I’ll be reporting the news below, but I first want to make my key points up front so that you don’t fall for the pity-party news story.
“Some call it charity!” Here is a charitable idea, some of those bringing in fat pay checks, like IRC CEO David Miliband, could send some of their boodle to staff in Kansas!
~The International Rescue Committee is ostensibly a private non-profit group and therefore the US State Department can’t dictate that it must close offices (supposedly they will be closing 3 of 28).
They might not be getting new refugees at the office in GC that was set up only 4 years ago at the heyday of Obama’s presidency, but they surely could pay for some staff and a small office to help those they already dropped off in the town whose major employer is Tyson Foods!
~The IRC is a financial giant as non-profits go. From its 2016 Form 990 we know they had revenue that year of $736 million and that $494 million was provided to them by you—-the US taxpayers!
~Some of their top expenses were salaries ($244 million), grants and other assistance to foreign organizations, foreign governments, and foreign individuals ($296 million) and office expenses ($20 million).
Their headquarters are in Manhattan, New York (not Manhattan, KS). I mention this because I wonder: how much could a small office to aid struggling refugees cost in Garden City, KS? (You will see that the GC Telegram story is all about how refugees will be left in the lurch.)
~Salaries of top staff we have reported previously are here:
The point I am making is that the IRC could very well have kept its Garden City office open even if new refugees (new paying clients) were not being sent there by the State Department. They could have continued to help the refugees they brought in during the first 4 years with other money from their ginormous pot of money.
But, instead, this news will be used as one more bit of media fodder to blast President Donald Trump.
What a shock! What an outrage, as President Donald Trump reduces the number of paying clients for the refugee contractors***, this ‘religious’ charity declares it will have to seek private donations from churches.
Last I checked, World Relief (full name: World Relief, National Association of Evangelicals) a private Christian non-profit group was 73% funded by you, the taxpayer, to place refugees in your towns and cities.
So how many will donate their private money for their (religious) humanitarian good works?
When the Refugee Act of 1980became law, it was understood that resettlement was a public-private partnership, but as the years have gone by the contractors have gotten lazier and lazier about raising private money. Poor managers, they must never have envisioned a day when some of their federal money would dry up.
Now (gasp!) World Relief Atlanta says it will have to go to the churches for their ‘religious’ charitable work. Imagine that!
Editor: I’m back and there is so much news I don’t know where to begin! I hope you have been able to follow my Twitter feed over the last ten days at Twitter, or here at RRW, where I posted the most interesting bits I came across while traveling.
This story is all over the internet, so I expect you have seen it already. I’m posting it to make the point that although the story is about the UK, the US should be cutting the UN completely loose from our decision-making process when choosing refugees for America for FY19. The UN tells the US which refugees to accept and from where, but that is changing under this President.
(As we speak, the deep state and the White House are surely at loggerheads over numbers for the coming year.)
I’ll be leaving today for a ten day visit to various family members in the west.
It is going to be a challenge to not write a post for those ten days. It might be the longest stretch in 11 years that I won’t have helped to educate my devoted readers about the US Refugee Admissions Program and related migration issues here and abroad.
Even when I did my 2016 (6,000 mile) roadtrip to visit towns struggling with refugees, I managed to post along the way. However, right now I haven’t a decent laptop in good working order. So, maybe that is a message that I need to take a break.
This is the artwork the SPLC created when they named me in their now deleted report: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/04/20/splc-takes-down-their-field-guide-to-anti-muslim-extremists/
But, I want to leave you with somethings to read! (9,275 posts to choose from!).
So, let me tell you what is available here at RRW especially for new readers, but also for longtime readers who need a refresher.
On the header here at RRWyou will find a link to Frequently Asked Questions, check it out! It isn’t completely up to date, but you might find something useful there.
I also have a category entitled ‘Where to find information’with hundreds of posts about reports, documents, research etc. You might want to look down the categories drop-down in the left hand column and see if there are any categories of information that interest you. I recommend ‘crimes’ and ‘health issues.’
I have a few Youtube videos available here, if you have never seen them. You might also want to see the talkI gave in May of 2015 in Iowa (that is the day I had an opportunity to speak with candidate Donald Trump solidifying my support for his candidacy).
By the way, RRW has a very good search function. Simply type a key word or words in to the search window (upper left hand column) and it will lead you to posts on that topic. I recommend you begin by typing your state name and see what I have said about it on previous occasions over the years.
Pivotal posts!
Here are some pivotal posts we wrote in early years. They aren’t so much brilliant revelations as they are posts about news that became important for my thinking about the issue of refugees in America.
In 2007, I was frustrated with my local newspaper—the Hagerstown Herald Mail—which refused to investigate when refugees began arriving quietly in our rural county with the help of the Virginia Council of Churches. Citizens were first concerned about news that the refugees were being neglected and wanted to know the facts. I asked a reporter at the paper to help find the answers to a series of question.
You canread those questions here, they are pretty reasonable and still relevant today, but the paper was not interested in answering them. I began writing this blog as a response to the paper’s lack of interest in finding facts.
We had a public meeting and ultimately the US State Department closed the program in Hagerstown, here. The Virginia Council of Churches said we were an “unwelcoming” community just because we wanted all the facts put on the table!
Another important revelation occurred over the next two months, when blog partner Judy reported here and hereabout how so many refugees in Ft. Wayne, Indiana had to be treated for TB that it was busting the county’s health department budget.
What the heck? We aren’t screening out people with TB!
Early on, I found out the program was pretty much controlled by nine non-profit groups funded with millions of tax payer dollars—-this wasn’t about heartfelt private charity. We were paying for it at the same time we were being kept in the dark about how the program operates.
Then came revelations about lies….
In 2008 we learned that thousands of Somalis had gotten in to the US fraudulently, see here. Family reunification was closed for Somalis and some other Africans as a result. It stayed closed for years.
Not long after, in 2009, we began to see reports that Somali ‘youths’ raised in America (on your dime!) were secretly leaving the country to join the Jihadists in Africa, see here.
By that time in 2009, I was hooked on the issue. I was appalled at the secrecy of the program generally. Why are local citizens kept in the dark as refugees are moved to unsuspecting towns and cities? How were they getting in to the US with communicable diseases, and what is going on in Muslim ‘communities’ where those refugee kids we raised preferred jihad to a good life in America?
Bottomline, as I said, I was hooked at that point and since the mainstream media wasn’t eager to find and report answers, I figured it was up to me.
Eleven years have flown by!
I won’t be completely absent…..
@RefugeeWatcher
While I am away I’ll be tweeting (see my twitter feed in the right hand column here at the blog). I have over 14,000 followers, but twitter seems intent on keeping my numbers stagnant. Every time I add about a hundred, they wipe them out in the coming days!
My partner on facebook will continue to post there at our facebook page, here.
If I come across access to a computer in my travels and something exciting happens with refugees, I will try to post, but no promises.
Oh, and since I moderate comments, your comments might not show up for days, but will try to get them up eventually.
I haven’t written about Bhutanese refugees in awhile. To date, we moved over 96,000 of the Nepali people (mostly Hindu, some Buddhists) who had been expelled from Bhutan to American towns and cities.
Go here for a post which gives a little of the background about the George W. Bush era plan to help the UN clean out its camps on the border of Nepal. It was supposed to be a joint effort with many other countries, but of course we took the vast majority of them.
We said we would take 60,000 beginning in 2007, but as is always the case, we go way beyond what we told the public we would do.
Here is where they were distributed in the US (from Wrapsnet):
We have also reported on many previous occasions about the exceedingly high suicide rate in the US Bhutanese ‘community.’
It is interesting to me that many do-gooders who push refugee resettlement to America never grasp that some people cannot make the cultural shift and that pushing resettlement can actually have deadly consequences, as it did for this man.
If you go back to my early posts (see archive) on the Bhutanese resettlement, you will see that the camp dwellers initially fought like hell to not be “scattered to the four winds.”
Note that he worked in a meat processing plant! Even in Vermont, refugees work in slaughterhouses! Why didn’t that make him happy?
