This is no surprise, since resettlement contractors like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are given millions of your dollars every year (more than 90% of their funding comes from you!) to bring refugees to your towns, they spend a lot of time pressuring Washington for more moola! Editor’s update/clarification! Read carefully! This is a post about the the funding we object to, it is not a post in support of their desire for more of your tax dollars!
Below is what their head-honcho (Linda Hartke) is saying on their website. Thanks to a reader ‘domstudent11’ for sending it.
Linda Hartke: Waaahhhh! We need money for the 100,000 (mostly Muslim) refugees Obama promised for next year.
The days left on the Congressional calendar are numbered, and yet, funding provisions to respond to the greatest humanitarian crisis of our lifetime have not been allocated. Congress has from now until September to pass funding bills for Fiscal Year 2017 that ensure critical funding for refugee resettlement. However, the draft text cripples the U.S. Refugee Admissions program and reduces resources for refugees at a time when our commitment to serving uprooted men, women, and children is needed most. With more displaced people today than ever before, funding for refugees programs cannot afford a spending cut. The United States has signaled commitment to resettle 100,000 refugees in Fiscal Year 2017, a mere fraction of the global need, yet the proposed funds would cap refugee admissions at no more than 75,000. At least 25,000 vulnerable refugees will spend another long year without the life-saving protection they deserve.
Furthermore, the funding cut fails to reflect the outpouring of support and welcome for refugees you all have demonstrated across the country. With over 75 years of experience resettling and providing integration support to refugees, we know there is ample community support to help 100,000 refugees rebuild their lives in the United States in FY17.
We need your help to call on appropriators to echo our commitment through robust funding. During the Congressional recess from now until Labor Day, you can take the following actions:
Meet with your Members of Congress in your district (Here’s the how-to toolkit.)
Tweet at your Senator and Representatives:
“.@SENATOR/REPRESENTATIVE, show that #AmericaWelcomes by supporting increased funds to resettle #refugees! #RefugeesWelcome”
Call your Members of Congress using this script:
“As Congress considers Fiscal Year 2017 funding, I urge Congress to increase funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Department of State’s Migration and Refugee Assistance account to support refugee assistance that appropriately responds to the global need. As a person of faith, my community welcomes refugees. I urge your office to reflect my commitment to welcome refugees by increase funding for refugee protection and resettlement.”
Don’t allow Congress to let time slip away before they enact sufficient funding for refugees and other vulnerable populations. Call on Congress to be Good Samaritans who support those in need of life-saving protection.
Editor: Our reader suggests you change the words in the appeal to Congress in #3 above and ask your Member of Congress to “decrease” funding instead!
See LIRS most recent available Form 990 here. In 2014, LIRS had a total revenue of $59 million and $55 million came from government grants (from you!). Hartke pulled down a comfortable $235,000 salary and five other employees were in 6 digits.
If you want to know if LIRS is resettling refugees where you live, click here, find your state and see the abbreviations in the left hand corner of the entry. Look for LIRS.
One more thing, although Hartke is whining about being short on funds to resettle 100,000 refugees, remember that the Refugee Council USA (the lobbying consortium for the contractors) is calling for 200,000 next year (which begins Oct. 1, 2016).
And remember that September is crunch month as Obama does his UN gig and sends his final determination (for how many refugees we will take) to Congress.
…But, those pushing the no-borders agenda are still hopeful that the special Obama-led Pow-Wow in New York in September will result in commitments for numbers of migrants individual countries will pledge to permanently admit.
I’m emphasizing the word ‘permanently’ because I still run into people who think we admit refugees on a temporary basis and that we send them home when the turmoil in their home country is over. That is not so—refugees, asylees and even those here on Temporary Protected Status rarely go home (except to visit! which begs the question about their supposed persecution at home!). Get ready for massive PR campaign around UN in September when Obama hosts refugee resettlement pow-wow. A time for people with our concerns to counter their propaganda?
Here is the latest on efforts to try to get commitments out of countries either roiled by the migration invasion or deep in election-year politics. We aren’t agreeing to anything say world leaders!
World leaders are set to reject a concrete target for the number of refugees that should be resettled within developed countries, dashing hopes of a solution to the world’s unprecedented displacement crisis.
Before a landmark conference in September, negotiators from every UN member country have failed to agree on a promise to share responsibility for 10% of the world’s refugee population, and postponed the completion of a new global refugee deal for another two years.
With the number of refugees and displaced people around the world at an all-time high, campaigners had hoped that an international conference on refugees and migrants in New York would enable world leaders to agree a new mechanism for sharing refugees.
O-man to the rescue. I sure hope the Trump campaign is paying attention and getting ready for the propaganda onslaught the Obama UN event will be generating.
But others still see September’s UN summit as a missed opportunity, with a decision on changes to the global refugee regime postponed to 2018. Attention now turns to another refugee-themed summit in New York scheduled for the same week in September, when leaders invited by Barack Obama will be invited to make individual resettlement pledges – as opposed to making collective ones.
There is also a mention in this article about how the International Organization for Migration (a huge NGO that prepares refugees for their trip to America, among other things) is now going to be moved in to the United Nations. I don’t know what that means other than to assume it means even more control of the US refugee program from within the United Nations.
Be ready!
Note to concerned citizens: the UN General Assembly convenes on September 13th. I could not quickly find the date for Obama’s special refugee confab, but assume it will be in the first part of September.
This would be a good time to generate media campaigns in your states to counter what surely will be a mainstream media effort to support Obama and Hillary’s lust for more third worlders to be resettled in small town America!
Notably, also in September, Obama is required to send his final determination letter to Congress with the number of refugees he proposes for FY2017 (yes, he has one more opportunity to open the flood gates).
Michael Patrick Leahy writing at Breitbarthas put pen to paper and pulled together some of the facts about how the refugee resettlement industry is in an incestuous arrangement between agencies that dole out your tax dollars and the contractors that receive them. If this isn’t illegal it should be! She is looking to open offices in Rutland VT and Reno NV next! See our Limon archive here: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon
The arrangement is unethical at minimum and I fault Congress for its lax review of the expanding UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for the practice Leahy exposes.
Disallowing the present arrangement is the least Congress could do to begin to reform and rein-in the program that will bring 85,000 refugees to the US this year, including 10,000 Syrian Muslims. Here is Leahy:
A revolving door in the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has sent millions of dollars in federal funding to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants [USCRI], which is led by two former directors of the Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR], the federal office that selects the voluntary agencies [VOLAGs] who get lucrative federal contracts to resettle refugees.
President Bill Clinton appointed Lavinia Limon as director of ORR in 1993, a position she held until the end of his administration. After a brief interlude at the Center for New American Communities, a project of the left-leaning National Immigration Forum, Limon was named executive director of USCRI in August 2001, a position she still holds.
In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Eskinder Negash, an Eritrean refugee on Limon’s USCRI staff, as director of ORR. When Negash resigned abruptly in December 2014, he went back to USCRI, where he now serves as Vice President of Global Development.
All of you concerned with the arrival of refugees in your towns, or the expansion of existing resettlement sites must read this report! Click here to continue!
USCRI wants Rutland and Reno next!
I have to head out early today (I’ll pass the 4,000 mile mark on my road trip) and can’t elaborate, but I want to make two additional points.
Lavinia Limon’s USCRI has two (maybe more) new sites they are targeting: Rutland, VT and Reno, NV!
And, although the focus here was on the Office of Refugee Resettlement at HHS, don’t forget that Anne C. Richard, the Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration has also revolved into the door at the US State Department from a contractor—the International Rescue Committee. See her bio here.
She had an earlier stint at the State Department and see her connection to the International Crisis Group (a Soros project). Richard says in her bio that she helped create this group!
We have written often about the consortium of members of the refugee resettlement industry calling themselves the Refugee Council USA (RCUSA). Go here for our archive on the group which includes the nine major federal resettlement contractors.
Thanks to reader Joanne for sending this recent statement from their Washington, DC office. They are, needless to say, thrilled that the Obama Administration is going to host a big pow-wow on refugees at the UN in September. (I hope Trump’s people are getting ready for this huge propaganda stunt!) Melanie Nezer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (one of nine federal contractors) is the present chair of RCUSA. She says 200,000 is the magic number for 2017.
As you read through this statement, remember that, in recent years, 70,000 was the target number for the refugees to be admitted to the US (from all countries). In FY2016, Obama is shooting for 85,000 and then he signaled he wanted 100,000 in FY2017 (begins October 1, 2016). (Yes, he has one more shot at dictating how many we take.)
If re-elected will Speaker Paul Ryan do a thing to stop the funding for this huge new number? Based on recent statements and last year’s actions, that is doubtful!
The Refugee Council USA is urging Obama to go for 200,000 (from all countries) for FY2017!
Refugee Council USA (RCUSA), a coalition of 20 U.S.-based non-governmental organizations dedicated to refugee protection, welcome, and excellence in the U.S. refugee resettlement program, commends the Obama Administration for coordinating the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees that will take place on September 20, 2016.
The Leaders’ Summit, as well as the UN General Assembly Summit on Large Movements of Migrants and Refugees on September 19th, are both critical opportunities for the U.S. and other members of the global community to show collective leadership by taking concrete steps to address the tremendous refugee protection needs that exist around the world, including right here in the Americas. This leadership must be demonstrated through concrete new commitments to expand and strengthen humanitarian assistance to refugees and the host countries carrying a disproportionate responsibility for them. But leadership also means demonstrating a resounding rejection of xenophobic and racist rhetoric that increasingly dominates global discourse around refugees today.
Yikes! So the US won’t be embarrassed in September, they want Obama to propose that 200,000 refugees be admitted to US beginning in October! And, they want more $$$ for “services.”
The U.S. should commit to provide protection to 200,000 refugees through admission to the United States in FY17 through a combination of traditional refugee resettlement and additional legal, proven and secure approaches. At least 140,000 of these refugees should be resettled through the existing U.S. refugee resettlement program, with the necessary support for receiving and integrating them in American communities. To do any less would represent a U.S. commitment that falls short of the call made by the White House for a collective doubling of resettlement commitments in advance of the Summits.
The United States should also ensure that there is a commensurate increase in the social services and integration support [read TAXPAYER dollars!—ed] that are available to refugees as they start their new lives in this country.
In addition to higher numbers, the U.S. should also demonstrate a commitment to a more equitable distribution of resettlement opportunities, ensuring that refugees in desperate circumstances everywhere have a chance of accessing this life-saving program.
Go here to read more.
And, remember readers, they NEVER quit! It is all about changing America by changing the people! So, we can never quit exposing the facts and their real agenda either!
I was surprised to see that this large number—38%—of Democrats think our refugee admissions are too high! The numbers indicate that the public is not behind Obama and Clinton on the subject of refugees. Trump needs to continue to hammer this issue! Republicans in support of the refugee program for its ready supply of cheap labor should beware!
Readers you have to wade through a lot of column inches before you get to what I consider the meat of this story by AP. It sure looks like Americans generally are not in agreement with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on admitting tens of thousands of refugees from mostly Muslim countries, especially Syrians. Associated Press at WHIO (12 paragraphs into the story). Emphasis below is mine:
Americans are slightly more likely to oppose than favor a temporary ban on Muslims who are not U.S. citizens from entering the United States, by a 52 percent to 45 percent margin that has been strikingly consistent in AP-GfK polls conducted this year.
Sixty-nine percent of Republicans say they favor the temporary ban on Muslim immigration, while 68 percent of Democrats are opposed. Half of whites and just a third of non-whites say they favor the ban. Seventy-six percent of Trump supporters are in favor.
On a trip to Scotland last month, Trump shifted his rhetoric, saying he would instead “want terrorists out” of the U.S., and to do so, he would limit people’s entry from “specific terrorist countries and we know who those terrorist countries are.”
The poll indicates that rhetorical shift could win support. Among those asked more broadly about a temporary ban on immigrants from areas of the world where there is a history of terrorism against the U.S. or its allies, 63 percent are in favor and 34 percent opposed. Ninety-four percent of Trump supporters say they favor this proposal, as do 45 percent of Clinton supporters.
“That’s a necessity for creating stability,” said Ryan Williams, 40, a health care provider from Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Most Americans — 53 percent — think the United States is currently letting in too many refugees from Syria, engulfed in civil war since 2011 and the Islamic State militant group’s de facto center. President Barack Obama has pledged to admit some 10,000 Syrian refugees this year.
Remember Hillary is on record saying she wants to admit 65,000 Syrians immediately (only 11 percent of Americans agree with her!):
Another 33 percent think the current level is about right, while just 11 percent want to let in more. About 4 in 10 think there’s a very or somewhat high risk of refugees committing acts of religious or political violence in the United States, 34 percent think the risk moderate, and 24 percent consider it very or somewhat low.
Seventy-six percent of Republicans think the U.S. should allow fewer refugees.Among Democrats, 43 percent think the current level is about right, 38 percent think the U.S. should allow fewer, and 18 percent want to allow more.
This tells me that Trump has to continue to pound the issue of refugees! (And, that the propagandists at The Hive have their work cut out for them). BTW, if every American could see what I’ve seen over the last two days on my road trip, these numbers would be even higher!
One more thing…I’ve heard several times lately that some Americans think that the US refugee program is a temporary one for the refugees, that they only come here until things calm down in their home countries. That is NOT the case! Refugees who come to the US come here permanently and ultimately become citizens.
