The Toledo target area! We learn something new every day!

08/09/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Beware the 100 mile radius!

Toledo-1.10 — If I knew how to do stuff with graphics, it would be very cool to show you how many towns are within a hundred miles of Toledo. So the best I can do is show you this map and as a point of reference. Bowling Green is about 30 miles from Toledo. Every town you see here (and beyond) could be getting refugees anytime soon!

Do you know why I still wouldn’t call myself an expert on the refugee resettlement program after 8 years? It’s because only bits and pieces of how it works slip out inadvertently in news stories as the UN/US State Department and their resettlement contractors (the Volags) work hard to keep as much secretive as possible.
And, there is another thing too, I have come to find out that all the different players at all the levels of action on this program, from local to state to federal and throughout the government agencies and throughout the contracting agencies, don’t have a good handle on what each other is doing.
I’ve been told that some on the ‘inside’ follow RRW so they know the full scope of what they are doing! But, that is subject for another day and so back to Toledo, OH.
This is a news story (meant to be warm and fuzzy) from the The Blade where we learned some interesting tidbits.
If we have any ‘Pockets of Resistance’ forming in Toledo, looks like this is a pretty new program and thus you should demand a public hearing before it gets too entrenched!
The most important tidbit of news that I want you to pay attention to is the mention that the subcontractors can resettle within a 100 mile radius of their office. I knew this from hearsay, but I don’t think I have ever seen it in print! So, all of you concerned about whether your town could get refugees, go here to the federal list of subcontractors and see if your town might be within that 100 mile radius and thus fair game to be colonized!
The Blade (emphasis is mine):

Corine Dehabey is the first welcoming face for refugees who are resettled in the Toledo area.

Ms. Dehabey, resettlement coordinator for US Together in Toledo, is also the primary facilitator for their adjustment to the area.

The organization has been quietly and steadily resettling refugees in the Toledo area for a little more than a year, the only agency in the Toledo area doing so.

The refugee community is a small but growing regional population, Ms. Dehabey said. She has placed 11 families in the Toledo area, including two before US Together opened its Toledo office in May, 2014.

[….]

Ms. Dehabey opens an average of one case a month, she said, though arrivals can be sporadic. Refugees have arrived from Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Burundi.

[….]

During the three-month stint, refugees take classes in financial literacy, mock interviewing, and other job skills. Cases are closed typically after three months, but that does not signal the end of the agency’s relationship with families. [By the end of three months they turn the refugees over to the social services–taxpayer funded services–available in your town—ed]

“We say, ‘We close the case but we don’t close the door,’ ” she said. “I still have cases that ended six, seven months ago, and they’re coming in for services here, services there.”

[….]

The organization is filling a previous void for local services, Ms. Dehabey said. In the 10 or so years before US Together’s arrival in Toledo, any refugees settled here were handled through an agency in Ann Arbor.

[….]

Opening a branch in Toledo made sense, said Nadia Kasvin, director of the Columbus office and co-founder of US Together. Toledo was another metropolitan area to join branches in Cleveland and Columbus.

US Together is affiliated with Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, a national resettlement organization, which began plans to open an office in Toledo about five years ago. The Toledo office resettles people within a 100-mile radius of the city.

“We wanted to bring services here locally so that they’d have better access to case management,” Ms. Kasvin said. “There was clearly a gap in services.”

Toledo was also attractive because of the well-established Middle Eastern populations that would provide a ready-made community for new arrivals. US Together, which has operated in Columbus since 2003, looks to open an office in Cincinnati by the end of the year, Ms. Kasvin said. Across all locations, US Together places about 600 refugees per year.

There is more, continue reading here.
See our previous posts on Toledo, here. Toledo is getting Syrians! And, on Ohio, here. Remember in order for Ohio to have become such a large refugee resettlement state, Governor Kasich had to have been fine with it!
Also, we learned some time ago that any state that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare was a “key indicator” about whether the state would become a priority resettlement state.
Addendum: I should have also remembered this important post about US Together in Cleveland at Welcoming America Watch–Midwest and linked it when I wrote the post earlier today.

Europe's refugees: Here come the infectious diseases

08/02/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Invasion of Europe News….

This latest disease is not one that immediately comes to mind like TB and HIV/AIDS that we usually hear about. BTW, American readers should know that even our “screened” refugees are permitted entry into the US with TB and HIV.

diphtheria-ppt-21-638 — http://www.slideshare.net/saeidzaxo/diphtheria-ppt

From Outbreak News Today (never heard of it, but maybe it is time to follow this news site!). Story titled: ‘Europe reporting imported cutaneous diphtheria in refugees’

People are fleeing certain African and Middle Eastern countries in large numbers and many are headed to the countries of Europe. In fact, one report notes that about 5,000 people flee Eritrea each month, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency.

One of the things that can come from refugees and asylum seekers are infectious diseases contracted in their home country.

Europe is currently reporting cases of cutaneous diphtheria in asylum seekers to several countries to include Denmark, Sweden and Germany. To date, nine cases have been reported by the three nations.

The disease is contagious and can be deadly. More problems and expense for Europe’s socialized medical system.
Go here for our ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive. And, for new readers, you should know that we have a ‘health issues’ category, here (with 278 previous posts on health problems of refugees).

Bhutanese refugees in Ohio need more costly mental health care due to high suicide rate

07/21/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is nothing new in this story from the The Columbus Dispatch. We have reported ad nauseum about the high suicide rate among Bhutanese (really Nepali) refugees first admitted during the Bush Administration. Even before Bush’s Asst. Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, gave the go-ahead to resettle 60,000 from UN camps (the UN wanted to close the camps so we said sure! and now we are up to over 80,000 Bhutanese scattered across America) we learned that the Bhutanese really preferred to live in their own culture in their part of the world.

The “Bhutanese” are really Nepali people who had lived in Bhutan. Bhutan expelled them and Nepal didn’t want them back. So, why was it in our national interest to bring over 80,000 to America? It was a Bush Administration decision. Did the Republicans want to import more cheap labor?

See our huge archive on the Bhutanese (mostly Hindu) migration to America by clicking here. It goes back nearly eight years to a time when the Bhutanese did not want to be “scattered to the four winds.”
For all of you contemplating ‘welcoming’ refugees to your towns and cities, remember that health care/mental health care costs will be borne by state and local taxpayers.
From The Columbus Dispatch (hat tip: Julie). What is going on in Ohio that there is so much immigration and refugee news coming out of the state (see our Ohio archive)? A suspicious person might think that Ohio was somehow being targeted for colonization!

So they recently surveyed 200 members of the Nepali-speaking Hindu minority who had fled the Himalayan mountain kingdom of Bhutan a quarter-century ago during an ethnic cleansing led by the Buddhist elite.

What they discovered shocked them.

Bhutanese refugees in central Ohio are twice as likely to report thinking about suicide as are those elsewhere in the U.S. They have high rates of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress and report that they smoke and use alcohol more frequently than other Bhutanese refugees.
“It’s a serious wake-up call,” said Surendra Bir Adhikari, an administrator for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services who led the research project.

[….]

Between October 2008 and September 2014, 5,654 Bhutanese were resettled in Ohio, including 1,738 in Franklin County. The total population is larger because of the family members and others who have arrived in the state from other parts of the U.S.

Local leaders of the Bhutanese community estimate the total population at close to 20,000, but state officials think it is lower. In 2012, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among Bhutanese refugees resettled in America was 20.3 per 100,000 people. That’s nearly twice the rate among the general U.S. population and higher than the global suicide rate of 16.9 percent.

No jobs and yet we keep the refugee flow coming! Look at the Ohio numbers on this map!

Besides facing language and religious barriers, refugees worry about loved ones and friends left behind. And there’s often a disconnect between their idyllic views of life in America and the difficulties they encounter finding jobs that pay well.

[….]

Much more needs to be done to address the social isolation, substance abuse and trauma experienced by refugees and immigrants, local and state officials say.

They want “mental-health first-aid training” offered to help identify, understand and respond to signs of addiction and mental illnesses in refugees. They’d like to see more health-care systems provide both medical and mental-health services under one roof to lessen the stigma.

There is more, continue reading here.

Texas gets more refugees than any state in the nation (primer part II)

06/08/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update June 9th: Part III is here. It is for everyone, not just Texans.
As I said yesterday in Part I of the (hopefully) Texas trilogy, in 2011 Texas moved into the number one spot in the nation for refugee resettlement. Yesterday someone commented to me that that is the year the push was on to begin turning Texas BLUE. The refugee numbers themselves are not great enough yet, but combined with all of the other immigration to Texas, both legal and illegal, the idea is not so far-fetched.

Hindu_residents — Elderly refugees in Vickery Meadows are eligible for SSI although they have never paid into the system. Photo here: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/park-cities/headlines/20141011-vickery-meadow-neighborhood-is-melting-pot-of-america.ece

That reminds me, have you read Ann Coulter’s new book, “Adios America: The Left’s plan to turn our country into a Third World hellhole?” I’ve just started it, but she doesn’t pull punches and says straight up: Democrats want the voters, employers want cheap labor, rich people want nannies, maids and gardeners, Republicans want campaign cash and churches want taxpayer money!
Support for mass immigration, including refugee resettlement, is thus the one issue that binds those disparate sections of the American political landscape. It leaves the rest of America suffering the consequences of their greed!
Read yesterday’s post, Texas Part I, if you missed it then continue here:
Longtime readers know that there are nine major federal resettlement contractors that divvy-up the refugees chosen mostly by the UN and then distribute them to 49 states (Wyoming, so far, has received no refugees). They have been working at this secretive ‘seeding’ program for 35 years! These are the nine:

Then they further divide them between their (350!) subcontractors. Please go to this list of subcontractors everywhere and scroll down to Texas.
Recognizing how lucrative the ‘welcoming’ Texas turf is (contractors are paid by the head to resettle refugees), eight of the nine contractors have set up shop somewhere in Texas. The only one with no office there yet is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society!

Dallas…..

One little nugget I gleaned from my reading is that it is the International Rescue Committee does most of the resettling in Vickery Meadows (readers may remember that the Liberian man who died of Ebola was visiting family there) the large multi-ethnic immigrant enclave in North Dallas. However, two other contractors doing business as Refugee Services of Texas (LIRS and CWS) resettle refugees as does the US conference of Catholic Bishops/Catholic Charities there and elsewhere in Dallas as well.

healthcare Vickery — Taxpayer funded healthcare is available to refugees. Photo from 2014 Vickery Meadows story here: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/park-cities/headlines/20141011-vickery-meadow-neighborhood-is-melting-pot-of-america.ece

New Texas readers need to know that the International Rescue Committee, headquartered in New York, is now headed by David Miliband, a British citizen and brother to UK Labor Party (let’s rub the right’s nose in diversity!) head honcho Ed Miliband (aka “Red Ed”).
When Miliband arrived in New York to head up this ‘non-profit’ (with a yearly income of nearly a half a billion dollars), he was feted at a gala event in New York that saw George Soros, Bill Clinton, Samantha Power and Madeleine Albright toasting him.
Miliband’s predecessor pulled down a salary and benefits package of nearly $500,000, so we can assume Miliband is in the same salary range running a US resettlement agency!
It is the rich elitist International Rescue Committee that is one of three US State Department contractors bringing refugees to Vickery Meadows. The four contractors (LIRS, CWS, USCCB and IRC) brought Dallas a total of 2,428 refugees in 2014!

In 2014, Dallas alone got more refugees than most states got for the whole state! How fair is that?

See this map!
Go to the Texas Dept. of State Health Services for more nuggets of information.
Most Dallas County refugees in recent years came from: Iraq, Burma, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Somalia. Top asylees cared for by the contractors in Dallas include Egyptians, Eritreans, and Ethiopians. By the way asylees normally get into the country illegally or overstay a visa and then claim asylum.
Health issues are of concern in Dallas County because refugees there have the worst rate of screening of any county in Texas with 13% going unscreened. Of the screened, 19% are positive for TB, 11% parasites and 3% HepB.

Remember you are paying for all of this as the federal government has over time passed the cost of the refugee program off on to the states!

One cost local taxpayer’s must bear is the cost of translation services. In Dallas County, 91% of refugees in need of health services require an interpreter. The top language needed is Arabic! No surprise, as Arabic is the top language spoken by refugees admitted to the US in recent years.
That’s all for today!

Here is your homework assignment! Anyone who gets an ‘R & P Abstract’ out of a Texas subcontractor gets a gold star!

I know it is overused, but knowledge is power!
This post describes what an abstract is. Read it. Then go to the list of subcontractors. Find one near you and call the office. Tell them you would like their most recent R & P Abstract (FY2015). They will most likely tell you that you can’t have it and some will pretend that they don’t know what you are talking about! If you get one, be amazed! as the word has gone out nationally to all subcontractors—don’t give out the abstracts to anyone and be sure to tell the big boys and girls in Washington (the refugee industry’s lobbying arm) that people are asking for them.
P.S. If you didn’t see yesterday’s homework assignment, go here.

You've been funding 'healthy marriage' grants to non-profit resettlement contractors

06/02/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:
I’ve been meaning for awhile to give our new readers some information that we have written about over the years, and, for longtime readers, this is an update.

Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota, the primary refugee contractor in the state, received $1.2 million of your tax dollars to promote Healthy Fatherhood.

We talk all the time about how non-profit refugee resettlement agencies are paid by the head, by the US State Department, to resettle refugees to your towns and cities.
However, that is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to the millions they get from you for every sort of grant under the sun!
One such program you have funded over the years is the Refugee Healthy Marriage Program.
We told you here in 2013 what we found in the 2009 Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual report to Congress.
I see there are still grants listed on page A-24 of the 2010 Annual Report and a description of how millions of your dollars are educating refugees on how to have healthy marriages beginning on page 21 of the report.
Incidentally, these annual reports are a treasure trove of information for those of you who are digging deeper around the country.
However…..

A huge expansion of the Healthy Marriage program occurred in 2010!

The new program is now called ‘Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood!’ You pay for it!

What is IRCO doing with your money? Wouldn’t you like to know! http://www.irco.org/who-we-are/mission-vision-and-values/

This is how the Dept. of Health and Human Services describes the program:

The Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood initiative is part of ACF’s strategy to improve the lives of children. ACF funded a local network of 121 organizations in 47 states to provide comprehensive healthy relationship and marriage education services, responsible parenting, and job and career advancement activities to advance economic stability and improve the overall well-being of children and their parents.

The Claims Resolution Act of 2010 (CRA) provided $75 million for Healthy Marriage grants and $75 million for Responsible Fatherhood grants. The grantees are conducting a range of activities including marriage education and enrichment programs specifically designed for existing couples, including married couples, engaged couples, and individuals interested in marriage. Responsible Fatherhood programs target all fathers, including non-custodial parents and fathers who have or will soon reenter their communities from incarceration.

What are we paying Catholic Charities of Wichita, KS to do with almost $1.5 million of your tax dollars?

The Healthy Marriage Program serves 60 grantees and 73,346 participants; the Responsible Fatherhood program serves 55 grantees and 14,894 participants; and the Fatherhood Ex-Prisoner Reentry Pilot Project serves 4 grantees and 945 participants.

Grants totaled nearly $60 million in one year alone!

I did find a list of grant recipients which includes some of our usual resettlement contractors here for 2011, but haven’t the time or patience to search for newer lists of who is receiving millions of tax dollars—just short of $60 million in this one year! Be sure to look down the whole list.
I wonder if these mostly non-profits are ever audited??? I doubt it.
Readers are always asking what can we do?
Well, here is one thing, find one of these grant recipients located near you and find out exactly what they are doing with hundreds of thousands of dollars per agency to ‘help the children.’
Become like the investigative journalists of old!
More tomorrow or later this week on other outrageous grants (culturally appropriate daycare, refugee matched savings accounts, refugee gardening projects, etc.).