Someone asked me today where to find the number of refugees who were resettled in each state in the US over the years and it reminded me that we have many many new readers every day who are just beginning to try to get a handle on how the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program works.
Very useful documents are the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports to Congress*** which are full of all sorts of data, not just the statistics on how many refugees were resettled in your state, but they include data on welfare use, employment, housing, and medical assistance, among other things.
They also include reports from the VOLAGs (the federal contractors) and discussions of special problems that some refugee populations encounter here. And, of course there is information about the myriad grants these contractors receive each year.
I can’t say it enough, but knowledge is power. If you want to begin to understand what is happening in your towns and cities, start by looking at one of these documents.
Click here for a list of available reports.
By the way, the Refugee Act of 1980 specifies that this report should be completed and sent to Congress by the end of January following the close of the fiscal year. Thus, the 2015 Annual Report should be available, but they are behind in producing it.
So what else is new! At one point a few years ago, they were three years behind!
For new readers we have a category entitled ‘where to find information,’ and you might want to have a look at it from time to time.
P.S. I just spent a few minutes examining Table 1 (of the Appendix) in the FY2009 Annual Report where it cataloged how many refugees and from what countries were resettled in each state between 1983 and 2009. Wow! Amazing!
***This is not to be confused with another report to Congress that accompanies the President’s proposal for the upcoming fiscal year. That report also has much useful data but is not as comprehensive as the reports found here.
Category: Refugee statistics
Top language of refugees entering the US since 2008 is still Arabic
We previously reported on data regarding top languages of refugees here in April of last year.
This is the latest from the US State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, here. This is data for the period from 2008 up until April 30, 2016.
Remember, these are only the languages spoken by refugees, this does not include those spoken by other categories of legal immigrants or of illegal immigrants.
[If the above isn’t clear enough, this is the list: Arabic, Nepali, Somali, Sgaw Karen, Spanish, Chaldean, Burmese, Armenian, Kiswahili, other.]
We notice that since we reported a year ago, Somali has moved up to number three. Also Kayah (a language from Burma) is off the list and Kiswahili (African language) replaces it at number 9. I’m guessing that is because the State Department is moving ahead quickly with its proposed resettlement to your towns of 50,000 from the DR Congo.
Pay attention new refugee resettlement towns and cities!
When contemplating becoming a “welcoming” refugee community, remember you, state and local taxpayers are responsible for providing interpreters (Bill Clinton Executive Order!) for just about anything from medical treatment, problems in the school system and in the criminal justice system, etc. etc. etc.
North Dakota update: seems that very few elected officials have a clue about what ol' Teddy and Joe created
Back in 1980 when Jimmy Carter signed the monster into law (after it was pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden) everyone jumped on board (every state but Wyoming!) and figured this was just one of those warm and fuzzy feel-good plans from Washington.
It was put on auto-pilot (no serious review by Congress has happened in 35 years) until now when the once seemingly innocuous program has grown so large, so costly and fraught with security risks that the public is finally paying attention.
Here is the latest on North Dakota, a state with one of the highest per capita rates of refugee placement, and where elected officials are now trying to figure out what rights they have to slow it or get out altogether.
The story is here at Breitbart where reporter Michael Patrick Leahy tells us how the North Dakota Senator and former governor doesn’t understand how the program works.
Read the story. Learn how much your state is on the hook for!
Now this…
Every “humanitarian arrival” costs the US taxpayer a bare minimum of $10,000 per person. Do our Washington elected officials even have a clue?
I want to use this opportunity of the Breitbart story to highlight a brief mention of the cost of the program reporter Leahy mentions near the end. Here is what Leahy said:
Hoeven is not the only member of Congress who does not seem to understand how the federal refugee resettlement program works. In fact, hardly any members of Congress seem to have such an understanding. That may be the most obvious reason to explain why Congress continues to fund the VOLAGS who operate it to the tune of $1 billion a year.
Since a reader asked just this morning about the cost of the program (in light of the upcoming opportunity to testify), the best I can do is send you here to Obama’s proposed FY 2016 Report to Congress (from Sept. of 2015) on what the Administration said the program would cost the feds in this year (2016). Go to Table VII and see that they estimated $1.19 billion total. That includes $652 million for the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
However, when you go here to the Dept. of Health and Human Services FY2017 Budget Justification (begin on p. 244) you will see a very different story. Either the budget has dramatically increased (from 2016 to 2017) or Obama was downplaying the costs only 6 months ago.
Get this! Obama’s FY2017 budget includes (rounded number) $2.2 BILLION just for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) where they say they will care for 213,000 “humanitarian arrivals” including Obama’s 100,000 refugees he has been touting for next year.
The FY 2017 budget of $2,184,860,000 for this account represents the cost of maintaining current law and service requirements for additional refugees and other Entrants and unaccompanied children and for expanding assistance to domestic victms of trafficking. The funding levels for the Refugee and Entrant Assistance account in FY 2017, particularly with regard to Transitional and Medical Services, Social Services, Preventative Health, and Survivors of Torture programs.
The President’ Budget request would support a total of 213,000 humanitarian arrivals in FY 2017, including 100,000 refugees, consistent with the Administration’s commitment to admit at least this number of refugees in FY 2017. The FY 2017 base funding level for unaccompanied children represents an increase of $278,000,000, which is flat from the base resources available in FY 2016, including carryover.
I’m rotten at math, but doesn’t that amount to over $10,000 per refugee just for the ORR share.
That over $2 billion figure does not include the costs of the US State Department which pays contractors their per head fee and it doesn’t include the enormous security screening costs for the Dept. of Homeland Security for the large numbers arriving from Muslim countries.
And, it most certainly does not include the (surely!) billions in welfare payments, medical care and education for the children refugees receive.
Refugee kids get more welfare benefits than American poor kids
Thanks to all who sent this information from Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:
America loves kids, but Uncle Sam has a favorite: children of refugees.
Among recipients of food stamps, welfare cash and Social Security payments, refugee children receive more in taxpayer-funded aid than children of citizens, according to a new report on federal spending from the pro-immigration Migration Policy Institute***.
Click here for more and to follow link to the report. We know that refugees generally get more welfare than American citizens. See stats in the most recent ORR Annual Report to Congress, here.
*** For regular readers, you may remember that it was the Migration Policy Institute which co-hosted a forum we attended last fall. I am so interested to see that they would actually publicize information that is critical of the US refugee industry. When Congress debated the bill that became the Refugee Act of 1980, members were told this was not a program to import poverty. Oopsy!
Somali flow to America is three decades old with no end in sight!
Update: Thanks to two readers for sending this story from Minneapolis today. Police are looking for five Somali men in a case of alleged sexual assault.
Leo Hohmann writing at World Net Daily has a very detailed accounting of the flow of Somali ‘refugees’ to America, please see it by clicking here.
And, just to set the record straight, it was the George W. Bush State Department that brought the most Somalis to America (so far).
See this very informative graphic below and ask yourselves why, more than 3 decades after THEIR civil war, is it America’s responsibility to continue rescuing them?
There are by some counts, a half a million Somalis waiting in a massive UN camp in Kenya for their turn to come to your town.
Why does this continue to be America’s problem?
Very cool graphic at World Net Daily:
