However, your tax dollars are still flowing out to federal refugee contractors even as the number of arrivals has dropped dramatically.
The Chronicle of Philanthropyhas published a survey of the financial fallout to non-profit groups in the wake of the Chinese virus ‘crisis’ and finds that big foundations are still giving, but otherwise donations to non-profits are declining.
The bleak picture (title with a positive spin!):
Nonprofits That Rely on Foundation Grants Fare Better Than Others Amid Pandemic
Most nonprofits that get foundation grants haven’t suffered cutbacks as many had feared when the Covid-19 and economic crisis struck in March, a study released today finds.
[….]
The survey found that revenue from other sources was far less reliable. Only 14 percent of nonprofit CEOs reported an increase in giving by major donors (those who give more than $7,500 annually), while 43 percent saw gifts from those donors decline. For donors who contribute less than $7,500 annually, only 18 percent of CEOs reported increased giving, while 51 percent saw decreased giving.
I was interested in this section about refugee resettlement contractor World Relief.
The pandemic has placed a greater burden with more demand for services on nonprofits that serve “historically disadvantaged communities,” according to the survey; 61 percent of those CEOs say the demand for services has increased, compared with 35 percent of CEOs at other nonprofits.
Chitra Hanstad, executive director of World Relief Seattle, said her organization has been hit hard by the loss of government contracts for refugee resettlement, which has come to a halt***.
The nonprofit continues to provide a wide array of services to refugees who have arrived in the United States recently, and demand for those services has increased. [But aren’t we continuously hammered about how refugees are not a burden and are self-sufficient within a few short months of arrival?—ed]
Wealthy people set up family foundations to shelter some of their money and are then able to use the foundation to promote their pet political projects. https://www.stoltefamilyfoundation.org/about#main
However, Hanstad added that donors have been very generous and flexible during the current crisis. She cited in particular the Stolte Family Foundation, created by Heidi and Chris Stolte. Chris Stolte was co-founder of Tableau Software, and Heidi Stolte is a former educator.
[….]
However, Hanstad said that while donors are being generous in terms of immediate need, she’s worried those donations may come at the expense of funding long-term challenges, such as providing refugees with income stability, securing affordable housing, and attaining citizenship status. “I wish people would give as robustly to systemic solutions,” she said.
***But wait! World Relief , the parent contractor to World Relief Seattle, is still bringing in millions of federal bucks!
During the first week of May I reported that World Reliefhad received just short of $30 million from taxpayers in 2019 (an amount higher than they received in many Obama years) and I see that they have received $13 million this year!
Nevermind that it is the United Nations that halted refugee travel due to the Chinese virus crisis.
Refugee contractors are trying to “chart a path forward” as refugee admissions this year are set to be the lowest they have ever been since Senators Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, created the US Refugee Admissions Program that became law in 1980.
But, oh how they love their sob stories featuring poor suffering families seeking to be reunited.
Sob story design and promotion is one of the Leftwing media’s greatest skills!
Sorry, no sympathy from me for a mother who leaves her INFANT daughter in a hellhole refugee camp to come to America with a supposedly sick husband expecting then to have the US government fly her daughter to her at a later date.
A family was set to be reunited after nearly four years apart. Then coronavirus struck.
(CNN) More than three years ago, Deman Aman Abshir, a Somali national, faced an impossible choice: leave behind her newborn daughter to come to the United States or watch as her husband’s health worsened.
She left behind an infant daughter, now three years old, to hop on that plane with a supposedly sick hubby. She had another choice!
Abshir and her husband, fleeing deteriorating conditions in Somalia, worried that any delay in leaving could hinder their chances to resettle in the US and get medical treatment, she said. So they left.
[….]
In 2011, amid an ongoing civil war in the country, Abshir decided to leave Somalia and fled to a refugee camp in Ethiopia.
“Life was hard and there was a lot of struggle,” she said.
Over the years, the health of Abshir’s husband, Mohamed Hussen Ibrahim, who was being treated for a neurologic condition that prevented him from walking and doing other daily activities, started to worsen.
His “neurologic condition” apparently didn’t prevent some daily activities!
And, he sure must have gotten some magical medical treatment in the US (on your dime!) because he got a job, but there is not one word in this story about his diagnosis, treatment or recovery.
In late 2016, more than a year after their case had been approved, the couple was ready to depart to the United States.
“Three different situations happened at the same time: my husband’s situation got worse; we had our newborn; we had the process approved,” Abshir recalled. “It was 2016 so Trump was getting elected, so we knew if we had to delay, the opportunity would never come so we had to choose sacrifice to be with our child or leave for the US with my husband to get better treatment.”
She had another choice: Let her husband go on to America (so you could pay for his medical care) and she could stay in Africa with her INFANT daughter!
Now we are expected to believe she is so emotional over the separation that she can’t work!
Abshir’s four-month-old daughter had not been part of the original case, therefore adding her would delay their departure and postpone obtaining medical treatment for her husband. Abshir called the decision to leave Nimco behind “painful,” recounting the difficulty she had in keeping jobs in the US because she was overwhelmed with emotions.
Plummer is described as the family’s lawyer, but she also happens to be the Executive Director of CRIS a Columbus, Ohio based subcontractor of Church World Service, facts not reported by CNN. https://www.crisohio.org/about-us/
Since then, Plummer has tried to get Nimco’s case approved to reunite with the family. The nearly four-year uphill battle appeared to be reaching a conclusion when the coronavirus pandemic shut down arrivals.
[….]
Abshir, whose husband also lost his job because of the pandemic [“also”? weren’t we just old she couldn’t hold a job due to being emotionally distraught?—ed] has remained hopeful, but extended separations often weigh on families.
[He had a job, wow! He must have recovered from his serious health issue and inability to walk.—ed]
CNN continues….
“I see these cases and it’s joyful when a child reunites with a parent and it’s all wonderful superficially but you can’t get that time back. The child doesn’t know their parents … just the psychological impact to the family for as long as the delay continues,” Plummer said. [Taxpayer-funded counseling ahead?—ed]
All of that is to set the tone for the rest of the article that goes on to bash the Trump Administration.
We do learn that no date has been set to resume refugee resettlement.
Refugee arrivals to the US were suspended as of March 19, with the exception of certain emergency cases, a State Department spokesperson told CNN.
No date has been provided on when admissions will resume.The spokesperson said State “will seek to resume refugee arrivals when it is safe and logistically feasible to do so, subject to any travel restrictions in place at that time.”
Now, we are told, the reason so few cases have been reported at the world’s supposedly largest refugee camp in Bangladesh is that the residents fear they will be isolated if found to be infected and are therefore refusing testing.
I know this is likely boring for most of you, but since I started following the warnings of “catastrophe” and “carnage” as the Chinese Virus spread “like wildfire” to camps where “vulnerable” migrants live in close proximity to each other, I’m compelled to give you updates.
Literally for months there have been dire predictions of the impending crisis, that has not yet materialized.
Only one death of an old man so far as I said hereon Wednesday.
Fear stops Rohingya getting tested as virus hits refugee camps
BANGKOK/DHAKA (Reuters) – Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh with symptoms of the novel coronavirus are not coming forward to get tested because they fear being separated from their families and held in isolation, community leaders and aid workers say.
Only one death from the coronavirus has been recorded in the crowded camps in southeast Bangladesh, where some 730,000 Muslim Rohingya fled in 2017 to escape a military crackdown in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Yale Economics Professor Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak visited the camp and told Reuters he is sure the disease prevalence is much higher than testing so far indicates. https://faculty.som.yale.edu/mushfiqmobarak/
But aid workers fear the coronavirus may be spreading faster through the world’s largest refugee settlement than the 29 cases confirmed since mid-May would indicate.Only 339 tests have been carried out in the camps, officials said, partly because people were simply not going to health facilities to get checked.
“Camp hospitals are emptyand illegal doctors’ shops are full,” said 23-year-old refugee Mujef Khan, a community organiser, referring to pharmacies in the camps run by refugees where people buy pills to treat themselves.
“Many people are getting sick day by day – in every shelter,” he said.
Three Rohingya leaders interviewed by Reuters said coronavirus symptoms were prevalent in the camps that sprawl out over hills near the border with Myanmar.
The camps are more densely populated than the most crowded cities and sanitation is poor and social distancing impossible. [This will be the ultimate test in my opinion of whether social distancing matters or not!—ed]
While new testing facilities and treatment centres are being built, a surge in cases couldoverwhelm the camps, aid workers said.
I guess if they aren’t bothering to be tested, they aren’t that sick. However, they won’t be able to hide the deaths and so we will then get a better indication if the “tinderbox” has exploded as the media has been predicting literally for months!
I have been writing about the Rohingya for nearly 13 years. You need to know they are being resettled in the United States right now. See my Rohingya Reports categoryto learn more about this Muslim ethnic group.
….as migrants, refugees and asylum seekers will be blocked from admission because of fear that they are “diseased.”
This line from near the end of an article published in The Nation yesterday sums up the fear of the international Open Borders movement:
The existential threat of Covid-19 has prompted a swift retreat to the nation-state, at the cost of international human rights, as countries rush to fly their own citizens home while keeping others out.
I’ve snipped some highlights from the article, but it is very well worth your time to read it all!
Could Covid-19 Mean the End of Asylum Law in the United States?
As this type of hand-wringing story is wont to do, it begins with a paragraph about the travails of those stalwart souls who walk for months to our southern border expecting to be let in (so they can disappear into their ethnic enclaves and hide for years). LOL! No it doesn’t say that last part.
(Emphasis below is mine)
For almost all of the people who made this kind of journey but were unlucky enough to complete it in the past two months, their time in this country has lasted less than a few hours before they were summarily—and illegally—deported back into Mexico.
Since March 21, the Trump administration has sent over 20,000 people back across the border, thousands of whom would have otherwise sought refugee protection. In that same time, only two people were allowed to stay to seek asylum.
One of the earliest victims of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States was the country’s refugee system. On March 20, the Trump administration announced a sweeping and unprecedented order: Instead of processing new arrivals for asylum, the Border Patrol was encouraged to deport them as rapidly as possible. The United Nations said the decision was illegal under international law; advocacy groups and elected officials called the new policy a travesty. The administration defended the move, claiming it was only a temporary, 30-day measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But the rapid expulsion policy remains in place, almost two months later. It has not yet been challenged in court.
While the administration has justified the end of asylum on the border as a necessary public health measure, it’s not hard to see the ways in which the pandemic is merely the pretext for the order, not the motivation.
“From its earliest days, one of the Trump administration’s chief objectives has been overturning and circumventing US laws that were designed to protect refugees and people seeking protection, as well as unaccompanied children,” says Eleanor Acer, the senior director of refugee protection for Human Rights First. “It’s now using the pandemic as yet another weapon to try to circumvent US asylum law.”
[….]
Why, despite its clear illegality, has the total asylum ban remained in place?
Scholars of immigration say the administration has capitalized on two things: the current crisis, and over 100 years of anti-immigrant propaganda casting immigrants as diseased.
Now, here is an interesting piece of news—the ACLU in “disarray!” Why? Is it because they are busy defending the civil liberties of rioters, looters and thugs?
The Nation continues….
Organizations that would typically challenge the law, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are in disarray, as they deal with the shock of multiple emergencies and a pandemic that is impacting their lawyers across the country.
However, even after the intensity of the shutdowns and quarantines wear off, advocates worry that fears of “diseased” outsiders will make Americans—including those who otherwise support the institution of asylum—more willing to give up on refugee law: Foreigners will simply be seen as too dangerous to admit, no matter the circumstances.
[….]
“Crisis produces an instinct to close the border and keep people out,” says Charanya Krishnaswarmi, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for the Americas.
But the Covid-19 pandemic might create long-term damage to refugee law in ways other crises have not: Sickness provides a convenient pretext to mask xenophobia. Even in the best of times, immigrants are seen by those seeking to limit immigration as a threat to “our” culture, “our” economic well-being. Now, the risk of a deadly virus means the outsiders can be presented as an existential threat as well.
[….]
On April 21, the president announced plans to “temporarily suspend immigration into the United States” in a move Democrats have called “xenophobic scapegoating.” Covid-19 has made tangible the parallels the president himself has drawn between migrants and disease, and given such claims a veneer of legitimacy.
Medicalized migration reinforces this connection between immigrant and threat, while simultaneously buttressing the inequalities between citizens and noncitizens. [There are, and should be,”inequalities” between citizens and non-citizens.—ed]
What does this mean for the future of refugee law? Human Rights First’s Acer, like other refugee experts we spoke to, suspects that the new, total asylum ban will last long after the coronavirus pandemic ends. “I expect they will fight to make it last as long as this administration, however long that is,” she says.
[….]
Acer worries that the Chinese virus will give yet another reason for their most-feared world leader and ultimate boogeyman—Viktor Orban!—to keep Hungary’s borders closed in order to save Hungary for Hungarians.
However, even if asylum is reinstated on the southern border (for instance, under a hypothetical Democratic administration), Acer worries that the pandemic-inspired exclusions policy might have already done significant damage to international refugee protections.
“What I’m worried about now is how countries like Hungary and Turkey will be emboldened to further refuse refugees,” she says. The language of public health creates a convenient narrative for anti-immigrant zealots like Hungarian President Viktor Orbán to obscure racist and Islamaphobic rhetoric with the language of medical necessity.
There ismuch more (it was hard to decide which were the best bits to snip!).
It is always worth learning how the opposition thinks and what they fear the most which in this case is that they fear the hardening of borders worldwide while using their humanitarian mumbo-jumbo as a cover for their real goal of erasing borders altogether.
See my Viktor Orban (the world leader I would most like to meet) archive here.
As I said a couple of days ago, I know you have more important things on your mind, but I did say I would follow closely the long-predicted “carnage” coming to refugee camps where thousands upon thousands of people are packed cheek by jowl in camps like the one at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.
The breathless news was reported by several outlets within the last 24 hours. One gets the feeling that the international media can’t wait to report on “catastrophe” befalling the “vulnerable.” (But, if they could only find a way to blame Donald Trump!)
RPT-UPDATE 2-First Rohingya refugee dies from coronavirus in Bangladesh camps
DHAKA, June 2 (Reuters) – An elderly Rohingya refugee has become the first person to die from coronavirus in the world’s largest refugee settlement in Bangladesh, where there are fears the disease could spread fast due to overcrowding.
The 71-year-old man died on May 31 while undergoing treatment at an isolation centre at the camps where over a million Rohingya live, said Bimal Chakma, a senior official of the government’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission.
“Today we got the confirmation that he tested positive for COVID-19,” he told Reuters by telephone.
Note that he died from something prior to being tested for the Chinese virus.
Reuters goes on to report that there are now 29 cases in the camp that houses a million Rohingya Muslims.
I am watching because this is the ultimate test of the importance (or lack of it) of social distancing.
Refugee contractors are trying to “chart a path forward” as refugee admissions this year are set to be the lowest they have ever been since Senators Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, created the US Refugee Admissions Program that became law in 1980.
