My alerts are full to overflowing with news about when and where the Biden Administration is distributing the Afghan evacuees. The ‘how’ of it all is a bit tricky because the entire refugee program (the Afghans aren’t refugees!) is in disarray as I reported here a few days ago.
I picked the Nebraska story because I traveled through the state on my road trip to have a look at refugee overloaded towns in the west and midwest back in 2016 and I chuckled when I saw this news because I can’t see the Afghans rushing the slaughterhouse employment offices.
And, why should they? According to a report from John Binder, see it here, your tax dollars will flow to them either directly or through the ‘social safety net’ (aka welfare) you pay for.
Binder wraps his piece with this line:
The data revealed also that most Afghan arrivals in the U.S. live on welfare.
About 500 Afghan refugees have arrived in Nebraska; resettlement agencies swamped
The number of Afghan evacuees coming to Nebraska has grown to over 1,000, and about 500 of them have already reached the state.
So far, 469 people evacuated from Afghanistan since the nation’s Aug. 15 collapse have arrived in Nebraska, or are on their way, from U.S. military bases around the nation.
Another 635 Afghan evacuees destined for Nebraska were still at bases, Nebraska State Refugee Coordinator Sara Bockelman said Wednesday. [See her Linked in page —ed]
This is the image on Bockelman’s Linked in page. It appears to be one of those overloaded migrant invasion ships in the Mediterranean. Hopefully not arriving in Nebraska anytime soon!Bockelman
That’s in addition to a smaller, undetermined number of people who came directly to Omaha from Afghanistan or otherwise have ended up in Nebraska.
Bockelman, speaking to a meeting of the Omaha Refugee Task Force, said a total of 1,104 Afghan evacuees are currently expected in Nebraska.
Initially, it was projected that about 655 Afghan evacuees would be placed in Nebraska. But officials said all along that they expected that number to grow.
About 300 of the Afghan evacuees so far have been placed in metropolitan Omaha by Lutheran Family Services and the Refugee Empowerment Center, the two resettlement agencies that place people in Omaha. Others have been placed in Lincoln and Council Bluffs.
To give you some idea of the rapid pace at which people are coming to Nebraska, Lutheran Family Services received 92 Afghan evacuees, including 39 school-age children, in November alone, an official of the agency said at Wednesday’s meeting. And the Refugee Empowerment Center was expecting 20 people to arrive in Omaha on Wednesday.
[….]
Because of the rush of evacuations, a lot of the Afghans of working age are coming without the employment documents that most refugees have when they arrive. So they will need financial help for longer than the usually expected three months until they can start working.
Useful nugget of info here…
Meanwhile, it appears that the pace of Afghan evacuees’ arrival to Nebraska will only pick up. The federal government has set a deadline of Feb. 15 for all people at U.S. military bases to be sent to cities around the nation. Officials at two of those bases have set an earlier deadline, the end of this year.
Guess they will have to be clearing out Ft. Dix in New Jersey pretty quick. Again, don’t miss Breitbarton that ‘welcoming’ arrival location.
FAIR also has more newson your hard earned tax dollars (or borrowed Chinese bucks) going to the Afghan relocation to a town near you.
Endnote: I think I have the spam blocked for now that was overwhelming the comment option here at RRW. You might want to check it out for me and see if you can leave a comment.
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting.” [From the Biden Administration]
Angie Plummer, Ohio resettlement contractor
Hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving with your friends and family. No promises, but I will try to post from time to time so I won’t have too big a gap in my now nearly 15 year running catalog of ills surrounding the US Refugee Admissions Program.
Reminder: there are over 9,000 posts archived here at RRW and the search function works pretty well. Choose a few key words and see what is here.
You surely know by now that the tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees are being treated like legitimate refugees and have swamped the refugee program causing complaints to surface from other ethnic groups and from contractors*** who do not want the Afghans to completely wipe out the chances of others, like the Somali starring in thisColumbus Dispatchreport, getting their extended family members into the US.
Biden’s pause on refugee resettlement worries agencies, advocates in Greater Columbus
Aden Hassan wants his mother here. He blamed Trump for not moving faster and now he blames Biden.
Biden has paused the regular resettlement program in order to accommodate the Afghans, many of whom have not been vetted and likely will never be legal refugees.
Columbus is a top Somali resettlement target city
Angie Plummer, executive director of local refugee resettlement agency Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) [CRIS is a subcontractor of Church World Service—ed], which resettled Hassan, said there’s no reason why Afghans and refugees from other countries can’t be helped simultaneously.
“When we were asked do we want to pause (refugee) arrivals, I said no because it’s apples and oranges,” Plummer said. “We don’t think that it’s necessary. It’s not a competition for resources to have these folks come.”
[….]
“I fear there’s only so much bandwidth and that it’s shifted to focusing on Afghans, and we can’t take our eyes off these other crises that are happening,” Plummer said. “We want to serve the Afghans well, but we also feel committed to serving those people whose cases we started and who got the shaft under Trump.”
In light of the pause, refugee resettlement advocates are lamenting the fact that Biden did not prioritize rebuilding the refugee resettlement program as soon as he was inaugurated in January.
Plummer said she is concerned because the program’s capacity is still being rebuilt after Trump’s administration decimated its infrastructure.
“Any stopping and starting creates pains,” Plummer said. “I worry about that. Even if their intentions are to try to exempt out certain groups, we should be trying to ramp it back up and help this machinery work again.”
[….]
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting,” Plummer said. “I really thought some wrongs would be righted and they haven’t been, and it feels like they’ve been shuffled down the road.”
Meredith Owen, Church World Service
The fact that the administration hasn’t prioritized restoring resettlement capacity sooner makes Meredith Owen, director of policy and advocacy at the national refugee resettlement agency Church World Service (CWS), furious.
“The problem is you never want to undermine or harm one refugee population in the name of another,” Owen said.
But, that is exactly what is happening. Muslim Afghans are apparently Biden’s priority. There is much more, visit theColumbus Dispatch for additional details.
*** For new readers, these are the nine major federal resettlement agencies which have contracts with the US State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement to place refugees (find housing!) and get them signed up for their welfare benefits, their medical care and get the refugee kids in school.
If you have an agency working near you and it doesn’t have the same name as one of the nine below, check its website carefully and you will most likely find it is a subcontractor of one of the nine (like CRIS is a CWS subcontractor).
Poor mouthing….
Know that when they “got the shaft” under the Trump Administration they were fundraising on their plight something they can’t do now that their guy is in charge of the taxpayer portion of their money stream.
Darn! It is comments like that which will force me out of semi-retirement because no one in the media ever calls them on this crap!
Thanks to a reader for sending me this news from CNN that appeared in a few media outlets around the country, here at CBS 58 in Milwaukee.
But, before I give you the money quote, pay attention to this story. The refugee contractors have long wanted to see a private refugee sponsorship program set up as a way to increase the numbers of ‘refugees’ admitted to the US.
The private sponsors would be in addition to their paid work as government resettlement contractors.
The massive number of Biden’s Afghans cannot be accommodated under the present system so this trial run at finding private sponsors for thousands of families outside the present system could be just the ticket they have long hankered for.
HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield
Note too that Afghans could be placed anywhere, and that the long understood one hundred mile radius of an approved refugee resettlement site will no longer apply.
Anyway, here is what Mark Hetfield of HIAS, Inc (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) says and continues to say about how the Trump administration decimated the contractor system.
It just is not true!
But after four years of historic low arrivals under the Trump administration, agencies had to close some of their offices around the country, limiting where refugees can be relocated — a significant hurdle at a time when housing options are already hard to come by.
“We just didn’t have the capacity after the beating we took under the Trump administration,” said Mark Hetfield, the president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society did NOT take a beating under Trump as you can see from data at USA Spending!
In fact, Trump upped their income from early years of the Obama Administration.
First year under Obama:
First year under Trump:
Last full Trump year:
You could actually say that Trump nearly doubled the federal dole to HIAS from Obama’s early years.
But, now, they are in the money as Biden has gifted them just about $50 million of your tax dollars for their charitable (ha!) good works.
Apparently salaries did not suffer under Trump either!
In an article, one of MANY I am seeing, refugee contractors are complaining that they can’t find enough housing for the Afghan evacuees most states, including New Hampshire, are welcoming.
Ten days ago, I reported on the lack of affordable housing for Biden’s newest wave of ‘new Americans,’ see here:
I found this particular story at the Concord Monitor interesting, and useful for readers, because it demonstrates the web of resettlement agencies and sub-agencies that may have you confused.
Agency struggles to find housing for Afghan evacuees coming to New Hampshire
The agency responsible for coordinating the arrival of Afghan evacuees to New Hampshire is struggling to find places for them to live just as they are set to arrive in the Concord area.
Memory lane! Ascentria (formerly Lutheran Social Services of New England) made news here at RRW when its then new President and CEO, Angela Bovill stated publicly that refugee resettlement was a “business”—a business that needed federal cash to survive. We knew that, but it was a big deal when Bovill admitted it. Just checked their recent IRS Form 990*** and wow! Bovill pulls down an annual salary package of $300,000! Doing well by doing good! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/07/19/refugee-contractors-increasingly-admitting-they-cant-survive-without-your-money/
Crissie Ferrara, the program manager for services for New Americans at Ascentria Care Alliance, said a mother with five daughters will be moving soon, and likely staying with another family. Two individual men will also likely be arriving in Concord soon. Ferrara’s organization is responsible for finding housing for refugees and humanitarian evacuees, like the ones coming from Afghanistan.
Ferrara said that Ascentria has received an outpouring of support from people willing to share rooms in their homes with those coming from Afghanistan. Ideally, new families and individuals would be able to have the autonomy and independence of renting their own private housing, located near services in Concord.
The organization’s online form for landlords or property owners who want to provide housing to Afghan arrivals in New Hampshire and Massachusetts explains that independent affordable apartment housing options will be prioritized over people offering to host people in their homes. [What the heck! Let people take them to their homes! After all, what could go wrong!—ed]
Ferrara said Ascentria has suggested that single men without family in the United States be sent to [white rural!–ed] New Hampshire first, including men who may have made friends with another individual during the eviction [evacuation?] process.
See that there are additional ‘non-profits’ in on the action.
Use my search window for over two dozen post on New Hampshire—the ‘Live Free or Die’ state.
*** Most recent IRS Form 990 is here. Take a look at those salaries beginning on page 7! As I have said before, tell your kids to grow up to be executives at non-profit do-gooder religious charities!
As the 2021 fiscal year wrapped up, resettlement contractors*** are directing their anger at Joe Biden, as that meany Trump can no longer be blamed for his “nativist” and “racist” slowdown of refugee admissions under the Refugee Act of 1980.
But, LOL! They aren’t going so far as to call their team—Biden or Harris— names and disparage their characters for the lowest number of refugee admissions on record.
Editor: Readers remember that the border invaders and most of the unvetted Afghan deluge are not considered legitimate refugees (yet).
They are “hanging by a thread!” says Lutheran CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah who is barely making it on a quarter of a million annual salary supplied by US taxpayers!
Here is what The Hill is saying, and I have to laugh because once again we have Lutheran CEO Vignarajah crying about how little funding is flowing to the contractors for their ‘charitable’ good works.
“Increasing the figure earlier on would have meant an infusion of resources [aka money, your money–ed] that were especially needed by local resettlement agencies that were hanging on by a thread.”
I’m not picking on Vignarajah, some contractor do-gooder CEOs make gobs more than she does, it is just that she can’t seem to stay out of the limelight.
Biden on track to beat Trump’s record for fewest resettled refugees
I was interested to see that although Joe told Congress that the ceiling for the 2022 fiscal year will be 125,000 refugees from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East—a flow that was supposed to begin 4 days ago—he has yet to sign the order.
After a litany of complaints about Biden’s back and forth on the ceiling in his first months in office, The Hill reporter comments:
The reversal was whiplash for the resettlement agencies that contract with the government and who had set about rehiring staff in order to rebuild a system that atrophied under the Trump administration.
Uh-oh! Biden is making the contractors jittery with this:
But the report seems to express some internal doubt about the government’s ability to meet that goal, writing to Congress that the State Department would issue funding for 65,000 refugees.
“Those funding levels will be re-evaluated and increased as appropriate as the year progresses and as it becomes clearer how much progress can be made against the target,” the White House wrote.
Read the whole article, there are some interesting bits of information for serious students of the refugee resettlement industry.
Lutherans Hanging by a Thread? Hardly!
So, once again I made a trip to USA Spending! See what I found! Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is presently at about 87% federally funded (you can calculate that by examininga recent IRS Form 990).
Check out their taxpayer-funded boodle here. (Screenshot below)
It is very clear that Trump’s presence in the White House didn’t deplete their funds and in fact they did better under some Trump years than under Obama!
It is my fervent hope that one day a real reporter will call them out for their poor-mouthing lies….
From USA Spending:
*** These are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors. Not only do they place refugees in cities large and small but are in the driver’s seat when determining which cities will get which refugees.
Editor: Apologies from me for not being able to keep up with everyone’s requests for information. I am overloaded on all fronts as I try to maintain some balance in my life.
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