Rep. Keith Ellison is among 50 or so Congressional members of the House Progressive Caucuswho have submitted a Resolution in the House pushing for Trump to return to Obama’s proposed 110,000 ceiling for refugees to be admitted to the US in the coming fiscal year.
Keith Ellison Wants to Flood Minnesota and the U.S. with 110,000 Refugees in 2019
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is leading an effort to try to force President Trump to boost the number of refugees permanently resettled in the United States over the next fiscal year by more than 300 percent.
Ellison is the Democrat nominee for the statewide office of attorney general in Minnesota. He holds a slight lead in the most recent polls over his Republican opponent, Doug Wardlow, and is currently entangled in allegations of sexual abuse by two women.
Taxpayer dollars at work? In February 2017, Ellison headlined an anti-Trump rally in New York organized by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society a federally-funded refugee resettlement ‘non-profit’ group. Since 2008, HIAS has received $186 million from the US Treasury. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/02/14/breitbart-federally-funded-refugee-resettlement-contractor-hias-organized-ny-rally-against-trump/
The Minnesota Sun continues….
The issue of refugee resettlement has become a hot topic in the state’s gubernatorial race between GOP nominee Jeff Johnson and Democrat nominee Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN).
House Resolution 1073was submitted by Ellison and more than 50 other Democrat members of Congress to the House Judiciary Committee, where it could receive a hearing or be ignored.
Minnesota and Ohio have ranked among the top five states for receiving refugees over the last 10 years, with the vast majority coming from Somalia. And both states have had problems with Somali violence, including knife attacks at two difference malls in Minnesota and a car-ramming and knife attack at Ohio State University, among the most bloody examples.
The list of signatories on the resolution reads like a who’s who of the leadership of the House Progressive Caucus, which is considered the most far left of the Democrat Party. Ellison is vice chair of the caucus.
[….]
As Barack Obama once said, “elections have consequences,” and one of Trump’s campaign promises was to admit fewer refugees and other low-skill immigrants.
That infuriates, almost more than anything else Trump has done, the far left of the Democrat Party.
Hence, you have the resolution drawn up and submitted this week by Ellison, who is one of two Muslim members of Congress along with Rep. Andre Carson, (D-IN). Carson has also signed the resolution.
The House resolution claims to be “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Presidential Determination of the annual refugee admissions limit in fiscal year 2019 shall be no less than 110,000 and that President Trump and his administration must operate the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) in good faith.”
As faithful readers know, Secretary of State Pompeo announced a week ago that the administration is looking at a ceiling/cap of 30,000, see here.
I have to steel myself to write AGAIN about the issue of the President’s legal right to set the annual CAP (aka ceiling) for the number of refugees to be invited to the US to become your new neighbors. But, I know how important repetition (to the point of wanting to barf) is!
Bixby at twitter: @scottbix
In fact, as I read the Daily Beast story by Scott Bixby, I was heartened to see that maybe after all these years the facts about the program are beginning to be reported and understood.
Progress is being made!
Reporter Bixby actually did some good reporting when he said that many of the contractors are 97% federally funded on a refugee per capita basis. (You know that, but believe me the average voting American doesn’t!).
Most reports by the Leftwing lapdog media about these federal contractors, aka VOLAGs, leave readers and viewers with a wrong assumption that they are paying for all of their ‘humanitarian good works’ from their own charitable pockets. It ain’t so!
Before I get into the latest whinefest by the contractors*** consider one of my primary fundamental concerns:
Taxpayers should not be required to pay large (any!) salaries and supply non-profits with cushy office space only to have those same non-profits act as political community organizers and agitators for not just more refugees, but for more migrants, legal and illegal, trying to get to the US.
The story is entitled:
The New Collateral Damage in Trump’s War on Refugees
The Trump administration has cut the number of refugees they let into the country by a third. That decision could gravely harm organizations that assist those already here.
(Emphasis is mine)
When the Trump administration announced its intention to slash the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States to the lowest level in nearly four decades, the decision sparked worry among thousands of displaced persons who feared that the nation’s doors were now closed to them. But in addition to the record number of global refugees seeking safety from unrest in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the admissions cap will likely also harm organizations designed to help the thousands of displaced people who do make it safely to the United States.
As the U.S. government slows the number of legal refugees who can enter the country to a trickle, the nine private voluntary agencies with cooperative agreements with the State Department to help settle those refugees must now contend with a potentially devastating budget crunch.
Reporter Bixby picked the wrong contractor to quote. The International Rescue Committee headquartered in Manhattan is headed by David Miliband, a British national, sucking down a nearly $700,000 annual salary as the NON-PROFIT organization fires lower level staff. The IRC received $846 million from the US Treasury since 2008.
“It’ll have a tremendous impact on the number of people who are able to access these life-saving services,” Nazanin Ash [working for Miliband—ed] vice president of policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee, told The Daily Beast. “There’ve been over 150 office closures over the last two years, and that shutters a vital resource in many communities across the country.”
[….]
Government grants, provided on a per capita basis tied to the number of refugees assisted, account for as much as 97 percent of the resettlement grants for these organizations. Lower resettlement admissions therefore mean fewer federal dollars—and program funding is now set to plummet as precipitously as the number of admitted refugees.
That loss in grant money threatens a funding shortfall that could endanger community-based resettlement offices nationwide, as well as programs intended to help those who have fled their homes to establish a life in the United States, from housing placement and food support to professional support, English classes and community integration.
[….]
Under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the president has the sole authority, following consultation with Congress, to determine the maximum number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, called the Presidential Determination. Under President Donald Trump, the Presidential Determination was decreased from 110,000 in 2017 to 45,000 refugees in 2018, one-seventh of its peak. Even then, the cap is a limit, not a requirement—so far, only 20,918 refugees have actually been admitted to the United States this year.
Don’t miss my post on the myth of Obama’s 110,000 ceiling, here where I said this:
Never once in his previous 7 years did he propose a ceiling (a cap!) that high and he came no where near that number of refugees admitted.
LOL! Now they are really stretching.
Below Melanie Nezer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (which received $186 million from the US Treasury since 2008) says, because of that meany Trump, you are being deprived of the joy, of not getting to know refugees who might have been placed in your towns.
If it was going to be such a positive thing to open more communities for refugee placement, then why did the Obama State Department keep those sites under consideration secret from us?
Do not forget that these nine contractors were working closely with the US State Department in the Obama years to locate as many as 40 new resettlement sites and it was all being kept secret from you—the citizens of the 40 or so new targets.
If you were to benefit so much from being ‘chosen’ then why were they keeping those sites secret?
Nezer cautioned that the grant reduction won’t just negatively affect the refugees they’re intended to serve, but may foster a sense of isolation and complacency among native-born Americans.
“Fewer resettlement offices means fewer opportunities for people to volunteer and work with refugees,” Nezer explained. “If fewer refugees come, and fewer Americans get to engage directly with refugees, that kind of starts a cycle where there’s less direct connection” with refugee populations.
“As fewer comes and fewer Americans get to have that relationship, then there’s less support for letting refugees in at all.”
There is much more in this story, but its getting way too long.
Read it all here, see that reporter Bixby, trying to make a case for bipartisan support for the program, tells us how angry REPUBLICANS in the House and Senate are at the President for not consulting them as the law stipulates. See my post here on that.
These R’s are just a bunch of phony-baloneys who cared not one whit about past consultation requirements when numbers were large!
Many only care about one thing—cheap labor for their pals at global corporations and at the Chamber of Commerce!
***Here below are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors.
You might be sick of seeing this list almost every day, but a friend once told me that people need to see something seven times before it completely sinks in, so it seems to me that 70, or even 700 isn’t too much!
And, besides I have new readers every day.
The present US Refugee Admissions Program will never be reformed if the system of paying the contractors by the head stays in place and the contractors are permitted to act as Leftwing political agitation groups, community organizers and lobbyists paid on our dime!
And, to add insult to injury they pretend it is all about ‘humanitarianism.’
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees into your towns and cities and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)! And, get them registered to vote eventually!
President Donald Trump has many avenues to slow the immigration steam roller that is changing America by changing the people.
Making it harder for wannabe future ‘new Americans’ to stay, is to require that they won’t suck off the federal teat in the process of advancing toward a green card and future citizenship.
Stephen Miller is at it again says Politico
But before you get excited, know that refugees and asylees (and a whole bunch of other categories of legal immigration) are exempt from a proposed rule change.
When the bill that became the Refugee Act of 1980was debated in Congress, ol’ Teddy Kennedy promised that we weren’t simply bringing more impoverished people to America to place on welfare. He lied!
I want to know why the supposed humanitarian NGOs (the contractors) presently being paid by us, the taxpayers, to take care of refugees can’t use their own money to feed and house the refugees they say they love. After all, they claim that the refugees quickly find work and become self-sufficient!
Here is Politico which obviously is sending a message for Dems and Leftwingers to strongly oppose (protest!) the proposed rules they claim are straight from the evil brain of White House aide Stephen Miller. Never mind that controlling immigration was the primary reason Donald Trump was elected to sit in the Oval Office and Miller is one of the few who remember the promise!
The Leftwing media focus on Miller is a classic Saul Alinsky tactic. I suspect he finds the attacks amusing.
Immigrants may be denied green cards if they’ve received benefits
The Trump administration proposed expanding its pre-election crackdown on immigration by denying green cards to legal immigrants if they have received government assistance.
Under the new rule, which the Department of Homeland Security posted online Saturday, immigrants can be denied so-called “lawful permanent residency” if they’ve received certain government benefits — or if the government anticipates that they may do so in the future.
The measure represents the latest move by White House aide Stephen Miller to reduce drastically all immigration to the U.S., both legal and illegal, and reflects his strong conviction that doing so will improve congressional Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections. The benefit programs targeted include the the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare), Medicaid, and Medicare Part D (prescription drug subsidies).
The regulation could force millions of low-income families to choose between government assistance and permanent settlement in the United States.
Advocates fear it could ultimately restrict children’s access to food and health care.
The move will affect mainly legal immigrants and their families, since undocumented immigrants are not eligible for most federal benefits.
[….]
The proposed regulation would provide a more robust enforcement mechanism for longstanding statutory boilerplate that bars immigrants “likely to become a public charge.”
[….]
Trump’s fatal error in the end could be his failure to put people like Von Spakovsky in his administration so loyal aides like Miller would not be virtually alone in fighting the deep state.
Roughly one million people become lawful permanent residents each year — a generous allotment, according to Hans von Spakovsky, a senior fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“We can be choosy about who we allow into the country,” he said. “One of the primary factors ought to be ensuring that the legal immigrants who come in are people who can financially support themselves.”
Approximately one-third of the federal budget goes to health insurance subsidies and social safety net programs, according to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — an expenditure the Trump administration and Republicans seek to reduce.
[….]
A range of activists spent months preparing for the rollout of the proposed regulation and plan to wage an opposition campaign.The proposal will now be subject to a public comment period, an opportunity for opponents to mount an assault on the plan.
A coalition led by the National Immigration Law Center and the D.C.-based anti-poverty Center for Law and Social Policy will push for a wide range of businesses, organizations and government officials to submit comments.
Refugees, Asylees, Cuban/Haitians, Special Immigrant Visa holders, those here through the ridiculous ‘temporary protected status’ program, more! are all exempt!
The prospective regulation wouldn’t apply to all immigrants. Refugees and asylees are exempt, as are certain victims of domestic violence and children who qualify for “special immigrant juvenile status,” which is available to minors who were abused, neglected or abandoned by a parent.
Foreigners who apply for “temporary protected status” to remain in the U.S. after a natural disaster or armed conflict in their home countries will also be exempt, so long as they received a blanket waiver to absolve them of any public charge considerations.
See Jim Simpson’s charton how many refugees and others have been approved as ‘new Americans’ in the last ten years and know that all of these will be exempt!***
It isn’t clear if the UAC ‘children’ will continue to receive welfare but I suspect they will.
Continue here if you wish. Politico, through its long report, is helping the Left figure out who opposes the draft measure and offering a blueprint on how best to fight it including stalling it by overwhelming the system with thousands and thousands of comments.
***If you need more proof than what Politico says, here is a screenshot of a portion of the draft regulationsexempting refugees and asylees. This is from page 85 but more exemptions are on page 86,87,88, and 89!
The list of exemptions goes on for four more pages!
This is one more reason that the Trump Administration should be pushing for a complete review of the US Refugee Admissions Program with an eye to up-ending—dumping entirely or re-writing—the foolish system put into motion by the Refugee Act of 1980.
We simply can’t bring in so many refugees that they then live in squalor, placed there by some supposedly ‘religious’ charities paid by US taxpayers with virtually no oversight of what they are doing and no accounting of where our money goes.
And, not to mention, having an economic, cultural, and health impact on Americans kept in the dark about the arrival of poor third worlders to their neighborhoods.
Inspectors entering housing complex where hundreds of Burmese refugees were placed by a resettlement contractor working for the US State Department.
Maybe not ‘humanitarian’ at all!
Some might say we are actually promoting slave labor for the meatpacking industry and other giant globalist companies.
It is a long story, and you should read it all at the Omaha World-Herald (hat tip: Joanne):
Squalid Omaha apartments housing refugees targeted by city operation in ‘humanitarian effort’
City of Omaha housing inspectors descended Thursday morning on a north Omaha apartment complex to inspect units and potentially remove and relocate up to 500 refugees from Myanmar living among bedbugs, lice, rodents, gas leaks, mold and other squalid living conditions.
Officials described the operation at the Yale Park Apartments, near 34th Avenue and Lake Streets, as a “humanitarian effort” involving code enforcement, police and fire personnel, as well as members of the philanthropic community and social service agencies who could be tasked with finding temporary housing for hundreds of people.
[….]
Tenants, which include an estimated 175 children, may be forced to live out of community centers equipped with cots in coming days as the scramble begins to find places for them to stay. City officials said they’re trying to respect the tenants’ cultural wishes, too, which likely includes being placed together as much as possible.
[….]
Three men entered the courtyard Thursday morning wearing white hazmat suits and orange rubber boots. People wearing Omaha Public Schools, Heartland Family Services and Lutheran Family Services gear were standing by.
The reporter wants us to believe that the problem is entirely the landlords fault, but doesn’t tell us that it was Lutheran Family Services, a federal resettlement contractor, that was likely responsible for placing refugees in questionable housing in the first place.
Meatpacking laborers!
The article tells us that many of the Burmese work in meatpacking at nearby Cargill. (Yes, the same Cargill company we mentioned here yesterday with the E.Coli recall).
In 2017 Cargill in Nebraska expanded the size of a plant that then required more laborers. See here.
Learn more about Cargill at wikipedia, it might change some of your buying habits.
If these meapackers want the refugee laborers maybe they should subsidize better housing for them! Or, better still, go back to paying good wages so Americans will be happy to do the job!
Several people have asked me about the statement made by Secretary of State Pompeo when he announced the Administration’s intentions of capping refugee admissions at 30,000.
According to the New York Times, Pompeo mentioned a backlog of 800,000 asylum cases piled up in immigration courts and the NYT is quick to point out that the number is too high.
It is ONLY 320,000!
(And, remember readers that those waiting for their asylum hearing are mostly free to roam the USA, relatively few are in detention!)
“This year’s refugee ceiling reflects the substantial increase in the number of individuals seeking asylum in our country, leading to a massive backlog of outstanding asylum cases and greater public expense,” he added.
Nazanin Ash (left) speaking for refugee contractor the International Rescue Committee: “In justifying its policy intention, the administration has pitted those seeking asylum against refugees.”
Mr. Pompeo said refugees had to be weighed against a backlog of 800,000 asylum seekers who are awaiting a decision by immigration authorities about whether they qualify as in need of protection under United States law and will be granted status to remain.
But he vastly overstated the numbers, while making a linkage between two groups of immigrants that are not the same and are processed differently.
As of the end of June, the Department of Homeland Security reported just under 320,000 people who had claimed asylum— meaning they had passed an interview conducted to verify that they met the “credible fear” threshold to be considered — and were awaiting a decision from the department about whether they could stay.
About 730,000 additional immigrants were waiting for their cases to be resolved by immigration courts, according to the Justice Department…
In other words Pompeo is saying that the Trump Administration is going to focus first on a huge backlog of asylum claims.
So what is this asylum issue?
Perhaps we haven’t talked about it enough over the years, but asylum is the other side of a two-sided coin for ‘refugee’ admissions to the US.
The cap we are talking about refers to the refugees who are found abroad, are accepted for admission and are flown here at taxpayers’ expense and turned over to one of the nine refugee resettlement contractors for care.
Asylum seekers are people who got to the US on their own dime and upon entering the country across a border illegally (or sometimes with a legal visa) they request asylum claiming they would be persecuted if returned home. They then go through a legal process to determine if their claims are legitimate or not. (Another can of worms involves the question of how many of those whose claims of asylum were rejected actually leave the country!)
If granted asylum they are called Asylees and are eligible for all of the social service goodies we give to the refugees we fly in. Therefore, US taxpayers’ generosity is not only to the smaller number of refugees we flew in, but potentially to tens of thousands more each year!
The asylum system here and in Europe has been massively scammed where worldwide millions are claiming asylum when in fact most are economic migrants or just plain crooks.
There are so many that they are overwhelming our legal system and that is why Sec. of State Pompeo says we are prioritizing—getting those hundreds of thousands processed.
(See Jim Simpson’schart in this post to see how many had successful asylum claims for each of the last 10+ years. Total is over 266,000 since 2008!)
Refugee Industry thrilled with Asylum avenue to America!
In 2010 I attended the 30th anniversary celebration for the Refugee Act of 1980at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and was struck by the focus speakers were placing on the asylum process.
At the Georgetown anniversary event, it was Doris Meissner (who apparently had a role in crafting the Refugee Act of 1980) who said with obvious pleasure: We only expected the odd Russian ballet dancer to use the asylum process, but now (yippee!) large numbers of migrants are using it!
They were downright giddy that so many migrants were now showing up at our borders seeking asylum. In fact, they seemed to be conscious of the fact that there were limits to the numbers they could get in to the US in the normal refugee admissions process even before Trump ever appeared on their radar screens.
In 2011, after seeing more stories about asylum seekers arriving at our borders from far flung places like Somalia, I wrote this post:
Is there a conspiracy by NGO’s to bring asylum seekers to US borders?
I said this at the time about the Georgetown shindig after calling for a Congressional investigation.
I was also struck at the conference by how much emphasis the pro-refugee, pro-open borders activists and speakers were placing on our asylum program. They wanted to educate more asylum lawyers and hire more asylum judges (apparently the refugee program itself wasn’t bringing immigrants in fast enough!). One speaker even said that the original idea behind the program was to rescue the odd ballet dancer seeking asylum from some repressive regime, but had now expanded to thousands every year.
You can read the whole post here, but the gist of it was that I believe the international open borders Leftists are actively involved in pushing migrants to first world countries’ borders (maybe even paying their way!) where, having been previously coached, they know how to ask for asylum. Of course that is exactly what we are seeing now here and in Europe.
By the way, check out thewhole NYT story. The reporter says that Secretary of State Pompeo wanted to keep the CAP where it was at 45,000, but Stephen Miller in the White House pushed for an even lower ceiling.
See my post yesterdaywhere I say it should have been ZERO!
