That is the gist of the opinion piece published today in USA Today.  The author is Lavinia Limon head honcho of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). 

Let Haitians with relatives in the USA immigrate here ASAP.

The horrific disaster in Haiti compels us to act in every way possible to reduce suffering and save lives. I salute everyone working on the ground in dreadful conditions to provide medical assistance, food, water and shelter. Although the relief is agonizingly slow, there’s progress, and it will accelerate.

What else can we do?

We can help the approximately 50,000 Haitians who’ve already gotten U.S. government approval to come to this country because they have a close relative (spouse, child, parent or sibling) who’s a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident.

[….]

But we shouldn’t stop there. Other Haitians who also have family in the U.S. should be allowed to join their relatives for humanitarian reasons. They could work and send money home to help rebuild Haiti.

Readers should know that family reunification is a big part of the refugee resettlement business.  Agencies like USCRI (one of the Top Ten, now nine, federal refugee contractors*) through its affiliates resettle refugees in your town and then they are paid by the government to fill out paperwork to bring extended family members.  That is an important part of their income and how they change your community over time.  They then are paid by the head to resettle the new refugees (and as we learned this week that funding has increased by 100%).

You may recall that the family reunification program has been suspended for “refugees” coming from some areas of the world (most notably Africa) because the State Department discovered that about 80% of the applications were fraudulent.  The anchor refugee was likely not related to those he or she was applying to bring to the US.

As of this writing, there is one comment to the opinion piece at USA Today, it is from Christopher Coen at Friends of Refugees (we told you about Mr. Coen’s work here).

The message to help Haitians is a good one. Too bad it comes from someone who heads an organization, the USCRI, that has severely neglected refugees in this country for years. Just in the past 2 years newspapers around the country have reported about USCRI refugees who have been dropped off in filthy, decrepit, and roach & rodent-infested apartments and left to fend for themselves with little assistance from USCRI’s network of refugee offices. A USCRI affiliate in Connecticut even lost it’s government contract to resettle refugees so bad was the neglect.

Ms. Limon would be better off using her time to adequately care for the refugees her organization has already been entrusted with, rather than advocate for even more refugees to neglect.

Christopher Coen
director
Friends of Refugees

The Connecticut reference involves a story we covered extensively (here is just one link to get you started) involving an USCRI affiliate in Waterbury, CT.  Recently we have chronicled the on-going problems in Bowling Green, KY (and here), that is also an USCRI affiliate involved in Bowling Green.  Complaints against USCRI have been made in other states as well (Ohio, Vermont, Missouri and New York for starters).

*For readers who are completely new to the refugee program there are ten (nine as of this week) volags (supposedly voluntary agencies) that contract with the US State Department to resettle refugees.  They then have affiliates in “welcoming” cities who receive their government funding as a pass-through from the ‘mother agencies’ which are responsible for making sure their affiliates use the taxpayers’ money properly and adequately care for the refugees (find them apartments, jobs and get them signed up for welfare) they have been assigned.   Review by the State Department is sporadic until an agency has been brought to the publics’ attention through the media.

The issue of what status the Haitians would have must have been brewing in an already overloaded North Carolina refugee program for the question to have come up. 

We’ve had extensive coverage of the turmoil in Greensboro recently with refugees living in substandard housing, church leaders angry with resettlement agencies and with refugees trying to figure out how to get out of Greensboro and North Carolina where the unemployment rate is one of the top ten highest in the nation.

This is from Star News:

North Carolina has been resettling increasing numbers of refugees, from about 1,200 in 2006 to nearly 2,300 in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

It’s the 10th-largest state for resettling refugees, accepting about four percent of the national total, according to Marlene Myers, the state refugee coordinator.

Someone must have been asking if NC was bringing more refugees—the Haitians.

Myers said that it was not yet determined how many Haitians might come to North Carolina, or where in the state they might go. But they would be classified as “evacuees,” not refugees, so a different agency in the N.C. Division of Social Services would be in charge of placing them. Since Interfaith Refugee Ministry deals with political refugees intending to settle permanently in the U.S., it will not be dealing with Haitian refugees.

Refugee or evacuee doesn’t really matter—either one is cared for by the taxpayers.  The only difference, as Myers makes clear, is it will just be different agencies spending your money.