In my previous post, I reported that three Iraqi ‘refugees’ have been arrested in Virginia for lying on their admission forms to the US. At least one of them made up his ‘persecution’ story!
How many more liars are there in this huge flow to America?
Because I wanted to see how many Iraqis were placed in Virginia, I checked Wrapsnet going back to FY2008. That is the year when the flow to your towns began in earnest. Usually Virginia doesn’t come in in the top ten for much when it comes to refugee admissions, but for Iraqis I was surprised to see it at #7.
Up to this morning, we have admitted 139,695 Iraqi ‘refugees’ since George W. Bush reluctantly opened the flood gates in his final year in office. Obama, of course presided over the last 8 years of seeding Iraqis throughout America.
Of the 139,695, 35,899 are Shiites, 50,554 are Sunnis and 2,184 are unspecified Muslims. The remaining 37% are all other religions. I continue to be troubled by the fact that we admit both sides of the warring Muslim sects (and likely place them in the same neighborhoods!).
Here is where they went:
And, here are the top ten states which ‘welcomed’ Iraqis:
For ambitious readers we have 729 posts on Iraqi refugees archived at RRW. Click here.
Category: Refugee statistics
World Relief building a "new community" in Durham, NC, was there anything wrong with the old one?
Changing America by changing the people!
This story at WRAL.com is meant to be one of those warm and fuzzy stories about ‘welcoming’ refugees (and diversity) to a southern city and how mean old Donald Trump has slowed their progress in changing Durham.
The last line of the story by reporter Tess Allen is the most instructive:
A new community is being built in Durham, one that is constantly evolving, one with a mix of faces, languages and cultures. And World Relief Durham and its volunteers plan to be there every step of the way.
Here are a few bits worth highlighting:
World Relief depends on federal funding for the majority of their financing. They receive a per capita grant dependent on the number of refugees coming into their area. That money helps support the agencies’ offices, staff and, mostly, the refugees themselves.
With the dramatic decrease in refugee arrivals that would accompany the reinstatement of this order, World Relief’s funding will drop equally dramatically. The Durham office, for example, will lose one-fourth of its federal funding, or about $250,000 a year. Nationwide, five World Relief offices will close and 140 staff members will be laid off.
[….]
Soerens [Matthew Soerens, World Relief’s U.S. director of church mobilization] also said that the loss of funding is why it’s increasingly important for their Good Neighbor teams to help refugees find jobs. World Relief can no longer afford to cover rent for families for more than a couple of months.
Wasn’t finding refugees a job a top priority all along? Or, it didn’t matter so much when they were flush with federal dollars.
Is Soerens saying that, because they (at World Relief) need to pay their staffs and keep offices open, they are going to be stingy about refugee rent going forward? Sounds like it to me.
If you feel like reading all the good news about good neighbors, continue reading here.
For our complete archive on changing North Carolina, go here. See especially my post on the 2016 Presidential election.
For more on World Relief’s finances, go here.
Here we go again, refugee numbers jump, 342 since Wednesday
As we have said repeatedly, and most recently here, the Hawaiian judge did not have the power to slow the flow of refugees entering the US, nor did he have any power to set the ceiling. That said, a week after the 120-day slowdown was to go in to effect, the numbers entering the US picked up dramatically since we reported 38,111 as of Wednesday (for FY17).
Today data at Wrapsnet indicates that another 342 refugees arrived in the US in the last 48 hours. We are now at 38,453!
If the US Department of State had been preparing for a 120-day pause to begin on March 16th, how is it that this large number of refugees was ready to board planes? Is there anyone in charge (other than the career people) at the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration? Are they still calling all the shots? Or, is it possible that the White House isn’t willing to fight on this portion of the EO (assuming we wouldn’t notice)?
The top five nationalities among the 342 newly arrived are as follows:
Syria (55 and 51 of those were Muslims)
Somalia (50 and all are Muslims)
Burma (44 and a surprisingly high number of those—17—are Muslims)
Iraq (41 and 32 are Muslims)
Ukraine (32 and zero Muslims)
The top five states receiving Syrians over the last two days are: Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho and Ohio.
The top five states receiving Somalis since Wednesday are: Massachusetts, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, and New York.
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’
Tucson area resettlement agency may close; Memory lane! Iraqis unhappy there in 2007
They say they may close if the number of refugees admitted to the US falls as a result of Trump’s 120-day pause on the program.
Somehow they seem to think that the flow will pick up because of the Hawaiian judge’s misguided restraining order. As we have said repeatedly, Trump didn’t need the Executive Order to reduce numbers being admitted to the US. (We are monitoring the numbers coming in every few days, see refugee admissions in right hand side bar.)
After I give you the latest news, I want to tell you about Tucson, Arizona and unhappy Iraqis there ten years ago.
Here below are a few snips from a story yesterday at Arizona Public Media.
Notice that once again, they are admitting, and the media is publishing the fact, that these so-called non-profit agencies actually live off of contracts (based on per refugee head payments) with the US government.
Tucson-area nonprofits that resettle refugees are worried that they may have to cut services or close their doors under the refugee ban President Donald Trump is seeking.
Refugee Focus is one of three nonprofit agencies in Tucson that resettle refugees from around the world.
Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest runs Refugee Focus, and Connie Phillips oversees the nonprofit. [She participated in an ‘interfaith’ rally against Trump, here, last month.—ed]
She said Refugee Focus may have to stop operating if the Trump Administration wins the court battle for the most recent executive order and there is a 90 to 120 day pause in settling refugees.
[….]
Money to run the program comes from federal contracts for resettlement services.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty. It is just highly, highly stressful right now.”
The other two nonprofits that resettle refugees in Tucson are International Rescue Committee and Catholic Social Services.
I just checked Lutheran Social Services Southwest recent Form 990 here.
92% of their funding is from you, the taxpayer. Their gross revenue in that form (2014) was $14,238,656. $9,210,621 is from government grants and $3,957,813 is listed as medicaid contracts (What the heck is that! Why is some Lutheran non-profit managing medicaid contracts?)
Iraqi refugees resettled in Tucson voice their unhappiness!
Back in the earliest days of RRW (2007), this news (below) from Tucson was an eye-opener for me.
Iraqis complained to the Washington Post that they were unhappy and neglected.
Like the Cuban, Vietnamese, Laotian and Sudanese refugees before them, some of the Iraqis are going through a difficult adjustment period, feeling disoriented, alone and even abandoned by the social service agency that is supposed to serve them.
[….]
When the Iraqi refugees arrive in the United States, they are sent to cities where there are other Arab or Muslim populations. Social service organizations are assigned to help them resettle.
“Refugees, in general, endure a tremendous cultural shock,” said Janell Mousseau, a program director at the Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest, an Arizona nonprofit organization that helped to resettle the 34 Iraqis here. “They have a lot of adjusting to do in a short time.”
LOL! Read this next paragraph! What a difference ten years makes. Back then the WaPo and most media never mentioned that the resettlement contractors were PAID for their charitable work by the US taxpayer!
The organization was asked [LOL! asked!—ed] by the State Department to find proper housing for the Iraq families, providing them basic supplies and helping them acquire Social Security numbers and food stamps. The group is paying [LOL! the group is paying!—ed] the refugees’ rent for three months. After that, the families will have to pick up the cost themselves.
Before they arrived here, the refugees said they were told by U.N. representatives that they could get jobs based on their professional qualifications. But they said they have now been told that they should work as hotel housekeepers, an occupation many of them have refused because they deem it degrading. [The hotel industry along with food processing companies have been major consumers of cheap refugee labor!—ed]
To add to their frustration, when the families arrived, they said they found their apartments missing beds, kitchen supplies, bedspreads and blankets. [Contracts with the govt. specifically list these items to be supplied as requirements of the contract—-ed]
This last line resonated with me because one of the first things that people were buzzing about in my Maryland county, when refugees were placed there beginning in 2006, was that some teachers at the local junior college were finding the refugees blankets and winter coats!
I have 727 posts in my Iraqi refugee category (see early posts where I joked about Matthew Lee a reporter carrying water for the contractors by helping to beat the drum for more Iraqi admissions).
Obama gone wild!
You need to know that George W. Bush was reluctant to admit the thousands of Iraqi refugees (paying clients!) that the contractors were demanding. But, in the last year he opened the flood gates and we have now, 11 years and 5 and 1/2 months later, admitted 141,433 Iraqis!
Here at Wrapsnet you can see what happened when the Obama team took over the US Department of State in 2009:
Go here for more on Arizona.
Hawaii judge places restraining order on Trump EO involving refugee pause
Unless I find a definitive article about what exactly the judge in Hawaii ruled on the Trump Executive Order in the next couple of hours (I have a doc appt.), here is one news story from the AP (thanks to reader Theodore).
Also, according to several news sources discussing other pending cases, including Fox News , one argument in the Maryland case is absolutely nuts. I worry that judges ruling on the cases have no idea about what the US Refugee Act of 1980 says or how the program has been administered for 37 years!
It makes me want to scream!
The line that I see while searching just now, that is being spread by many news sources, is this one:
“The Maryland lawsuit also argues that it’s against federal law for the Trump administration to reduce the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year by more than half, from 110,000 to 50,000. Attorneys argued that if that aspect of the ban takes effect, 60,000 people would be stranded in war-torn countries with nowhere else to go.”
We are assuming that comes from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society suit we reported here. The true gist of their argument is that they, the federal resettlement contractors, were expecting more paying “clients” and had built their budgets around the per head payment they were expecting with the unrealistic 110,000 refugees Obama said would come in the year he no longer was president!
For the umpteenth time, that 110,000 that Obama set last fall is a CEILING that the Administration says it will not surpass, it is not a goal!
And, that 110,000 was the highest Obama had ever set in his presidency. Trump has the absolute authority to reduce the ceiling, but more importantly he can bring in any number under whatever he set, or whatever Obama set!
Forget the EO!
President Trump has all the authority he needs to not import any more refugees this entire year (I’m not sure that his team even knows that he has no legal obligation to bring in even 50,000!).
As of this morning, we have admitted 38,106 refugees this fiscal year (2017) via Wrapsnet. 783 refugees arrived in the ten day period from the announcement of this EO and today when the “moratorium” was to go in to effect.
I repeat! The President does not have to call it a moratorium or include it in this EO. He can simply stop processing new refugees abroad with no further explanation!
President George W. Bush had 4 years under 50,000! His lowest year was 39,554. Even Obama had two years under 60,000 and well below the ceiling! See here.
Now look at this chart (below) very carefully. When I found it at Wrapsnet, the last year, 2016, was not complete. Know that we brought in just short of the 85,000 ceiling (a rare occurrence).
The federal refugee resettlement contractors have long wanted the president’s ‘determination’ each year to be a GOAL (a target) not a CEILING! But, the law says it is a ceiling. Look at the column for CEILING and the column for the number actually admitted!
What do you see? Rarely does the number admitted reach the CEILING.
In FY2006, they were 28,777 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2007, they were 21,718 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2008, they were 19,809 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2009, they were 5,346 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2010, they were 6,689 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2011, they were 23,576 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue President Obama?
In FY2012, they were 17,762 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue President Obama for leaving thousands “stranded in war-torn countries”?
Obama got closer to the lowered CEILING over the next few years.
You get my drift!
I’m begging ignorant and lazy reporters to get the facts!
And, I am sure you are scared as heck, as I am, to see judges making decisions based on sheer ignorance of the law.
See my post from last Friday about how Hawaii hypocrites! have “welcomed” only a tiny number of refugees over the years—none from Africa and only 5 (total) from two Muslim countries.
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’