vulnerable citizens.

 

This post if filed in my Comments worth noting/guest posts category.

Tennessee: Knoxville’s City Council and Open Borders Mayor Begging Governor to Bring Them Refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 3 Comments

Editor:  This is a guest post by David James who recently explained how the Trump Executive Order will not do what we had all hoped.

 

Knoxville City Council has voted unanimously to beg Republican Governor Bill Lee for cheap refugee labor and directed their open borders mayor Madeline Rogero, “to send a letter to the U.S. secretary of state to share the city’s plans to participate “’in this very worthy program.”’

Will Governor Lee go-along-to-get-along with local city officials such as Mayor Rogero and join a small number of governors (only three!) who have told the White House that they want more refugees for their state?

BTW, Rogero is a BIG supporter of the anti-American TN Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC).

Governor Lee would be well advised to not go down the “compassionate conservative” route, remember who put him in office, and carefully study the issues raised in the Tennessee lawsuit.

He should pay particular attention to the long-arm reach the federal government has made into his state budget to pay for the federal resettlement program.

Federal reports have admitted to shifting costs associated with the refugee resettlement program to state and local governments.

Of course these urban lefties see no irony in the fact that the director of the federal contractor who heads up Bridge Refugee Services, was a refugee herself and now gets paid by taxpayers to bring refugees to Knoxville and Chattanooga.

Bridge Refugee Service*** contracts with national VOLAGs Church World Service and Episcopal Migration Ministries and like all contractors involved in the resettlement industry, relies on federal cash flow to keep their pipeline flush. [Church World Service recently joined forces with CAIR to demand that the White House admit more refugees to the US.—ed]

Bridge’s financial reporting has been spotty, but what is available shows what they are really worried about – contractors are paid for each individual refugee they drop into your community – so the fewer the number, the lower the federal payouts. The combined federal and state grants in 2017 and 2018 likely reflect a much lower federal contribution resulting from Trump’s annual lowered refugee arrivals.

The state grants likely refer to money funneled from USHHS to NGO Catholic Charities of TN (CCTN), which USORR designated to replace the state of TN after TN withdrew from the refugee program. Best guess is that CCTN has decided to help keep Bridge afloat knowing that both Knoxville and Chattanooga are true blue cities where open borders groups rule and local governments agree.

2008 – $682,158

2009 – $641,801

2010 – $902,445

2016 – $1,329,939 – 155 new refugees for Chattanooga and 267 for Knoxville

2017 – $839,583 (combined federal & state grants*) – 48 new refugees for Chattanooga and 65 for Knoxville

2018 – $945,165 (combined federal & state grants) -150 new refugees for Chattanooga and Knoxville combined

The reports also show that on average, 50% of the new arrivals are under age 18 – meaning all state taxpayers are paying for their English learner services in school.

You’ll also be heartened to know that Bridge works to make sure that their clients don’t become like backward, hateful, prejudiced conservative Republicans in Tennessee.

Bridge collaborates with an Adventist Muslim Friendship Association which helps arriving Muslim refugees (like Whahab and Jinan profiled in the 2018 report), “overcome differences in language, faith, and culture as well as the prejudice in the community. ‘“We learned you don’t have to change yourself to be like Americans or change Americans to be like you,” says Jinan.”

Wahab has already joined Bridge’s board and no doubt it won’t take long for him to connect with the TN American Muslim Advisory Council which is doing its level best to force its desired change on Tennessee communities.

CCTN well understands that refugee resettlement MONEY is the lifeblood of not only Bridge, but its own organization as well. Take a look at their latest available financials – almost 50% of its operating budget for the entire organization is based on money flow from refugee resettlement program. At the same time, they have drastically reduced services to needy American citizens.

 

That’s the pattern with the open borders, moralizing lefties – needy and worthy American citizens – people with intellectual disabilities, the homeless, and veterans, step aside.

***Editor endnote:  Interesting that Bridge first came to the attention of RRW in 2007 when we first learned that it refused to give information to the FBI about two Iraqi refugees it had resettled. In 2003, Bridge joined the ACLU and Muslim groups to sue the federal government to block the use of the post 911 Patriot Act.

Trump’s Executive Order on Refugee Resettlement Won’t Stop Refugee Arrivals to Your State or Community

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 5 Comments

Editor’s note:  Concerned about growing assumptions that the recent Trump Executive Order will solve the problem of no local or state say about refugee admissions, a long-time observer of the program with legal expertise, David James, has explained for us that the EO does not do what it purports to do. 

Although grateful that the President has signaled his concern for a major flaw in the program, we must set the record straight.

For new readers, VOLAGs (short for Voluntary Agencies), is the refugee industry title by which the federal refugee contractors refer to themselves.

(Emphasis below is mine)

Decisions made by federal agencies and the VOLAGs (voluntary agencies) they pay, about where to place arriving refugees, along with secondary migration, have created Minneapolis’ “Little Mogadishu”, Nashville’s “Little Kurdistan” and Ft. Wayne’s “Little Burma” to name just a few of the refugee ethnocentric enclaves.

No executive order, including the President’s recent Executive Order on Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement (EO) can stop refugee migration, either initial or secondary, from changing the demographics of your town and/or state.

While the EO suggests that the federal government will not resettle refugees in communities unless both the state and local governments consent, that may not be what happens at the end of the day.

Putting secondary migration aside, Section 2(b) of the EO specifically preserves the authority of the three agencies which administer the refugee resettlement program (State, HHS and DHS), to override any non-consent to refugee placement by either the state and/or local government.

With the exception of the lowered cap of 18,000, the EO is more a restatement of consultation requirements with state and local governments which are already in statute and regulation. Not only is the concept of “consultation” nowhere defined, but the outcomes of any consultation are not binding on federal agency decisions on refugee placement. And the EO doesn’t make any non-consent binding either.

The U.S. Code sections referenced in the EO mean that non-consent for resettlement won’t stop family reunification or the participation by the VOLAG federal contractors in deciding where refugees are placed.

VOLAGs whose operations are almost wholly dependent on the flow of federal dollars, are paid for each refugee they resettle. As noted in a 2012 GAO report, local VOLAG “affiliate funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”

Last fiscal year when the refugee admission cap was lowered to 30,000, the State Department managed to fund all nine national resettlement contractors. Admittedly, the lowered ceiling of 18,000 for FY20 may prove challenging for some in the resettlement contractor industry to remain viable.

However, as Ann Corcoran reminds us, the refugee cap has not included other categories of entrants such as the Special Immigrant Visa holders from Iraq and Afghanistan who receive the same access to public benefits, such as state Medicaid programs, as refugees. The same goes for any successful asylum petition.

And once on the ground, refugees can and do go anywhere they want, nullifying any state and local non-consent per the EO.

Seeing one more opportunity (the announcement of the EO) to take a whack at the President, PA Gov. Tom Wolf (D) says Pennsylvania welcomes refugees. Was there any consultation?  Did concerned citizens of PA get to weigh-in before the Governor shot off a letter? NO!  PA borders West Virginia (a state that gets few refugees). Anything to stop refugees from arriving in PA and immediately moving to WV? NO! https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/466091-pennsylvania-governor-tells-trump-his-state-will-keep-welcoming-refugees

Governors in Oregon and Pennsylvania have already issued consent to receive refugees and New Jersey’s governor has announced the state’s intention to get back into the resettlement program.

While some refugee arrivals may stay put at their initial resettlement site, for others, consenting states will be nothing more than ports of entry for movement to non-consenting states and local communities.

The EO does not directly address the status of states which previously withdrew from the  resettlement program for purposes of non-consent. It’s possible that this question will be answered by the “process” to be developed by the State Department and HHS as required by the EO.

States like Tennessee which withdrew from the refugee program over 10 years ago, have since had their state refugee program administered by an ORR (U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement) selected NGO which just happens to have its own federally contracted refugee resettlement program.

When the Refugee Act was passed in 1980, Congress authorized reimbursing states 100% for three full years of the state cost of providing Medicaid for each refugee brought to a state by a federal contractor. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the chief sponsor of the Refugee Act was pushing for four years of refugee support as opposed to the House proposed two years of support:

“[i]n my judgment, it is essential that we continue to receive the full support of State governments for our refugee programs; I believe that we would jeopardize that support and cooperation if we were to transfer the resettlement burden to the States after the refugees have been in this country for only 2 short years.”

The House and Senate subsequently agreed to three years of reimbursement to states.

Feds shift cost to the states

Five years into the program, due to cuts in federal spending for refugee assistance, ORR began to reduce the three years of authorized reimbursement to states and by 1991, eliminated it altogether. Three years later in 1994, the federal regulation permitting a state to withdraw from the program and be replaced by an ORR state replacement designee, was added.

Beginning in 1990, various federal reports have admitted to shifting costs associated with the refugee program to state and local governments. State governments continue to incur these costs, even after withdrawing from the federal refugee program because federal contractors are enabled by ORR to continue initial resettlement in these states.

It remains to be seen whether these ORR designated state replacements which operate independently of the state government, will also have authority to consent for the state per the consent process required by the EO.

Tennessee has sued the federal government because of its Constitutionally impermissible taking of state funds for the federal refugee program by virtue of the cost shifting. The admissions to shifting federal program costs to states stand in stark contrast to the claims of the federally funded and financially dependent contractors that the program is “100% paid for by the federal government.”

President Trump’s EO fails to address the multiple layers of dysfunction in the resettlement program and Constitutionally suspect policies. Nor is there any reason to think that Congress will find its way to straightening out the mess they helped to create and continue to foster.

 

Endnote: It is vitally important that you send this detailed analysis to everyone you know.  We can support this President while at the same time pointing out where he might be going wrong on an issue that many of us believe is paramount to putting America First!

Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies addressed many of our concerns about the EO in his piece at National Review yesterday, see it here.