Promises, promises: As we approach 100 days, Trump has dropped ball on refugee program reform

04/25/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a detailed story at Breitbart yesterday in which reporter Michael Patrick Leahy reminds us of what Donald Trump promised, especially in Minnesota, days before his victory in the 2016 Presidential contest.

With about a week to go until his administration reaches the 100-day mark, President Trump’s campaign promises to halt Syrian refugee resettlement and tighten up the refugee vetting process remain largely unfulfilled.

Trump has reduced the overall number of refugees resettled, something that he implied but did not specifically promise on the campaign trail, but the level of reduction falls far short of the virtual halt many of his supporters had hoped to see.

President Trump’s most explicit statements about the refugee resettlement program during the campaign came at a November 6 rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two days before the election.

“A Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local community where they are being placed,” he told a “crowd of more than 5,000 who greeted him at the Sun Country Airlines hangar of the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport” (emphasis added):

“Hillary wants a 550 percent increase in Syrian refugees pouring into our country. And she wants virtually unlimited immigration and refugee admissions, from the most dangerous regions of the world, to come into our country and to come into Minnesota, and you know it better than anybody,” Trump said.

“Her plan will import generations of terrorism, extremism, and radicalism into your schools and throughout your communities,” he continued.

“When I’m elected president, we will suspend the Syrian refugee program and we will keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country,” Trump announced.

“Here in Minnesota you’ve seen first hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval, and with some of them then joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country, and all over the world,” Trump told the crowd.

“Everybody’s reading about the disaster taking place in Minnesota, everybody’s reading about it. You don’t even have the right to talk about it, you don’t even know who’s coming in, you have no idea. You’ll find out. You’ll find out,” he promised.

“And we will pause admissions from terror-prone regions until a full security assessment has been performed, and until a proven vetting mechanism has been established,” Trump added.

Continue reading here as Leahy lays out in great detail where Trump has dropped the ball.
We have extensive reporting in our ‘Trump Watch’ category on the many fumbles (if they are fumbles!) and the numbers the Trump Dept. of State is admitting with no sign of any “extreme vetting” having been put in place.
As of last Friday we have admitted 41,553 refugees in FY17, and, at the 900 a week rate, we could reach 60,000 (an average number since 9/11).
If I had to guess what caused the Trump big talk to fizzle, I bet it was the Chamber of Commerce Republicans who have convinced him that US companies need the cheap LEGAL refugee laborers now that the flow of illegals is slowing.
BIG MEAT needs workers willing to work for low wages, see here. (So does BIG POULTRY, and the dairy industry, and Marriott hotels, and airport support services, etc. etc.). What a business model—pay low wages and the refugee family is subsidized through taxpayer-funded welfare programs!
Never forget! Refugee resettlement is not first and foremost about humanitarianism!

Twin Falls, Idaho: Mormon Boy Scout troop being used to promote MORE refugees

04/12/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is really pretty shameful to use Boy Scouts who couldn’t possibly understand the complexity of the US Refugee Admissions Program to be shilling for a resettlement contractor paid by the head to place refugees in communities like Twin Falls just so local businesses can take advantage of taxpayer-supported cheap/captive labor that refugees represent.

Here is the latest from Leo Hohmann at WND. Be sure to see previous posts of mine about how the Mormon church is getting in to the refugee seeding process. LOL! I think they are angling to become VOLAG number ten!

One week after three refugee boys from Sudan and Iraq pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, the city council has voted unanimously to lay out the welcome mat for more refugees.

The council voted 7-0 to direct the city staff to draft a resolution declaring Twin Falls a “welcoming city” after hearing a pitch from local Boy Scout Troop 4, which is sponsored by the Mormon Church.

The Latter Day Saints Church sponsors a scouting troop that is involved in an Eagle Scout project to help refugees being resettled in the area by the College of Southern Idaho.

About 12 scouts and their parents showed up to promote the CSI Refugee Center and its continued resettlement of refugees from Sudan, Iraq and other parts of the world.

But not all residents were for the idea of making Twin Falls a “welcoming city.”

“By putting people into different categories instead of all residents, we’re setting aside a precedent that we’re all created equal with equal rights,” local property owner Terry Edwards told the council. “It’s surprising to me that we have a Scout troop here that are in favor of the refugee center, and I don’t know that they know a whole lot about it.”

[…..]

On Monday, LDS parents and relatives of the Boy Scout troop filled the council’s meeting chambers, along with a leader of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, local doctors, teachers and attorneys who all spoke in favor of more refugees. [Big Milk (big yogurt!) wants the cheap labor!—ed]

The LDS community has been supportive of refugee resettlement in Utah and Idaho, offering volunteers and financial donations to the resettlement agencies.

Please read on, there is much more.
Click here for our huge archive on Twin Falls.

Aberdeen, SD: Somali refugee sentenced to 3 years for attempted sexual assault of a mentally challenged woman

03/28/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When we first reported this case, it was learned through an apparent miscommunication by lawyers for the defendant that he had only arrived in the country the week before the incident occurred in July of last year. Now we learn he was a wandering Somali who had first been resettled in Idaho three years ago and had drifted from state to state ever since.
Before this case hit the news we had heard about the mayor there supporting the proposed opening of a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen and that citizens were upset. Click here for our first story on Aberdeen. I then visited the city during my travels throughout the Midwest and West last summer where I was mostly interested in seeing meatpacking towns that were being changed with the influx of refugee laborers.

Mayor Levsen gave a state of the city address last month. Note “immigrants” adding to Aberdeen population. http://www.aberdeennews.com/news/photo-gallery-state-of-the-city/collection_46caa9fe-e98d-11e6-ad76-3389dd13c3c0.html

Here is what happened in an Aberdeen court yesterday, from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily:

Liban Mohamed, a 39-year-old Somali refugee living in Aberdeen, South Dakota, was sentenced Monday to three years for attempting to sexually assault a severely mentally handicapped woman at a group home.

Speaking through an interpreter, Mohamed said he didn’t know English. Yet, he was seen communicating with his lawyer in English.

Judge Richard Summers sentenced Mohamed to five years, with two years suspended for a total of three years and gave him credit for time served of 228 days. Mohamed is not a U.S. citizen, but he has been living in the United States on a green card. [I assume there was no order for deportation after he finishes his sentence, will he be wandering to your state in three short years?—ed]

The incident happened July 30, 2016, just three days after Mohamed had arrived in Aberdeen to work at the Demkota Ranch beef-processing plant. He’d been in the country for about three years at that point, having been first resettled in Idaho. He then moved to Missouri, Kansas and on to South Dakota.

It’s not the only case recently of a Somali refugee running afoul of the law. Another man from Somalia, 24-year-old Abdirhman Noor, was charged with the attempted murder of two men on July 8, 2016, outside the Foxridge Apartments in Aberdeen. Noor jumped bail, failing to show up for a pretrial hearing in February. He has been missing ever since.

Still, the mayor of the small city, Mike Levsen, supports the continued arrival of refugees, many of whom are put to work in the local meatpacking plant and at a molded fiberglass plant.

The Liban Mohamed case was also notable for the way it was handled by the local media in and around Aberdeen.

Despite the facts – that a helpless woman was preyed upon by a refugee who had arrived in town just days earlier – coverage by the local newspaper, the Aberdeen News American, and local TV was non-existent until WND brought it to light.

When it did finally report the story, the News American refused to tell its readers that the perpetrator, Mohamed, was a refugee and buried the story on page 3.

The Brown County Sheriff’s Office refused to give WND a mugshot of Mohamed.

There are many more details. Continue reading here.
I wonder what his arrest, his legal counsel, his interpreters and his incarceration is costing the taxpayers of South Dakota? So much for refugees adding to local economies!
Aberdeen citizens might wish to review the ‘Rutland model’ regarding mayors.

Brazil: JBS and another BIG MEAT company raided in tainted meat scandal

03/18/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

So how does this affect you in America? It doesn’t directly, but it gives me another opportunity to educate new readers!
The story, which I first heard on my regular early morning scan of CNN, is about JBS, the Brazilian meat giant, that is changing American small cities because of it voracious desire for refugee labor!
Meatpacking companies get the cheap labor. American towns get the cultural upheaval.

I took this photo of JBS headquarters in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns. JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!

For new readers I have contended for years that the US Refugee Admissions Program is more about supplying large global corporations with cheap/captive labor than it is about ‘humanitarianism.’
Wages are low and we (taxpayers) subsidize the workers’ families through welfare. What a business model!
JBS (BIG MEAT) and other companies it owns (BIG CHICKEN) are changing towns like Greeley, Colorado where a large influx of Somalis have moved to the area to work for the global corporation, or have been directly resettled there by federal refugee resettlement contractors.
Be sure to see this story by Bloomberg about BIG MEAT and the Trump refugee slowdown.
Although this happened in Brazil, it places, once again, front and center the question of our food safety!
From the New York Times (emphasis is mine):

Brazil’s Largest Food Companies Raided in Tainted Meat Scandal

RIO DE JANEIRO — Federal agents raided the operations of Brazil’s largest food companies on Friday over accusations that their employees oversaw a scheme that included bribing inspectors to allow rotten meals to be served in public schools and salmonella-contaminated meat to be exported to Europe.

The investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police, an agency similar to the F.B.I., deals yet another blow to the country’s business establishment, which is struggling to recover from colossal graft scandals around Petrobras, the national oil company, and Odebrecht, a huge construction company.

In the newest corporate scandal, investigators said that employees at two food-processing giants, JBS and BRF, paid federal inspectors to ignore the adulteration or expiration of processed foods.

Inspectors also falsified sanitary permits, and bribes were channeled to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party of President Michel Temer, according to the authorities.

Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at Tendências, a consultancy in São Paulo, called the meatpacking inquiry “one more element that will add to the picture of political instability.” Brazil’s political establishment was already reeling from an array of other graft cases.

The meatpacking investigation also casts doubt on Brazil’s agribusiness industry, a relatively resilient pillar of the nation’s weak economy. JBS is one of the world’s largest meat producers, with the United States chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride among its foreign subsidiaries. BRF is a major exporter of meat to the Middle East and Asia.

Continue reading here.
See my tag ‘meatpackers’ for many more stories on the industry that once paid a decent salary and employed Americans.
You should know that then Senator Jeff Sessions (now Trump AG) called out meatpacking lobbyists behind the ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty legislation in 2013, here.
Endnote: If you live in a state with a lot of meatpackers/refugee labor, be sure to investigate how much your elected officials are getting in campaign donations from the meat/poultry companies.

Nebraska Republican Governor supports security screening, BUT wants refugee admissions to resume ASAP

02/18/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

My question is, so how much of the governor’s enthusiasm for refugees is because the meat and poultry industry in Nebraska has gotten addicted to cheap LEGAL immigrant labor?

nickerson_nebraska_downtown_1 — Last May we reported on tiny Nickerson, Nebraska where residents objected to a new poultry plant that wanted to locate there partly because they did not want the town changed with a huge influx of migrant labor. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/05/02/tiny-nebraska-town-says-no-to-chicken-plant-migrant-labor-one-important-objection/

There isn’t much different here than in dozens of sobs stories in recent days (that I can’t keep up with) about Refugee Resettlement contracting agencies having to reduce staff as the number of refugees arriving in the US begins to slow.
‘Religious charities,’ helping to supply BIG MEAT with laborers, are paid by the head (from the US Treasury) to seed refugees into your towns, and so obviously their money is drying up.
Nebraska was on my summer tour of states where meatpackers and poultry plants are changing the face of heartland towns with their greedy desire for cheap labor. Humanitarianism is only the cover!
Be sure to see Bloomberg’s ‘Big Meat Braces for a Refugee Shortage.’ I wrote about it here.

By the way, it is a fabulous business model for BIG MEAT (BIG TURKEY! BIG CHICKEN!) because US taxpayers bring the laborers directly to them, they pay wages much lower than they did 20 years ago, ‘religious charities’ get them settled in town, and then the refugee families’ lives are subsidized by taxpayers again in the form of social services (aka welfare).
This is the sob story from the Lincoln Journal Star yesterday:

pete-ricketts — Let’s get moving! “…so we can continue to safely welcome refugees from all parts of the world.”

Two of Nebraska’s three refugee resettlement agencies are cutting back their staffs in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.

Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, the largest of the three, announced Friday that it will eliminate 15 jobs in anticipation of a significant decline in refugee arrivals. Six of those jobs are in Lincoln.

Omaha’s Refugee Empowerment Center has also experienced cutbacks.

[….]

Trump’s order reduced the overall number of refugees allowed into the U.S. this year from 110,000 to 50,000. [Here we go with the bs again. Obama only wished for 110,000 in the year he would no longer be in office, 50,000 is still higher than 4 of George W. Bush’s years!—-ed]

That will have a significant impact in Nebraska, which led the nation in the number of refugees it accepted per capita last fiscal year.

[….]

The president clamped down on refugee resettlement and other travel into the U.S. following a wave of questions, mostly from Republicans, about the vetting process for refugees from Syria and other war-torn Middle East countries.

Gov. Pete Ricketts has said he supports Trump’s efforts to “strengthen security screening in the refugee process” but urged the White House to “quickly put new vetting processes in place, so we can continue to safely welcome refugees from all parts of the world.”

Continue reading here.
I fear that with everyone focusing on the security screening that most Republicans, who are driven by corporate donations and Chambers of Commerce, will not have any desire to reform this program with its huge economic and cultural costs.
Grassroots investigators should be looking for evidence that your elected officials are being lobbied by, or funded by, the meat and poultry giants in your states.
See our Nebraska archive by clicking here. Note the problems Nebraska has with TB in the migrant population there.