That is not a surprise, but what was a surprise is that the vast majority of the commenters at the Washington Posteditorial on Sunday were cheering Trump on! Readers of the Washington Post! Hillary will open the floodgates, Trump will not. It is that simple! http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/04/critics-hillary-clinton-has-plan-to-flood-u-s-with-muslim-refugees/
Mike Pence as governor of Indiana may not have the powerto block certain refugees from his state, but the WaPo acknowledges that a President Trump does! The Post obviously thinks this information is disqualifying for Trump. I maintain that the Trump campaign needs to start telling this to his vast audiences! Hereis a bit of the WaPo editorial (I didn’t snip any of their whinny biased lines):
A President Trump could slash the number of refugees allowed to enter the country, including from Syria, downgrading President Obama’s goal of admitting 110,000 in the fiscal year that started Saturday. Federal law gives presidents the power to bar any “class of aliens” they deem “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” so Mr. Trump could as promised ban immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
Now go therequickly and see the comments! The majority are for this novel concept: “I like the idea of sending them all back!” (Person20).
See my post of last week on Obama’s FY2017 110,000 ceiling and how Trump can drop it!
…..if the state is taking federal money for refugee resettlement.
(That is the hook, always the hook, states take federal money and then lose their states’ rights!) Vice Presidential nominee and Indiana Governor Mike Pence loses Appeals case on Syrian refugee resettlement on eve of VP debate. What a timing coincidence? Come to think of it, maybe Pence can lead Kaine into a trap tonight and ask Kaine how many Syrians he and Hillary want to admit to the US.
The lesson in this decision is that if you, the citizens of any state, want to control admission to your state of refugees being placed there by the US government, you have to either work to scrap or reform the Refugee Act of 1980(long term) or, you have to work right now to limit federal spending for the program (so fewer refugees can be admitted in the first place). Monumental task ahead….
Both solutions involve convincing a Congress where the Republican leadership is working against you with the help of most of your own representatives, the so-called religious charities, big greedy-for-cheap-labor global corporations, and the US Chamber of Commerce. A political solution!
There are still some legal avenues (where is the Tennessee case?) that need to be attempted, but hanging your hat on some legal decision years down the road strikes me as an avoidance measure. Time to tackle your Congressmen and US Senators! Here is the news from a conservative (we are told) Appeals Court (story posted by Nina Totenberg of NPR):
A federal appeals court panel Monday blocked Indiana Gov. and Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence’s attempt to keep Syrian refugees out of Indiana.
The court upheld a lower court judge in barring Pence from interfering with the distribution of federal funds to resettle Syrian refugees in his state. The appeals court panel said that federal law bars discrimination based on nationality.
The three-judge panel that issued the ruling is an all-star group of conservative judges, including one of the judges on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.
In a unanimous opinion, the appeals court said Gov. Pence acted illegally in accepting federal money for refugee resettlement and then refusing to use that money to aid Syrian refugees.
The panel rejected Pence’s argument that terrorists are posing as Syrian refugees to gain entry into the U.S., calling it a “nightmare speculation” based on no evidence. Indeed, the court said, the state presented no evidence that any Syrian refugee had been involved in a terrorist act in the U.S.
The court added that resettlement of persecuted refugees is a federal responsibility under the 1980 Refugee Act, which authorizes the president*** to determine, on the basis of “humanitarian concerns or … the national interest,” how many refugees to admit each year. In 2016, President Obama set the number at 85,000, including 10,000 Syrians.
It is about the money! When Congress returns in November they will have to finish and approve the federal budget for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year (it began Oct. 1, this past Saturday). Congress will either fully fund Obama’s 110,000 refugee plan for 2017 or it won’t appropriate enough of your money for the full 110,000. It is that simple.
For new readers, I don’t want to go too deep in the weeds, but Texas withdrawing from the program last week, is only a stop gap measure because the federal government will assign a non-profit refugee contractor to run the program. Sure, they will be in chaos for a couple of months there, but it will eventually mean that Texas will be just like all the other Wilson-Fish states. (You are going to have to search RRW for ‘Wilson-Fish’ because I want to move on to other things this morning). ***No easy outs, only two things to save us—Trump is elected and you work your butts off to change Congress on this issue.
LOL! Here comes ‘Mom for Trump’ as promised!
Ann, could you tell all your readers on a daily basis to call our useless Congress @ 202 224 3121 and have them say DEFUND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT PROGRAM. I call daily and if enough of us do so, we can make a difference.
Update October 5: Michael Leahy at Breitbart has written more on your tax dollars going to Maine’s large Somali community,here.
Do you think that maybe the Obama Administration is literally breaking the bank to give your money away before it clears out of DC for good. Just the other day we learned that a Somali ‘community’ group was given$300,000 to combat sexual abusein the East African (that’s what they call Somalis when they don’t want to use the ‘S’ word) community and now this!
The USDA has awarded a $400,000 grant to help Somalis eat better and reconnect with their roots! No kidding!
From the CTPost: Curbing food insecurity!
LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — The United States Department of Agriculture is committing nearly $400,000 to increase food access for the Somali community in Lewiston.
Limited food access for Somalis in Lewiston?
Members of the Somali Bantu community in the city are partnering with the Cumberland County Food Security Council on the project. The funding is expected to support Somalis’ agriculture and help them reconnect with their cultural heritage.
The USDA says the objectives of the project include building the capacity of the Somali Bantu community and its farmers to produce food and address the problem of limited food access. The agency describes the Somali Bantu community as the poorest community in the city, which is the second largest city in the state.
Cumberland County Food Security Council will recruit people in the community to help increase access to healthy food.
I wonder is Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins involved in this giveaway too?
By the way, the next time you see one of those articles in which the resettlement industry brags about how refugees bring economic booms to struggling towns, remember this! In the case of Lewiston, there is now an additional $700,000 sloshing around the community. But, it is still tax money coming from the money tree growing in Washington (joke of course).
It is not that the Somalis have helped the economy in the way the industry wants you to think—it is basically welfare dollars flowing from your pockets to theirs!
That is, if Speaker Paul Ryan would give the go-ahead to the House Judiciary Committee(Reps. Goodlatte and Gowdy) to give it a hearing, and that is the rub! It is not that all of Congress would disapprove the bill (they might), but it will certainly never see the light of day in this Congress or likely the next unless you act now. Stop ranting about Obama and focus your energy where it matters on two Members of Congress who could slow the flow of Middle Eastern/African refugees to your towns if they weren’t so afraid of Speaker Ryan (and his role in determining their own personal upward mobility). Reps Gowdy (left) and Goodlatte.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that the House Judiciary Committee (Goodlatte and Gowdy) never gave a look at another excellent bill by Rep. Brian Babin and dozens of co-sponsors to put the RAP on hold until certain benchmarks were met. That bill was introduced last year (the first year of this Congress) and so there was plenty of time to hold hearings, mark it up and move it to the floor.
(By avoiding moving any bills like this to the floor they don’t have to ever show their constituents what they really believe and shamefully direct your anger at Obama instead!) We can argue the merits and demerits of the different proposals until the cows come home, but none of it matters when Reps Goodlatte (chairman of the full House Judiciary Committee) and Gowdy (Chairman of the Immigration subcommittee) make NO effort to even entertain reviewing the Refugee Act of 1980. (In fact, by not holding a hearing on Obama’s ‘determination’ for FY2017 before the start of the fiscal year, they have already broken the law in the JUDICIARY Committee)
Why? Because they do what Paul Ryan tells them to do!
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. (F, 53%) has made it clear that if voters reelect his party, he will promote jailbreak legislation, the biggest priority of George Soros. Imagine if his party would instead run on protecting the security and sovereignty of the people by returning to the states the power over refugee resettlement?
Now, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa. (C, 76%) has a bill to do just that. Sadly, his bill — a reflection of amazing policy and a winning political strategy — is not as much of a priority as George Soros and creating a permanent Democratic majority.
Perry’s bill, similar to a plan I outlined in Stolen Sovereignty, would require that states affirmatively sign off on refugee resettlement proposals before the federal government and private [taxpayer-funded] refugee resettlement contractors can seed their communities with refugees. Under this legislation, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would have to first submit a plan to the relevant state legislature that includes all of the information concerning costs, criminal history, and health records of prospective refugees. They would also have to provide information regarding said refugee’s affiliation with any Muslim Brotherhood group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. Most importantly, any plan for resettlement must be ratified by the state legislature and signed by the governor, otherwise no refugees can be settled in that state.
[….]
No legal body in this country — from Congress to state legislatures — would approve the resettlement of tens of thousands of Somali refugees if they had to affirmatively approve it today. Unfortunately, in the most grotesque violation of the social contract and consent-based citizenship, the most radical forms of cultural transformation are in the hands of unelected entities. Scott Perry’s bill would right this ship and empower the people.
Read it allhere.
Rep. Perry deserves praise for his willingness to put his name on a plan to put more power over the resettlement of refugees in the hands of the states, but sadly this Congress is over for all intents and purposes. He will have to resubmit his bill when Congress returns in January.
However, it is not too late to make the funding issue a major one before the election next month.
The Continuing Resolution, passed last week, funds the government at the FY2016 level until December. They need to address the entire budget when they return right after the November election.
You still have one more chance to stop Obama’s 110,000 flood of refugees that began on Saturday and that is if you spend the next 36 days working to elect Donald Trump and to figure out every imaginative way to figuratively beat-up (and I mean it!) your Washington representatives by telling them to DEFUND THE REFUGEE PROGRAM FOR THIS YEAR. Tell them you want a moratorium! (If you don’t ask for the moon, you will get nothing). REPUBLICANS! Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are the ones who ultimately hold your community’s fate in their hands, not Obama!
I told you the other day that I would keep repeating what ‘Mom for Trump’ said, so here it is again:
Ann, could you tell all your readers on a daily basis to call our useless Congress @ 202 224 3121 and have them say DEFUND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT PROGRAM. I call daily and if enough of us do so, we can make a difference.
Stay tuned! Look for more things you can do to get to your Washington, DC so-called representatives while they are stumping in the home district starting tomorrow and for the next month.
All of our discussions about the budget process, and Congress generally, over the last couple of months can be found in my tag ‘Where is Congress.’
Voice of America has a wrap-up article for the FY16 UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program (saves us looking up the numbers). What tickled me was the US Conference of Catholic Bishops head lobbyist referring to refugees as their “clients.” We’ve been telling you that this is a business—big business—a several $ billion a year business. Voice of America:
WASHINGTON —The United States narrowly missed its refugee cap for the fiscal year, closing out 12 months of political turbulence over admissions policies just five people short of the administration’s target of 85,000.
Bill Caney (at the UN) is the head honcho for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Here he confirms for us what we knew—refugees are “clients” because this is a business, a lucrative one! The USCCB is paid by the head for each refugee it resettles, so this has been a good year financially.
State Department data as of midnight October 1, the start of the 2017 fiscal year and the reset point for the government’s financial calendar, is the closest the refugee program has come to meeting the presidentially established limit in 24 years. [You knew they would bring them in here fast and not thoroughly vetted because Obama had to speed up his seeding plan—ed]
Among the largest groups of refugees this year were more than 12,500 Syrians, following a self-declared goal by the administration last September to admit at least 10,000 people fleeing civil war and Islamic State violence there.
Refugee and resettlement officials told VOA last week that travel for some refugees who were scheduled to arrive by the end of September was postponed because the limit had been met. A State Department spokesperson did not confirm how many refugees were affected, but said that those who were delayed would be included in the coming fiscal year, which begins October 1. [See our post of a week ago about the “ceiling” each year—ed]
Our additional “clients” will be arriving shortly says USCCB honcho!
“We understand that some clients may be held back these days and booked immediately in October. Thus, we expect no effect on clients,” said Bill Canny, who heads migration and refugee services for one of the country’s longest-serving resettlement agencies, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
More resettlement cities have been chosen…. Anne Richard, Asst. Sec. of State for PRM and a former VP at a federal contractor (International Rescue Committee) is delighted to report that they have secretly chosen more towns in which to place refugees (they have 350 towns already) she says.
The article also says that the largest category for FY17 (for the first time) will be the Near East and South Asia category. We will be taking 40,000 of those. (Near East and South Asia includes: Afghanistan, Bhutan/Nepal, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Syria.)
Anne Richard, Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, reported to VOA on the growing number of cities that will ‘welcome’ refugees! We knew that!***
Richard also said the number of cities where refugees are resettled in the U.S. is “likely to grow” in the coming months. Programs are already in place in roughly 350 cities in nearly every state.
The refugee industry’s lobbying arm weighed in with this:
Naomi Steinberg, director of Refugee Council USA, an advocacy group for 22 NGOs that work in refugee resettlement, said that what stood out for her after what she called “a difficult year of nasty political rhetoric” is that the U.S. continued a “proud tradition” of welcoming those fleeing persecution.
“We know that as loud as those anti-refugee voices are, that they are still in the minority,” said Steinberg.
Please get your testimony off to Senator Sessions todayor at the latest tomorrow! Let Sessions know that Ms. Steinberg is blowing smoke!
***These are the new towns/cities we have learned about so far (we have heard that there are 47 new ones!). The selection process is mostly done quietly and out of public view.
Asheville, NC
Rutland, VT
Reno, NV
Ithaca, NY
Missoula, MT
Aberdeen, SD
Charleston, WV
Fayetteville, AR
Blacksburg, VA
Pittsfield, MA
Northhampton, MA
Flint, Michigan
Bloomington, IN
