He says it has nothing to do with the fact that under the Donald Trump Administration the number of refugees being admitted to the US has plummeted.(I checked yesterday and in the first 2 weeks of January only around 200 came in.)
For new readers, the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration is normally a political appointment used by a new President to set a tone in the Department of State reflecting his (or her) political view on the controversial issue. Anne Richard with then UNHCR Antonio Guterres. Richard is a hard core ideologue who has recently been speaking around the country against Trump and his immigration policies.
President Obama had two hard core Leftwing Open Borders advocates running the program. The first wasEric Schwartzand many of you know of Anne Richardwho was selected after Schwartz moved on.
The job is a political appointment that requires Senate approval (both of Obama’s picks were approved). However, here is the rub: Donald Trump has put no one forward for this position thus leaving it in the hands of State Department career professionals.
Perhaps he has a strategy behind that—-one less battle with Senate Dems, and Rs like Flake and Graham, and maybe it is easier to shrink the program without a leading figurehead. I don’t know the answer.
Anyway here is the latest news at a pro-more-refugees website.
LOL! My first thought when I saw this was: okay where is Hans and his reporter pal at Reuters?
From Refugees Deeply: Henshaw is moving on…. The top U.S. diplomat dealing with refugees has resigned his post. Simon Henshaw became the third senior official dealing with refugees to depart or be reassigned in recent weeks.
The acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) said it was a routine professional departure.
“It very honestly had to do with the fact that I’d felt I’d spent enough time,” Henshaw told Reuters. “I’m used to moving on every two or three years.”
The 33-year public service veteran said his move was not a protest at the Trump administration’s refugee policies, which have seen cuts to financial support and resettlement numbers as well as travel bans.
Carol O’Connell is moving in: https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/bureau/272122.htm
Henshaw, who has been with PRM since 2013, will hand over to Carol O’Connell, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. On January 9 Lawrence Bartlett, previously the head of the refugee admissions office at the State Department, was reassigned to the office handling Freedom of Information Act requests.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has suspended the entire refugee program for four months, slashed resettlement places and funding for refugee programs and withdrawn the U.S. from the negotiations for a global compact on migration.
Earlier in January, Barbara Strack, chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, under the Department of Homeland Security, said she would retire this month.
The White House is also preparing to slash funding to the U.N. agency supporting Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). [Yippee!—ed]
See our stories on Bartlett,here and Strack, here. (Hans and reporter pal again!).
I bet the head honchos of the nine US State Department refugee contractors are running as fast as they can to meet O’Connell (if they haven’t done so already). If past is prologue, she will be their information pipeline (and advocate, they hope).
Here are the nine that are largely funded (involuntarily) by you, the taxpayer:
Update: Leo Hohmann has more on this story at his new website, here.
In his argument posted atThe Guardian, he says more legal pathways are needed because they (from the third world) are coming illegally (whether we like it or not). Sounds like blackmail to me!
He also confirms my oft-repeated contention that it is the desire by industries for labor that we should be satisfying in the new borderless (dream) world.
Aspiring migrants, denied legal pathways to travel, inevitably fall back on irregular methods. This not only puts them in vulnerable positions, but also undermines governments’ authority. The best way to end the stigma of illegality and abuse around migrants is, in fact, for governments to put in place more legal pathways for migration, removing the incentives for individuals to break the rules, while better meeting the needs of their labour markets for foreign labour.
Thanks to reader Deb for sending me Jihad Watch’s take on his screedhere. See discussion there about hijrah and the OIC. Guterres in happier times (December 2016) https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/12/03/big-smooch-from-obama-to-new-un-secretary-general-guterres/
Then check out Breitbart’s report :
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has unveiled his plan to promote global mass migration in the left-liberal Guardian newspaper.
Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister in his native Portugal, took over the top job at the UN on January 1st, having previously served as the institution’s High Commissioner for Refugees.
His article, titled ‘Migration can benefit the world. This is how we at the UN plan to help’, makes the bold claim that mass migration “powers economic growth, reduces inequalities and connects diverse societies”, in order to promote the Global Compact for Migration.
“This will be the first overarching international agreement of its kind,” he boasted — but claimed it would not “place any binding obligations on states”, but rather serve as “an unprecedented opportunity for leaders to counter the pernicious myths surrounding migrants”.
Trump dumps!
Breitbart continues:
These assurances have failed to convince the Donald Trump administration in the United States, with the White House rejected it as “simply not compatible with US sovereignty”, and President Trump summarizing it as “no borders, everyone can come in!”
Then this….
He [Guterres] made the contentious claim that migrants “take jobs” that local workers “cannot” fill, and asserted that this is a positive thing. He also attempted to spin the fact that migrants send huge sums of money straight out of their host countries and back to their countries of origin as a kind of supplement to foreign aid.
Breitbart continues here.
Pay attention to this last issue above about remittances. It is huge!
I remember when the Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans was up for renewal under George W. Bush. It was quickly renewed with his administration saying that the money the Salvadorans sent OUT OF THE US ECONOMY was propping up El Salvador (so we needed to continue doing that).
Guterres at RRW:
We followed Antonio Guterres here at RRW for a decade since he was previously the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (before moving up to top dog position at the UN). Go here for my Guterres archive.
Just a reminder that in June of 2009, as UNHCR, he said it was sharia law that underpins international refugee law and United Nations refugee activities. See here:
New York, 23 June (AKI) – The 1,400-year-old Islamic custom of welcoming people fleeing persecution has had more influence on modern international refugee law than any other traditional source, according to a new study sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
High Commissioner Antonio Guterres said that more than any other historical source, Islamic law and tradition underpin the modern-day legal framework on which UNHCR bases its global activities on behalf of the tens of millions of people forced from their homes around the world.
Take that Christians and Jews! You thought Biblical Judeo-Christian charity predated Islam, silly you.
I’m sure readers get sick of hearing me talk about the per head payment the US State Department pays the so-called VOLAGs (aka resettlement agencies, aka contractors)*** to place refugees into your towns and cities, but it is important because that is why you hear the contractors wailing now about the Trump Administration’s refugee slowdown. Why is the “welcome” the responsibility of the beleaguered US taxpayer?
Of course these agencies are on the Leftwing of the political spectrum and want to see diversity (and Democrat voters) planted in your towns. They have bought into the UN’s borderless world agenda, and some (maybe more than we know) work directly with global corporations to supply refugee labor, but because they can’t survive without government funding, they are hysterical now.
Thanks to collegue Jim, here is a documentfrom ten years ago, produced by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service(the one experiencing financial accounting questions) claiming that the $850 per head payment they received at the time (half went to the refugees and half was for overhead) was not sufficient and they wanted a per head raise to $1,500.
Public-Private partnership, my foot!
They actually made the claim repeatedly in their report that the PUBLIC-PRIVATE partnership was too heavily skewed in the direction of private funding responsibility and that the feds weren’t putting up their share.
That claim led me to a Form 990 for 2009 (I couldn’t find 2008) to see if they were indeed putting in more money than the feds. The answer is NO!
In fact only 3% of their revenue from gifts, grants and loan collection fees was private funding. The remainder was GOVERNMENT funding of some sort.
Here is a screenshot of that portion of their Form 990 for 2009: Obviously government grants are taxpayer dollars as is the loan service fees.
That fact, that 97% of LIRS income that year was supplied by the US taxpayer, completely nullifies the argument they make in their 2008 18-page analysis: The Real Cost of Welcome where they say they are supplying the greater amount in the public-private partnership.
The purpose of the study was to ‘encourage’ an even larger share of the burden for the taxpayer. In 2008 they complained that $850 per refugee was inadequate and that they were putting in an unfair share of the public-private arrangement.
I thought you might like to see what ‘services’ they provide for refugees (that you pay for). Remember that they only take care of the refugees they place for 90 days.
Much of this could be done with volunteer help and donations. Isn’t this after all supposed to be a charitable humanitarian endeavor?
When did it happen that religious good works were to be paid for by the government?
You can readily see why a refugee designation is the most desirable LEGAL immigration category one could want. American taxpayers give out a lot of goodies, plus the refugees get caseworkers to hold their hands through the welfare bureaucracy!
Conclusion: We want $1,500 per head!
I can report that they got their wish and more! The present rate (climbed steadily over the Obama years) is now $2,125!
$1,125 is to be spent on the refugee and the contractor pockets $1000 for ‘administrative’ expenses. (And the contractor decides how to spend the refugee’s share!).
And, let me be clear, this (State Department payment) is not the only money the contractors receive from the US Treasury, they receive literally millions more through other agencies and grants/contracts particularly from the Office of Refugee Resettlement in HHS.
***These are the nine federal contractors who pass money through to hundreds of subcontractors operating around the country.
Broken record alert!
It is my contention that the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program will never be reformed until these Leftwing community organizers are removed from the federal dole. You get the list twice today (earlier post here)!
I just wish for once ‘journalists’ at Amos’s level would explain to her listeners some of the real facts about how the US Refugee Admissions Program operates, but maybe NPR listeners are only interested in horror stories about the President with headlines meant to alarm them in to action.
(More on that below)
But see how journalism professor Amos beginsher report (hat tip: Margaret) with Donald Trump declaring that Obama’s Australia deal was dumb. It was, and it is! Deborah Amos, advocate for the existing UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, opinion writer at NPR and Journalism visiting lecturer at Princeton University. https://journalism.princeton.edu/people/deborah-amos/
Last year began with an angry phone call about refugees, famously leaked later. The newly inaugurated Donald Trump exploded when Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, asked him to honor a U.S. pledge to resettle some 1,200 refugees from Australia’s offshore detention centers.
“This is a stupid deal,” Trump fumed to an astonished Turnbull. “This shows me to be a dope.”
A day earlier, the president had signed an executive order temporarily halting the entire U.S. refugee resettlement program and slashed the number of expected arrivals President Obama had set.
Trump complained that by honoring the deal with Australia he was “going to get killed” politically and abruptly hung up the phone.
It was the harbinger of policies set in motion to unravel the U.S. refugee resettlement program, an issue that defined Trump’s election campaign and has shaped much of his first year in office.
What the heck!
She then goes on and never reports that the President is going along with the deal (doesn’t she read RRW?).
But, you see, admitting that the President caved-in to pressure and is now going to admit up to 1,200 migrants that Australia doesn’t want, who have been in Australian-controlled detention for as long as four years, doesn’t fit the opinion piece she crafted and thus wouldn’t help stir up Leftwing anger.
She then quotes former Middle East ambassador Ryan Crocker (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama), bemoaning the (financial!) losses the federal refugee contractors*** will experience going forward:
“This is strategic, that’s why it’s different from previous anti-immigrant mindsets. It is a conscious effort to deconstruct the system,” Crocker says. He points to dramatic budget cuts for the nine private, voluntary agencies that for decades have contracted with the State Department to resettle and integrate the refugee population in communities across the U.S.
“The damage has already been done. These agencies run on the slimmest of margins. The layoffs are already doing structural damage. It’s going to take a long time to rebuild,” he says.
At this point, a real journalist would explain just a bit about the “voluntary agencies” (Ha! Ha!) which are almost completely funded by the US taxpayer, and, as such, are quasi-government organizations.
It would only take a paragraph or two to explain their financial structure based on federal payments on a refugee per head basis (hey! maybe even throw in a few numbers about CEO salaries). She might explain how they operate in secrecy in hopes that the locals won’t catch on to plans for their communities (Rutland, VT for example!).
She might say they are community organizers holding anti-Trump rallies like the recent one in Washington with CAIR, or that they hired the Podesta Group (for $100,000) to lobby for them.
She could point out that they could have been raising private charitable dollars to tide them over (and help refugees!) through slow refugee admission times. Or, maybe she could report on refugees left in the lurch by the contractors, some wishing to return to camps in Africa. You get my drift!
Then she quotes me wanting to be sure her listeners know what an extremist I am (well ok!). But, in many ways I’m more of an investigative journalist than she is!
“Donald Trump missed a fabulous opportunity to suspend the entire refugee admissions program,” activist Ann Corcoran complained to Breitbart News. Corcoran runs the Refugee Resettlement Watch website that regularly claims the resettlement program is corrupt and a health and security risk for communities that accept the newcomers. [Have I ever used the word corrupt?—ed]
Laughing my head off! This is my complete statement quoted at Breitbart:
“Donald Trump missed a fabulous opportunity to suspend the entire refugee admissions program, at least on a temporary basis, until we get back on our feet in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico,” Ann Corcoran, who runs the Refugee Resettlement Watch website, tells Breitbart News.
And, Amos is training young journalists at Princeton!
Yes, the President has great power under the Refugee Act of 1980 and he could have suspended it outright. His team obviously decided to “smother” it by cutting the numbers and consequently cutting the funding (your tax dollars) that feed the refugee contractors***. Immigration lawyer Becca Heller in Glamour magazine: “The fight against Trump….” https://www.glamour.com/story/becca-heller-irap-vs-trump-supreme-court
Here she gives Becca Hellerwith the International Refugee Assistance Project in New York a lot of column inches to say what we said yesterdaythat Congress will need to step in to make permanent changes to the law.
“We are in a pitched battle for the continued existence of the U.S. refugee resettlement program,” says Heller. “The numbers are going to be low for the next few years and it’s our job to keep them as high as we can.”
[….]
Heller says there are limits to the president’s powers to end the refugee resettlement program outright. Congress established the program’s framework and would need to vote to eliminate it.
“I think [the refugee program is] under attack but I don’t think it’s over. For one thing, it’s the law,” says Heller, pointing to the 1980 Refugee Act that sets out the provisions for the admission of refugees “of special humanitarian concern,” and the 1965 immigration law that emphasizes family reunification [aka chain migration—ed].
“The president may be able to temporarily prevent refugees from coming in,” Heller says. “It’s not going to successfully dismantle the program without Congress.”
Frelick says there is nothing in the law (Refugee Act of 1980) that says the US resettle a single refugee
Ms. Amos earlier in her piece, designed to paint the President in the worst light, while the refugee industry is pure as the driven snow, quoted a spokesperson for Human Rights First. But, she could have just as well quoted Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch who said this in November 2016 and I reported here. Take that Ms. Heller!
See what refugee advocate and longtime expert Bill Frelick (Human Rights Watch) said in November after Trump was elected and the refugee industry went in to shell-shock:
“In the U.S., there’s not a quota that has to be filled. The U.S. has a budgeted amount of money to do refugee resettlement, but there’s no requirement that the U.S. resettle a single refugee, and there’s no legal obligation to do it.”
I suspect he wasn’t too popular with his peers/media after that statement. I rarely see him quoted now.
More promotion of the existing/flawed refugee program and criticism of the President from Ms. Amos here.
***These are the “voluntary agencies” responsible for all refugee resettlement in the US. I rarely use the phrase voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) because it makes me laugh. When one thinks of voluntary agencies, one thinks of non-governmental organizations working hard to raise private money and using volunteer workers to carry out their humanitarian good works, not agencies funded with MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars(involuntarily taken from you) and CEOs making $200,000, $300,000 and $600,000 annual salaries!
The political Left-wingers, like those at Church World Service, don’t like LOUD when it comes from the people who don’t want their towns and cities changed without their consultation.
I had to laugh when I saw this headline at NPR:
Opposition To Refugee Arrivals Keeps Getting Louder
Erol Kekic dog whistling with this line? He said people asked: “Why are we bringing people who don’t all look like us?” I will bet no one uttered those words that night!
Don’t you know! Loud is bad if it doesn’t come from the Left!
And, it is funny, just last night I was so irritated by Leftwing commentators always referring to Rightwing “dog whistles” when along comes a story with some dog whistles from the Left!
If you don’t know what the heck dog whistles are (in the political sense), it is when a supposedly secretive message is being sent to one’s own political base.
Before I give you some juicy bits on this NPR story, you might want to revisit my reports on Poughkeepsie here.
In the waning months of the Obama Administration (before November) hopes were running high. Obama had set a refugee admissions ceiling for FY17 at 110,000, the highest in years and certainly much higher than any of his previous 7 years, and they all thought that Hillary was headed to the Oval.
So the US State Department with its contractors*** set about finding lots and lots of fresh territory in which to place refugees (older sites were getting overloaded and tensions were building). Poughkeepsie was one such new site.
Then along came Donald J. Trump to mess up their big plans….
A few days after Donald Trump was elected President, more than a hundred people packed into a church sanctuary in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. to hear a presentation about refugee resettlement in their town.
It didn’t go well.
This was after Trump had campaigned on refusing Syrian refugees, citing security concerns. In the church that night, staffers from the non-profit organization Church World Service laid out their plan to open a refugee resettlement office in Poughkeepsie, and bring in about 80 refugees, mostly from the Congo, Iraq and Syria.
The audience had questions. A lot of them. They wanted to know, would they be safe? And could Poughkeepsie afford to care for these new residents?
“As a resident of this town, of this city, I can look out my window any time and find someone in need,” said Poughkeepsie resident Steven Planck, to vigorous applause.
I have seen this comment dozens of times and ask this question: If Church World Serviceis a Christian ‘charity,’ why not focus on the poor people in every American city? Why are we importing more poverty?
The head of Church World Service’s refugee program, Erol Kekic, spent more than an hour trying to respond to the questions.
“We had to do a lot of truth-telling, and dispel some myths,” says Kekic. “From ‘the value of my property will go down because refugees will be resettling next to me,’ to ‘are we bringing terrorists?’ to ‘why are we bringing people who don’t all look like us?'”
It’s getting harder for refugees to find a welcoming home in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut the number of refugees allowed into the country. In cities and town across the nation, citizens are protesting refugees being resettled in their neighborhoods.
In Poughkeepsie, the debate got ugly. On social media, people called opponents of the refugee plan racists and Islamophobes. The staff of Church World Service received death threats. [Ho hum! Death threats, so what else is new—ed]
[….]
Until recently, refugee resettlement in the U.S. had wide bipartisan support. The U.S. State Department, along with nine large non-profit groups, decides where to resettle refugees fleeing persecution, war and violence. They look for communities where there are volunteers to help.
The reason the refugee industry had “wide bipartisan support” and still does is that the Republican establishment wants the cheap labor for their big business donors and the Dems want the voters. And it is only in the last few years that this secret program has been exposed to the American taxpayers who shell out the bucks for it!
NPR continued:
“We all wondered, why? Why Poughkeepsie?”says David Cole, 37, a lifelong resident of the town who helped mobilize opposition to Church World Service. Cole insists he has nothing against Muslims or other refugees. But he says Poughkeepsie isn’t a wealthy town; unemployment there is higher than the statewide average.
Why Poughkeepsie? Because Church World Service thought a banner year was coming with a slew of Obama/Clinton paying refugee “clients,” and they figured Poughkeepsie would be a pushover!
“I looked at people that I knew,” Cole says. “And I said, OK, well, why aren’t these people getting help? Why are we trying to help, you know, people from war-torn countries in an area where there’s people looking for jobs? Like, they’re scavenging for jobs around here. I don’t get it.”
[….]
“Yes, there are loud voices in every community,” Kekic says. “But they’re usually not the majority, and they’re usually just a very loud minority.”
