Last week someone asked me to have a look at the numbers of Somalis admitted to the US since 9/11.
It so happens that the US State Department site, Refugee Processing Center (Wrapsnet) has the data very nicely organized since 2002, so the request was pretty easy to accomplish.
However, prior to that year, one must pour over ORR Annual Reports to pull the numbers together.
In 2008, I wrote this post (updated too) and showed you what I found at those Annual Reports.
Here are the Somali refugee admissions from 1983-2002. Remember! These are only the direct refugee admissions and do not include Temporary Protected Status holders, successful asylum seekers who appeared at our borders, illegal entrants, or the family members brought in throughout the years.
And, if you are thinking this doesn’t seem high enough, remember there have been 35 years of population growth!
Continue reading “How many Somali refugees has the US admitted since 1983?”
Category: Taxpayer goodies
The dark underbelly of refugee resettlement in the US—churches neglecting refugees, working with questionable landlords
When I first began writing this blog in July 2007, one of the issues that attracted my attention was the puzzling decision by the Virginia Council of Churches, working for major resettlement contractor Church World Service, to place refugees in one of the worst buildings in the worst section of Hagerstown, MD.
But, here we are 11 years later and Church World Service has placed Congolese refugees in Greensboro, NC in housing that is managed by a company that has a record of many years of troubling business practices.
I’m sure CWS rejoinder is—well give us more taxpayer money and we will get them nicer apartments.
And, I say, this was supposed to be a public-private partnership, so how about you, CWS, raising private money from your churches to help these Africans you placed (so that North Carolina meatpackers could have cheap compliant labor)!
Continue reading “The dark underbelly of refugee resettlement in the US—churches neglecting refugees, working with questionable landlords”
Afghan special immigrant visa (SIV) holders and families enter US in high numbers
Maryland and Virginia are in the top five welcoming states…
I’ve been told that the flow of these ‘special’ immigrants are helping to keep federal money flowing to the resettlement contractors*** as they are treated as refugees (but not counted as part of the 45,000 ceiling set by the President last September) and as such, the contractors are paid by the head for their work in resettling them.
Just now I checked Wrapsnet to see what those numbers looked like. I’ve written other posts on the topic before, here, so this is an update.
Prior to FY14 we admitted small numbers of the people that supposedly helped us in some capacity in Afghanistan, but the number began to skyrocket in FY14.
The top year so far, 16,866 Afghan SIV arrivals, was in President Trump’s first year in office.
Top states for Afghan resettlement (regular refugees and SIVs) from FY07 to the present were California (20,171), Texas (8,229), Virginia (7763), Washington (2,898) and Maryland (2,745).
Here are some partial screen shots. The whole graph obviously doesn’t fit on the page.
Top of graph:
Bottom of graph:
The total number of Afghans admitted to the US, 60,623, above is from FY07 to the present. Less than 10,000 were determined to be refugees.
*** Here are the nine federal refugee contractors. They have been complaining as their regular paying client numbers (refugees) have declined, but it seems they have some taxpayer supplied funds coming in with this huge push to bring in Afghan ‘interpreters’ and their families.
The original Refugee Act of 1980, that set up this monstrosity, envisioned a public-private partnership that over the years has almost completely morphed in to a federal program.
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees (SIVs too) and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)! From most recent accounting, here.
- Church World Service (CWS) (71%)
- Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) (secular)(93%)
- Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) (99.5%)
- Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) (57%)
- International Rescue Committee (IRC) (secular) (66.5%)
- US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular) (98%)
- Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) (97%)
- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) (97%)
- World Relief Corporation (WR) (72.8%)
Refugee industry advocates flailing at Trump as he breaks the "assembly line" in to the US
I’m not going to spend the time this morning going tit-for-tat with refugee advocates whose only line of argument, about changes being made in the US Refugee Admissions Program, is to attack the President as a hateful, bigoted, racist boob.
I guess people, like Bill Frelick at Human Rights Watch, assumed the program was running like a well-oiled machine as refugees by the hundreds of thousands (some not even real refugees) were being secretly placed in US communities while the federal resettlement contractors sucked down billions of dollars (including fat CEO salaries) from unwilling taxpayers who they then labeled as, what else, racist Islamophobic boobs, if they dared to question the process.
Is Bill Frelick, in his screed at the Los Angeles Times, saying the program had no flaws and critics like me over the years have been complaining about nothing?
I guess so when he quotes Barbara Strack (retired USCIS refugee bureaucrat) referring to the “assembly line” in a piece entitled:
Trump’s brutal refugee program reflects prejudice instead of compassion
“The process works like the assembly line in a factory,” Barbara Strack, who retired in January as chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told the New York Times. “This fiscal year, the administration essentially ‘broke’ the assembly line in multiple places at the same time.”
An assembly line shoved down citizens’ throats for nearly four decades!
Yes, they have had an assembly line since shortly after 1980 and that is why the program has created anger and controversy as American citizens, who pay the bills and have to live with the destabilizing results in community after community across America, feel left out and are now asking questions and demanding change.
Elections have consequences.
Frelick and his morally superior pals in the industry should admit there are problems and work to reform the program rather than take cheap shots at the President and his nominee to head the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration.
They won’t though, even if they know deep down that there are problems, because they are one-trick ponies and apparently none are brave enough to break from the Leftist herd mentality.
US is still taking 'refugees' from Malta, why?
Yesterday after talking to an expert on the US Refugee Admissions Program where we talked about the highly irregular arrangement with Malta to welcome to America some of those illegal migrants who arrived on Malta in the last decade through the boat migration from Africa to Europe, I checked the data at Wrapsnet and see that we admitted 123 ‘refugees’ from Malta in this fiscal year (so far).
I have followed the case of Malta for ten years now and have a large file about this highly irregular arrangement first launched in the Bush Administration and continued by Obama.
Refugee law says that asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first safe country they get to.
It is not our responsibility to save Malta (an EU country!) from its own problems with illegal migrants/asylum seekers. What are US taxpayers getting out of this deal?
Why is the Trump State Department still participating in this legally questionable arrangement?
Continue reading “US is still taking 'refugees' from Malta, why?”