Category: Taxpayer goodies

Total chaos in US refugee flow; United Nations depends on US to take lion's share every year

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is one of many stories about the impact of the cap reduction to 50,000 refugees for the US in FY17, a portion of the Trump EO not effected by court wrangling.

We learned here that the refugee resettlement contracting agencies were going to be working on placing sob stories (like this one) to sway public opinion against President Trump.
As you read this, remember that since 9/11 we have had 4 years under 50,000 (2003, 2004, 2006, 2007) and under Obama we had one year (2011) under 60,000 see here.

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Joel Charny: “I expect the 50,000 cap to remain in place in subsequent years as well.” 50,000 is not that low! Photo and bio here: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/leadership_inst.aspx?id=152471339390

So these whining contractors have often had lower numbers to resettle, but they were licking their chops for Obama’s proposed 110,000 paying refugee clients (they are paid by the head, by you, to resettle refugees in your towns and cities).
And, here, I argued that the Trump Administration should lower the cap to 35,000. Very few migrants from Syria, Somalia and Iraq get to the US outside of the refugee program so it would effectively slow the flow from terror hotspots. And, btw, we have been taking Somalis for 30 years—DOES IT EVER STOP!

***This morning we are already at 34,078 (1,953 since the EO was signed on 1/28) according to Wrapsnet.***

One more thing before I give you a few snips from the “chaos” news.  Don’t allow anyone to use the argument made at the end of this article that we only take a fraction compared to say Turkey or Pakistan. Our refugees become permanent citizens and those presently swamping those countries will not be accepted as citizens.  They will be expected to return to their own countries when the conflict ends.
Mark my words, if this flow from Syria to America gets going full steam, as it has for Somalia, we will still be taking Syrians for decades no matter what happens in their homeland.
Here is Devex:

President Donald Trump’s ban on refugees from entering the U.S. has — at least for now — been suspended. But the resulting scene for those involved in refugee resettlement is chaotic, exacerbated by concern about the longer term prospects of the United States’ role as a host country, according to several resettlement, legal aid and advocacy organizations. A cap on refugee arrivals at less than half the previous expected figure remains in place.

“We don’t know when people will be brought over, or how many those numbers will be. It’s very complicated — total chaos,” said Bill Swersey, senior director of communications and digital media at HIAS, one of the nine refugee resettlement organizations*** contracted by the U.S. federal government, in a phone interview early this week. “Everybody is confused. It is like we are riding a rollercoaster. First there is a ban, then it is rescinded… We don’t know when we will receive new people. Last week, there was one Syrian refugee family that arrived.”

[….]

…..some elements of the ban remain in place.

This includes a reduction of the number of refugees the U.S. will welcome — now curtailed to 50,000 per year, less than half of this year’s expected admission of 110,000.

[….]

“That is a huge concern. Over time we have incrementally worked up to more sufficient numbers and that is a highly discretionary thing the President sets a cap for every year,” said Kate Phillips-Barrasso, the International Rescue Committee’s senior director of policy and advocacy. “We worry if the caps are lower it just sets us back many, many years with the resettlement we are doing. [And, it means less $$$ and less staff for them!—ed]

The US takes the largest share by far of UN chosen refugees for permanent resettlement

The U.S. has historically been the largest participant in the U.N. refugee agency’s global resettlement program. Canada, Australia, Norway and the U.K. also take large numbers of refugees through this program.

“It is hard to see any countries being able to come forward and make up for this reduction,” Joel Charny, director of the Norwegian Refugee Council USA, wrote in an email to Devex. “I expect the 50,000 cap to remain in place in subsequent years as well.”

In 2016, a total of 114,916 refugees were resettled as part of the U.N. refugee agency’s program. The U.S. admitted 84,995 people during fiscal year 2016. The greatest number of refugees entering the U.S. came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, followed by Syria, Burma, Iraq and Somalia.

Continue reading here.
This reminds me, Trump could take us out of the UN program and we could pick our own refugees.  The fact that 98% of the Syrians entering the US right now are Muslims is because the UN makes the first cut.
Where is Congress? Hiding? Afraid of the Chamber of Commerce and big corporations needing cheap labor, like the meatpackers?
The present system of resettlement in America is so flawed that I believe the Refugee Act of 1980 must be trashed.
Congress could then write a new law, dumping the UN role in choosing refugees, if it was determined to be in America’s best interests to bring in a certain amount of third world poverty to our towns and cities.
***Nine major federal refugee contractors:

Bloomberg: Trump's refugee ceiling of 50,000 could hurt BIG MEAT

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, check out who admits that Meatpackers have been drivers behind the importation of cheap immigrant labor, specifically refugees!
Thanks to reader Deena for spotting this!

Big Meat Braces for a Refugee Shortage

Reporters Lauren Etter and Shruti Singh at Bloomberg (emphasis below is mine):

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I took this photo of JBS headquarters in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns. JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!

Word of President Trump’s executive order barring the entry of international refugees shocked Fort Morgan, a town of 11,000 on the snowy plains of Colorado, some 80 miles northeast of Denver. Many of the workers at a Cargill Meat Solutions plant that’s the town’s largest employer emigrated from Somalia and Myanmar and had been waiting months, if not years, for relatives to join them. Now they’re afraid that reunion might never happen. As a result, the plant in Fort Morgan and other meatpacking plants in the U.S. that have dozens of openings may have to scramble to find a new labor pool.

[….]

Trump’s decision to sharply curtail the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. may lead Big Meat to recalibrate its recruitment practices.

While a federal court has temporarily suspended the administration’s four-month ban on new arrivals, not affected is Trump’s plan to slash refugee admissions from 110,000 to 50,000 in the current fiscal year.

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Refugees have been a fixture within the meat processing workforce since 2006, when immigration officials under President George W. Bush raided plants in several states, leading to the arrest of about 1,300 undocumented workers. Companies “realized that their business model of hiring undocumented people was causing problems for them,” says Lavinia Limón, chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a resettlement organization. “So they moved to the refugee population.”

More here.  I’m quoted saying that maybe it’s time BIG MEAT paid higher wages and hired American workers!
Ms. Limon must have forgotten that it was Bill Clinton in the mid-1990’s who first made Bosnian refugee labor available to his meatpacking pals (remember those cattle futures!) in Iowa, see here.
Ms. Limon was his Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the time! How could she have forgotten!

“And IBP’s good fortune didn’t end there,” Limbacher continues, “turns out the Clinton administration’s Bosnian refugee resettlement efforts also helped to keep labor costs down. Since 1995, for instance, the town of Waterloo, Iowa — population 65,000 – has been swamped with 6,000 Bosnian refugees, many of whom wound up working for the No. 1 local employer, IBP.”

(Iowa Beef was ultimately absorbed by Tyson Foods).

If you missed my post this morning where I argue that Trump could still stop most of the flow from terror hotspots by further reducing the refugee ceiling for this year from 50,000 to 35,000 (we are at over 33,000 now), be sure to have a look.

US Refugee law must be reformed and curtailing the program might serve as an incentive for Congress to get off the dime and do it!  If threats of terrorism can’t move them, maybe threats in a decline in cheap immigrant labor for big global corporations and the Chamber of Commerce might.

Will Trump Department of State be more forthcoming in response to FOIA requests?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“This is an opportunity for the Trump State Department to come clean and clean up this refugee welfare program.”

(Tom Fitton, President, Judicial Watch)

We sure hope so!
It is hard to get public information from the US State Department as Judicial Watch found out during this past year.

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Tom Fitton

So, don’t miss this news about Judicial Watch (the government watchdog organization that first revealed the presence of Hillary Clinton’s home server) filing suit over failed public information requests involving federally-funded travel loans given to refugees.
The refugees are supposed to repay the taxpayer for the cost of their travel to the US, but those same nine non-profit agencies that place them in your towns do the collecting.  And, for their work we pay them 25% of the loan dollars they collect. (See amount USCCB received below for one year.)
For years the DOS has been mum about the rate of return to the US Treasury of these and other loans to refugees.
Here is Judicial Watch earlier this week:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State seeking records on the number of “Refugee Travel Loans” issued by State’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration to the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration from 2010 to the present. Judicial Watch is also seeking the number of loans defaulted on and the amount of money written off on each defaulted loan. The suit was filed on January 24, 2017, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:17-cv-00157)).

Judicial Watch filed the suit after the State Department failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on February 5, 2016, seeking the following:

All records reflecting the number of Refugee Travel Loans furnished by the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) per year; the number of travel loans that are defaulted upon per year; and the amount of money written off per defaulted loan.

JW also asked for information from the Department of Health and Human Services about special Microenterprise loans given to refugees to start businesses, etc.
Continue reading, here. Then this:

“The State Department has stonewalled our request for refugee loans and associated taxpayer losses for a year – an unlawful delay that screams ‘cover up’,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This is an opportunity for the Trump State Department to come clean and clean up this refugee welfare program.”

To citizen investigators:  When you are looking at financial documents of the nine major refugee contractors, you will often see the special line item for the amount of money they get from the federal government (from you) for collecting the travel loan reimbursement from the poor refugees.
Here is an example from the 2014 Annual Report (page 10) of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration Fund. See that the “travel loan collection fee” for that year was over $3.4 million.
 
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So, while we are at it, please notice that 97% of the the Bishop’s funding in this year was provided by you! (Add travel loan collection fee and federal grants.)  Not even $3 million came from private Christian charity.

It is because these supposedly non-governmental groups are being so heavily subsidized by our tax dollars we have every right to transparency about how our money is being spent!

Where is Congress? The Refugee Act of 1980 must be reformed!

Asylum is the next big problem we (and Trump!) must face!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Most of what I write about here at Refugee Resettlement Watch is about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program which was created when ol’ Ted (Kennedy) and Uncle Joe (Biden) created the program that was signed in to law in 1980 by Jimmy Carter.
The main thrust of the program is that refugees are chosen abroad (the UN is picking most of our refugees) and we fly them here. The nine major resettlement contractors we talk about all the time are then paid by the head to place them in your towns and cities.  They, and the US State Department, choose the resettlement sites often secretively.

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The Tsarnaev (Boston Bomber!) brothers were refugees whose father had successfully gained asylum and brought the family to join him.  Just goes to show that security screening isn’t going to be enough to keep us safe. Your tax dollars benefited the boys who were once cute refugees, but grew into Jihadi killers.

However, an originally small, but now growing part of that same law deals with asylum.  To keep it simple, asylum seekers get here on their own steam—either they enter illegally across borders or they have a visa for some reason and overstay the visa (they are not screened abroad at all).
When those coming illegally hit the border, they know to apply for asylum claiming that if they are sent home they will be persecuted for their religious beliefs, political beliefs, race, sexual orientation (a booming category!) and a few other things. They are then referred to as asylum seekers.
They go through one of two processes that I have found confusing and are either granted asylum or not.  If they are turned down, they must leave the country.  Yesterday we learned that the Obama Administration was releasing from detention failed asylum seekers who are high-tailing it to the Canadian border.
A successful asylum seeker is called an asylee or sometimes the broader term political refugee.  The Boston Bomber brothers were part of a family that entered the US this way.  As full-fledged refugees they then could (and did) avail themselves of all the same welfare goodies of refugees we flew in and they were free to work and to travel outside the country. They could also bring in more family members.
Here is a good report at the American Immigration Council.
On average we grant asylum to 24,000-25,000 of those who are here illegally, but can make a persuasive case that they will be harmed if they go home. Add that 25,000 or so to the number we discuss often here (Obama proposed 110,000 refugees for FY17 and to that add this 25,000). To Trump’s 50,000 cap add this additional 25,000.
Those Africans we mentioned yesterday who are running to Canada right now are FAILED asylum seekers NOT refugees!
According to the American Immigration Council:

In FY 2015, USCIS found 33,988 individuals to have credible fear. These individuals, many of whom were detained during this screening process, will be afforded an opportunity to apply for asylum defensively and establish that they meet the refugee definition.

The number of credible fear cases has skyrocketed since the procedure was implemented—in FY 2009, USCIS completed 5,523 cases. In FY 2014, case completions reached an all-time high of 49,607.

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The largest number of successful asylum seekers are Chinese! Do you know we have a policy (I believe it is still in effect) that allows Chinese men to use China’s one child policy as an argument about why they should be here—they want more than one kid—and will thus be persecuted if returned to China!

The countries of nationality for individuals granted asylum have largely remained the same in that 10-year period, with nationals of China and Egypt accounting for nearly half (46 percent) of grants each year since FY 2012. The rest of the asylum grants provided in that time period consistently went to nationals of Ethiopia, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Russia, Nepal, and Eritrea.

In FY 2014, the most recent year with available data, more individuals from Syria were granted asylum than in any previous year (4 percent of all grants). Individuals from China, Egypt, and Syria combined accounted for half of the nearly 24 thousand individuals granted asylum—either affirmatively or defensively—in FY 2014 (Figure 2). A total of 96 nationalities were represented among all individuals granted asylum in FY 2014.

So you can add another 1,000 Syrians getting in to the US through asylum each year (a large number could be the Christians that the UN is keeping out of our normal refugee flow).  I digress, but didn’t Obama (with the UN) use a religious test when 98% of the Syrians admitted in the normal refugee program are Muslims?
One last thing!
I was annoyed by a Drudge headline last night that read: “Refugees self-deport” about a story about the failed asylum seekers heading for Canada. They are NOT refugees! They failed to be designated as refugees.  But, I see this morning that the headline has changed to the more accurate, “Illegals self-deport!”

The Open Borders Left has for years been working to control the language and they want you to think that anyone on the move anywhere in the world, for any reason, is a refugee. It is a big lie that the mainstream media helps to perpetuate!

Those migrants entering Europe by the hundreds of thousands are most likely economic migrants, but most will apply for asylum in Europe. They are not resettled refugees comparable to the ones we (with the UN) bring from around the world. They are in fact not refugees at all until they have successfully gained legal asylum although media around the world deceptively uses the word ‘refugee.’
Where is Congress?
I said as early as 2011, that this asylum process must be thoroughly investigated by Congress because I suspect that  someone or some groups are helping third worlders (possibly even paying them) to come across our borders and ask for asylum.

Dept. of State coordinating with its refugee contractors to try to keep refugees coming for two more weeks

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the time frame they estimate they have before the latest legal wrangles are resolved.

So look for another big rush of refugees in the coming days.

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US Together in Ohio is one of Hetfield’s subcontractors.

And, if they don’t materialize, contractors will have to start reducing their federally-funded staffs.
From CNN:

Washington (CNN) For the second weekend in a row, nonprofits tasked with welcoming refugees to the United States are reacting to a sudden, major shift in the policies that govern their work.

A week ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending resettlement for 120 days and initiating a review of the vetting procedures used to approve applicants to come to the United States.

Then Friday, a more welcome surprise for refugee groups: A federal judge in Washington reversed several key provisions of the executive order, paving the way some refugees to enter the country.

US Together is the Ohio subcontractor for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

I feel like our whole world has been turned upside-down,” Danielle Drake, community relations manager at the Cleveland*** nonprofit US Together, told CNN Saturday.

“The executive order came in so quickly, no one was prepared for it,” she said. “We had zero notice.”

Why can’t leftwing media like CNN be completely honest about this funding and explain how contractors are paid by the head out of the federal treasury to do their ‘work.’  As subcontractors of the big nine contractors, groups like US Together are almost exclusively funded by taxpayer dollars!
I am sure that the average American reading this has no understanding that they are talking about mom and pop taxpayer paying for all of this.

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Henshaw is a career federal employee obviously running the show and giving guidance to the DOS refugee contractors. Trump must appoint his replacement.

Funding for resettlement groups is also in question as the administration and the courts each consider the future of the US refugee program.

If the administration is given the go-ahead to move forward with its four-month suspension, Drake estimates US Together will have to lay off at least half its staff.

“One of the other very difficult aspects of the executive order was the financial implications faced by the local resettlement offices,” Sarah Krause, a senior director for the national resettlement agency Church World Service, told CNN. [See my funding analysis of CWS, here.—ed]

Busy, busy bureaucrats!

The State Department has been coordinating with CWS and other agencies to provide guidance on what Friday’s court ruling means for them in practical terms.

As of Saturday afternoon, CWS had been advised that flights were expected to resume early next week and continue for at least the next two weeks.

The cap of 50,000 refugees for this fiscal year remains in effect. See here where we explained why this was still too high! Bush had 4 years under 50,000, so this does not represent any big slowdown! Even 50,000 is going to cost taxpayers several billion dollars!

But for refugees still awaiting approval to go to the United States, the uncertainty created by the executive order and subsequent legal challenges has left them in limbo.

That’s due, in part, to a provision of the Trump administration’s order that was not overturned in Friday’s court ruling — a provision capping total refugee admissions at 50,000 for the 2017 fiscal year, which ends October 1.

More than 30,000 refugees had already been admitted to the US before the new policy went into effect, according to State Department data, leaving just under 20,000 spots open.

Continue reading here.
Church World Service and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society are organizing demonstrations against Trump. There should be a federal law prohibiting federal contractors from such overtly political activities.

*** Interested readers might want to visit my 2013 post about when ‘Welcoming America’ came to Cleveland to push for changing the city by seeding it with more third worlders.