Why should we? They are all Muslim countries and should take care of their own kind of people! Right?
Every day I look for the news that will come inevitably—the news that the US has opened its doors to Syrians in a big way.
Bring in the Syrians! Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch is getting impatient with the Obama Administration.
And, every day for months I’ve noticed that not a word of complaint has come from the “humanitarian industrial complex” after a PR flurry earlier in the year where the contractors made it clear (and here) that they want 12,000-15,000 Syrians sent to your towns and cities each year going forward.
This Human Rights Watch writer is voicing the first complaint I’ve seen in awhile.
(I have a theory that the US State Department told its contractors to shut up or else they would stir up even more opposition to the resettlement of what will be mostly Sunni Syrians.)
Bill Frelick in a piece entitled, ‘US to Syrian Refugees: We’ll Give You Money But Stay Away, Please,’ at the Huffington Post says:
With the number of Syrian refugees in the Middle East hitting 3 million, it’s worth examining how the United States and other countries not on the frontline of the conflict have stepped in to help countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. These countries have the misfortune to be neighbors not only of Syria, but of Iraq and Israel/Palestine as well, other places that have been the source of millions of refugees.
Consider this: Lebanon is hosting 1.14 million refugees from Syria, the equivalent of 83 million refugees in the United States — or the combined population of California, Texas, and New York. And what has the United States done to relieve the human burden on Lebanon and Syria’s other neighbors? In the first 10 months of fiscal year 2014, the US admitted a grand total of 63 Syrian refugees.
Obama will make an announcement soon!
Or, at least the US State Department will. The annual Presidential Determination letter will be sent to Capitol Hill sometime in the coming weeks (it has to because the new fiscal year begins October 1), and in it the Administration will spell out its refugee wishlist for the coming year. There is no way they aren’t going to bring in thousands of Syrians, it is just a question of how many thousands.
….turns out tens of thousands of the kids never existed!
Biden, Johnson, Obama (looks like they are on to us!)
That’s what blogger ‘sundance’ at The Conservative Tree House alleges and seems to have the numbers to prove it. There are still a lot of unaccompanied minors (mostly teenagers), but the number is about half of what the Obama Administration has been claiming.
In reality, says ‘sundance,’ the numbers of children with parents (mostly with Mom) is where the larger numbers are to be found. And, of course those migrants are just run-of-the-mill illegal aliens, not UACs who are given special treatment.
Why would they do this?
Maybe to push Congress to pass ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ pronto?
Three weeks ago we shared the fact that well over 40,000 reported UAC’s were missing from this years record keeping. The facts catching up with the ruse.
Well, the truth was/is they’re not technically missing because they never existed in the first place. DHS, which compiles the reports coming from the Border Patrol, and then gives the statistical summaries of the reports, had artifically inflated the apprehension numbers to support the White House narrative.
However, DHS, or more accurately Jeh Johnson, could not divert the end user of the apprehension reports, The Executive Office of Immigration Reform, the entity who controls the court dockets, from recording the missing reports.
Comparative FOIA’s into the recording agency, The Border Patrol, and the end user, The EOIR, showed the statistical ruse.
The reports were missing because they were never written; they were never written because the UAC’s were not actually real.
Read it all! See their excellent work! There is a lot of documentation to prove that one more time we can’t trust this White House. And, you know it would explain why we kept hearing of possible housing sites that would a couple of days later turn out not to be needed.
And, it would explain why, after one crisis story after another about the UAC’s gobbling up all the funding for the normal refugee flow, the money started reappearing in the refugee contractors’ budgets. Remember when that ‘carrot-tasting class’ money was so quickly restored.
I’ve said it before and will say it again, the general public may not fear a terrorist attack from so many Muslims entering the US (legally and illegally), but they will get mighty excited if their kids come home from school with TB (or parasites even)!
This week a reader brought to our attention this very thorough and important report on the health status of refugees resettled in Texas in calendar year 2013. We didn’t know such reports existed, but apparently in some states where the state itself still has some control over the program, reports like this one are generated.
We assume that in certain states, especially Wilson-Fish states, where contractors (like Catholic Charities) have complete control of who is resettled and how many in a state, that such information is not readily available to the public. Is the contractor even keeping records?
So here is what we are learning about Texas refugees from the “Texas Refugee Health Program Report 2013”here. Open: Epidemiological Report. There is lots of really interesting information about which counties refugees went to etc., so check it out. Here are just some bullets that interested me.
Paging Dr. Obama, the refugees are SICK!
* Texas reported 10,729 new refugees in the state in calendar year 2013. 7,195 were regular refugees, smaller numbers were Cuban parolees, asylees, and those holding special immigrant visas (Iraq and Afghanistan).
* Refuges from Iraq, Cuba and Burma make up the largest groups.
* 92% of arrivals were health-screened which means that about 858 were not screened for one reason or another. Why?
* 91% of arrivals needed an interpreter (imagine what that is costing Texas). Be sure to see the pie chart with the myriad languages which health practitioners must wrestle with.
* 3,583 of the arrivals were screened for Tuberculosis and 19% tested positive (that is about 680!). If you carried out this rate for 100,000 plus refugees resettled in the US every year (and every one was tested) we are looking at over 19,000 refugees each year entering the US with a positive TB skin test. Now some will argue they might not have active TB, but that doesn’t mean they won’t become active at some point in time. So, who monitors these people as they move on to other cities and states?
* 293, of those screened, tested positive for Hepatitis B.
* 97 were positive for HIV (remember you pay for their treatment!)
* And, surprisingly there were 76 cases of syphilis largely in the Cuban sample.
* We didn’t see anything about mental health, a common problem with refugees, but it could be there. See our ‘health issues’category for posts on mental health and refugees.
* There were 231 newly arrived refugees over age 65 and even one between 91 and 95 years of age.
For some end-of-summer reading fun, go here (especially you Texans!).
Our reader sent us reports for Utah ( go here). And, in Minnesota, out of 2,125 refugees screened, 474 tested positive for TB (22%).
We sure are lucky to have Obamacare taking care of all these “new Americans” health needs, aren’t we?
You know who should be really worried about this (in addition to American workers) is anyone who is trying to help real legal refugees find work because this plan may include employers of low-skill labor as well if the likes of Tamar Jacoby get their way.
Refugee activists won’t be concerned of course because it’s more about open borders for the refugee contractors than it is about humanitarian concern for needy refugees (or needy Americans).
Obama: Go ahead and joke about golfing all you want, but I am getting it done!
Reports run as high as 50% for the unemployment rate among legal refugees from some ethnic groups. (I can hear the howls from refugee contractors when I say it’s that high, but they don’t really know themselves because they keep phoney records on employment.)
The contractors must report to the feds the employment status of their refugees, but here is what they do—they get the refugee some piddling job that might only last a few months just so they can say their refugees are employed and it doesn’t matter if the refugee is fired or quits after that reporting date. And besides, after a few months, refugees move on to other towns and cities and no one tracks what they are doing!
After meeting with a “bevy” of big-business groups, President Barack Obama is reportedly considering granting them up to 800,000 additional guest-worker visas via executive actions.
According to the Associated Press, “one of the more popular requests among business and family groups is a change in the way green cards are counted,” which would “essentially free up some 800,000 additional visas the first year.” In addition, “other requests have included removing the requirement that some spouses of U.S. citizens return to their native country for at least three years before they can apply for U.S. residency, as well as extending work permits to the spouses of all temporary H1-B skilled workers.” The Obama administration is also considering granting work permits for low-skilled industries as well.
The Obama administration “has already increased the number of guest-worker permits by possibly 100,000 when it allowed the spouses of high-tech guest-workers who are applying for permanent residency to obtain permits.”
Numerous companies – like Microsoft and Cisco – have massively laid off American workers while pushing the Obama administration for more guest-worker visas at a time when scholars and studies from organizations on the left, right, and center have debunked the notion that there is a shortage of American high-tech workers. The Obama administration reportedly wants to appease big-business interests so they give him air cover for his potential executive amnesty, which may enable millions of illegal immigrants to get work permits in addition to temporary amnesty.
[….]
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) accused the Obama administration of “actively working against the interests of the American worker.”
Not only will the “legal” immigrants be working, but they will be voting because anyone with a driver’s license can vote in most states.
The next time you hear someone say they disapprove of illegal immigration, but LEGAL immigration is o.k. pop them in the nose (gently of course). Our problem is numbers now whether they are legal or illegal!
….invite in more “children” because more migrants means more money for government contractors! (she doesn’t say that! I do!)
Lavinia Limon is the CEO of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, known in the refugee industry as USCRI. Below, published at the Budapest Business Journal (of all places) is her six-point prescription for what the Obama Administration should do to save the ‘unaccompanied alien children’ (child “refugees” she calls them) because how we respond will “define us as a Nation,” she says.
Revolving door! Doing well by doing good!
Limon in 1996 as head of Bill Clinton’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/person/42360
It’s mentioned in her bio at the end of this opinion piece, but keep in mind she is one of several refugee contractors who have moved in and out of the revolving door from ‘non-profit’ contractor to government giver-of-grants and then back out again.
She was Bill Clinton’s head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS)after first working in a ‘non-profit’ resettlement agency, and now she heads up the ‘non-profit’ group USCRI where she seeks grants from her former USCRI VP (Eskinder Negash) who now heads Obama’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Did you get that?
And, be sure to have a look at this post we wrote in 2008 when we nicknamed her “whoop-de-do” when one of her resettlement subcontractors was caught dumping (and not caring for) refugees in Waterbury, CT. It had been revealed to the public that the contractor keeps a cut of what the refugees each are allotted by the feds and she told the reporter that the feds weren’t keeping up with the economic times and she mentioned everyone would squawk if their salaries weren’t growing. She said:
“Whoop-de-do” ….“God help us if our salaries had not kept pace with inflation like that.“
So, let’s see how the inflationary times are treating USCRI and her salary! (I’m going to get to her prescription for handling the southern border invasion, but this is too good!).
In 2008, we reported Ms. Limon’s 2006 salary (while USCRI was taking in $18 million):
In 2006 her salary and other compensation was $195,478. That is up about $20,000 from the previous couple of years.
Are you ready for this!
First, you need to know that in its 2013 Form 990, USCRI took in $35,676,146 and $35,429,570 came from government grants (page 9)—that is, 99% of their funds are from you—the US taxpayer! (much worse than any contractor*** we have reviewed so far). They apparently make virtually no effort to raise private funds in what was supposed to be a public-private partnership when the Refugee Act of 1980 was signed into law by Jimmy Carter.
So what is Ms. Limon’s salary today? Drum roll please!
Now working as a government contractor, you can hire Ms. Limon to speak. http://speakerpedia.com/speakers/lavinia-limon
On page 7 of that Form 990 we learn that Lavinia Limon is making more than the Vice President of the United States whom she ever-so-gently disparages in her op-ed at the Budapest Journal.
Her salary from USCRI and other sources related to her work there is $289,192. It went up 32% since 2006! Has your salary increased that much over so short a time? If she were in the legitimate private sector, then what they pay is none of our business, but she is essentially a government employee, so we have every right to blow our stacks!
Family business? One Peter Limon is listed in that Form 990 as well pulling down a salary of $115,878 and $23,991 from related income.
Consider all of that information when you read this opinion-piece (that you paid for!).
…..we’ve proposed six actions that the United States should take to resolve this issue. We’ve personally handed our proposal to every member of Congress, and we’ve spoken about it with every reporter who’s called. We’re getting some traction on these simple, yet tested ideas:
1. Respect families by allowing parents from El Salvador and Honduras who reside legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status to apply for their minor children to reunite. The children’s status would then be linked to their parents. This would immediately reduce immigration court backlogs, and would apply to an estimated 30–40 percent of the children surrendering at the border.
2. Keep kids out of the courtrooms by instituting a Children’s Corps based on the Asylum Officer Corps model. Officers will have training in child-sensitive interview techniques and Best Interest Determination standards, and will determine whether a child is eligible for legal relief. This will move the adjudication process from an adversarial judicial process to an administrative process for most children. Reports indicate that 40–60 percent of these children may be eligible for legal protection.
3. Help children avoid the dangerous journey by allowing them to apply for refugee status from their home country. We’ve previously used this process so that Soviet Jews, Vietnamese, and Cubans could avoid life-threatening escapes. Additionally, other North and South American countries may be willing to accept the children for resettlement.
4. Engage the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to determine international protection needs using its well-established procedures.The UNHCR could then refer cases to the U.S. Department of State for further interviewing and approval before resettlement in the United States, and possibly other countries.
5. Forgive the children by granting Children’s Protected Status (CPS) to all unaccompanied children who have already been brought into custody.We used this approach with Cubans and Haitians who arrived illegally in 1980. The government could announce a cut-off date after which new arrivals would be subject to expedited removal. Granting CPS will relieve the government of the burden and cost of adjudicating the cases of the thousands of unaccompanied minors who are at the border, and will increase the Department of Homeland Security’s capacity to handle other immigration cases.
6. Introduce hope by creating a Regulated Entry Procedure for 10,000 unaccompanied immigrant children per year per country from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. As precedent, a lottery system has allowed 20,000 Cubans to enter the United States annually for the past 34 years. The children would enter the United States legally through a process managed and regulated by the U.S. government.
I love the United States, and I have high expectations for its international behavior and reputation. We can do better, and I commit to being part of the solution.
said it before and will say it again, the general public may not fear a terrorist attack from so many Muslims entering the US (legally and illegally), but they will get mighty excited if their kids come home from school with TB (or parasites even)!
