Category: Testimony for 5/1/2012 State Dept. meeting

ECDC: We want money even when refugee flows are low

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

ECDC is the Ethiopian Community Development Council, Inc,* one of the top federal refugee contractors, here  (oh funny, I see we lost two contractors recently, the number had been 11).  A representative from this organization testified last week at the State Department meeting and although I couldn’t understand his verbal testimony, his written testimony has several interesting nuggets of information.  One nugget, which I hope to get to in the next few days, involves a pitch to take so-called “refugees” from the Rainbow Nation—that supposed heaven-on-Earth called South Africa.  Who knew that blacks could be xenophobic!

We want to be paid no matter how many refugees we resettle! 

Readers, I have reported on many occasions that one of many flaws in this program is that the resettlement contractors are paid by the head to resettle refugees, so when the flow slows, as it is right now (due to extra security measures being put in place), the agencies have to (boo hoo) let people go.   It was before my time, but I am told that immediately following 9/11 the flow was cut dramatically, but these “non-profit” contractors managed to wrangle money out of the federal government anyway to pay themselves salaries until the spigot opened again.

Here, the representative from ECDC asks for your tax dollars again, even if work has slowed.   (I have broken his long paragraph into smaller ones so you can read it easier, and added emphasis—ed)

Administrative Floor Funding for Domestic Resettlement

ECDC recommends that PRM fund local resettlement agencies at 100 percent of approved capacity. Within the last two fiscal years, partly due to the Inter-Agency Check (IAC) [involves security—ed] holds, the resettlement program has encountered significantly lower than expected arrivals.  Because local resettlement agencies are reimbursed on per capita arrivals, they have been unable to pay for administrative expenses, including staff.

While some agencies have used reserve funds and have been able to garner additional private resources, in the reality of continued low arrivals, these funding sources have been exhausted.  [This program was never intended to be fully funded by the feds (by you)! The public-private partnership meant that the “non-profits” were to raise lots of money on their own!—ed*] Consequently, many agencies have laid off staff.  When agencies do receive arrivals, they are not fully prepared to serve them with limited employees.  They must quickly hire new case management staff who may not receive the benefit of robust, extended training.

US refugee arrivals fluctuate widely from month-to-month and year-to-year, making it nearly impossible for local agencies to have a solid infrastructure in place at all times that can readily adapt and provide quality Reception and Placement services. With full funding, local resettlement agencies are able to maintain continuity in their respective administrative and staffing capacities to resettle refugees, despite unanticipated and uneven arrival patterns. [So, they can sit around in offices collecting a salary even if no refugees are coming?—ed]. It is in the best interest of refugees that local offices be equipped and ready at all times to offer high-quality resettlement.

* Now check out their most recent Form 990, here.   They took in $13 million in that year and $11 million came from you!  They have a couple of 6-figure salaries they have to maintain too.

All this would be solved if we took these contractors out of this business.  The complaints that we see on the local level are related to contractors wanting more warm bodies to resettle and then three months later turning those people over to local government to care for!

New readers:  See all of our coverage of this May 1 State Department meeting in our category set up specifically for that purpose, here.

“We are a Nation of immigrants” mumbo-jumbo

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update and correction!  It was brought to my attention last evening by an observant reader that Mr. Hunter’s testimony to the State Department below was taken in part from a 2006 article in Frontpage Magazine, here.  The author is Lawrence Auster whose thoughtful writing on the issue of immigration has been widely published.  You may wish to read his blog, View from the Right, here.  I sincerely apologize to Mr. Auster for this rookie editor’s error.

As I said the other day, I am going to have days and weeks of material from the US State Department meeting last week on the Refugee Program.

Editor’s note to citizens and taxpayers:  The US State Department is not going to release the testimony to you although all of the testimony we received last week was available to anyone in the public who made the trek to that 11th floor obscure meeting room in Arlington, VA.  When I get a few minutes I’ll make links for all the files we have from that meeting.

Here is one segment of testimony from Edward Hunter (US Voices on Immigration Reform) where he discusses the sacred cows and pat little phrases and slogans the immigration industry pushes on the public.   How many times has someone tried to shut you up with this one—We are a Nation of immigrants!—as if that statement alone justifies wide open borders.

Hunter/Auster(emphasis mine):

This—the veritable “king” of open-borders, globalist, mass immigration, refugee resettlement clichés—seems at first glance to be an indisputable statement, in the sense that all Americans, even including the American Indians, are either immigrants themselves or descendants of people who came here from other places. Given the above, it would be more accurate to say that we are “a nation of people descended from immigrants.” But such a mundane statement would fail to convey the thrilling idea conjured up by the phrase “nation of immigrants”—the idea that all of us, whether or not we are literally immigrants, are somehow “spiritually” immigrants, in the sense that the immigrant experience defines our character as Americans.

This friendly-sounding, inclusive sentiment—like so many others of its kind—turns out to be profoundly exclusive. For one thing, it implies that anyone who is not an immigrant, or who does not identify with immigration as a key aspect of his own being, is not a “real” American. It also suggests that newly arrived immigrants are more American than people whose ancestors have been here for generations. The public television essayist Richard Rodriguez spelled out these assumptions when he declared, in his enervated, ominous tone: “Those of us who live in this country are not the point of America. The newcomers are the point of America.”

In reality, we are not—even in a figurative sense—a nation of immigrants or even a nation of descendants of immigrants. As Chilton Williamson pointed out in The Immigration Mystique, the 80,000 mostly English and Scots-Irish settlers of colonial times, the ancestors of America’s historic Anglo-Saxon majority, had not transplanted themselves from one nation to another (which is what defines immigration), but from Britain and its territories to British colonies. They were not immigrants, but colonists. The immigrants of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to an American nation that had already been formed by those colonists and their descendants. Therefore to call America “a nation of immigrants” is to suggest that America, prior to the late nineteenth century wave of European immigration, was not America. It is to imply that George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant (descended from the original colonists) were not “real” Americans, but those that have entered most recently and who in many ways are bringing cultures that are inimical to that original American identity are.

Apart from its politically correct function of diminishing the Americans of the pre-Ellis Island period and their descendants, the “nation of immigrants” motto is meaningless in practical terms. Except for open-borders ideologues, everyone knows we must have some limits on immigration. The statement, “we are a nation of immigrants,” gives us no guidance on what those limits should be. Two hundred thousand immigrants per year? Two million? Why not twenty million—since we’re a nation of immigrants? The slogan also doesn’t tell us, once we have decided on overall numbers, what the criterion of selection shall be among the people who want to come here. Do we choose on the basis of family ties to recent immigrants? Language? Income? Nationality? Race? Victim status? First come first served? The “nation of immigrants” slogan cannot help us choose among these criteria because it doesn’t state any good that is to be achieved by immigration. It simply produces a blind emotional bias in favor of more immigration rather than less, making rational discussion of the issue impossible.

To see the uselessness of the “nation of immigrants” formula as a source of political guidance, imagine what the British would have said if they had adopted it in 1940 when they were facing an imminent invasion by Hitler’s Germany. “Look, old man, we’re a nation of immigrants/invaders. First the Celts took the land from the Neolithic peoples, then the Anglo-Saxons conquered and drove out the Celts, then the Normans invaded and subjugated the Anglo-Saxons. In between there were Danish invaders and settlers and Viking marauders as well. Since we ourselves are descended from invaders, who are we to oppose yet another invasion of this island? Being invaded by Germanic barbarians is our national tradition!”

Since every nation could be called a nation of immigrants (or a nation of invaders) if you go back far enough, consistent application of the principle that a nation of immigrants must be open to all future immigrants would require every country on earth to open its borders to whoever wanted to come. But only the United States and, to a lesser extent, a handful of other Western nations, are said to have this obligation. The rule of openness to immigrants turns out to be a double standard, aimed solely at America and the West.

It is also blatantly unfair to make the factoid that “we are all descended from immigrants” our sole guide to national policy, when there are so many other important and true facts about America that could also serve as guides. For example, throughout its history the United States has been a member of Western civilization—in religion overwhelmingly Christian, in race (until the post-1965 immigration) overwhelmingly white, in language English. Why shouldn’t those little historical facts be at least as important in determining our immigration policy as the pseudo-fact that we’re all “descended from immigrants?” But immigrant advocates are incapable of debating such questions, because there is no rational benefit for America that they seek through open immigration. Their aim is not to strengthen and preserve America, but to transform it into something else.

This post and all posts on the State Department meeting are filed in a new category entitled, “Testimony for 5/1/2012 State Dept. meeting” here.

Recap of the State Department meeting on refugee admissions for FY2013

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I hope no one out there has been holding their breath waiting for my report from the May 1 meeting in Arlington!   Primarily I am delayed in writing this because I was so blown away by the large amount of testimony sent in by some of you and others (I’ve never heard of) that I didn’t know where to start this report!

Much to my surprise, critics of the program sent more comments, by far! than the professional resettlers looking for more business with the government.   We are compiling those comments in Pdf format and hope to have links for you soon (the State Department is not going to make them available, but we will since they were made public for the meeting attendees).   The Refugee Resettlement program has stayed under the radar for so long because of things like this—no reporters present and the statements not distributed to the general public.

Here is what I’m going to do.  First give you a little sense of the meeting now and then in the days and weeks to come I will report on the various testimony received.   This post and all posts on the meeting will be in the category on the side bar entitled, “Testimony for 5/1/2012 State Department meeting.”  At this writing there are four other posts there.

The meeting whose purpose is to begin to determine how many refugees would be “welcomed” to America in FY2013 by President Barack Obama (in a formal letter to Congress in September) was held in a small room on the 11th floor of an Arlington, VA high rise building.  The meeting is obviously geared to those who have salaried staffers working in the DC metropolitan area. So, guess how many average American taxpaying citizens might ‘find their way there?’    LOL!  Next year we should push for regional meetings around the country so certain Mayors of certain beleaguered towns and cities might be able to attend.

I would love to have asked those in attendance (maybe around 100 max) to raise their hands if they were paid to be there.  I would guess only three critics actually gave up a day from work and other duties to attend.  The others had some financial stake in the event.   Although in fairness there were some speakers representing small advocacy groups of certain ethnic peoples they would like admitted to the US and who surely aren’t making 6-figure salaries like the big contractor reps.   Of the contractor behemoths, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Kurdish Human Rights Watch and Church World Service gave testimony and had written statements available.

I can only assume the other biggies gave private testimony to the State Department.  The International Rescue Committee, one of the largest recipients of federal grant money, doesn’t need to present testimony when its Vice President has just recently been chosen by Obama and approved by the Senate to head the program, here.   Check out the IRC’s 2009 Form 990.  They received $200 million from the US taxpayers that year!  And, while you are at it, have a look at the 6-figure salaries of its top-grossing employees.  I wonder how they were able to exclude their President’s nearly $400,000 salary and benefits package of previous years on this tax return?

I’m digressing and that is one of the reasons I didn’t get started on this post earlier—I knew I would have too much to say!

Back to the meeting!

Sitting at the head table were the following:

Lawrence Bartlett

Director, Office of Refugee Admissions

Department of State

Barbara Strack

Chief, Refugee Affairs Division, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Department of Homeland Security

Eskinder Negash

Director, Office of Refugee Resettlement

Department of Health and Human Services

I’ll tell you more about the principals (above) in later posts.

No public record of the meeting will be available, nor was anyone permitted to videotape it.   Efforts had been made to urge certain Members of Congress to request that videotaping be allowed or that C-Span be invited in to film the event so that Congress (which holds the purse strings) might have some idea of the process whereby contractors ask for more immigrants (and more money!).  I doubt any serious effort was made by Members of Congress because it would have happened if someone, or several Members, had pushed hard enough (What is that I hear? click here!).    After all, this isn’t the Supreme Court!  It is a meeting for government officials to hear from contractors!

Each person who had signed up IN ADVANCE was permitted 5 minutes to make a pitch.  Most of us read from our previously submitted statements (mine is here).  There were no questions permitted and those presiding asked no questions (although I am told in the past there was more give and take).  The meeting concluded in about an hour and a half.

More Muslims please!

I can’t wait to tell you about the testimony.  I haven’t read all of it yet.  But, one thing that jumped out at me in what I’ve read so far (or heard at the meeting) is that no one spoke for Christians persecuted by Muslims!  The US Conference of Catholic Bishops never even mentioned them, but they sure asked the State Department to send more Muslims to the US, in particular, they want more Somalis and Rohingya* (Burmese Muslims)!   Several of those testifying also called for the prompt re-opening of the P-3 family reunification program that has been closed for nearly 4 years due to the widespread fraud uncovered involving Africans, mostly Somalis.  The State Department has reported that as many as 36,000 Africans entered the US fraudulently in a 5 year period after 9/11!

Perhaps my favorite testimony came from a citizen of Lancaster, PA who is helping refugees, but critical of Church World Service (the contractor).

Watch for upcoming posts on the testimony!

* Please take a few minutes and begin to familiarize yourselves with Rohingya Muslims.  We have a whole category (Rohingya Reports) with 100 posts in it on this group of “stateless people” that the US State Department initially resisted when the UN told them to start letting them into the US.  They have begun to be resettled here (although at the moment there is some bureaucratic snafu with Bangladesh where many are located).

State Department hearing today on refugee numbers for FY 2013, commenter concerned about Shariah Law

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ll be reporting back tomorrow morning about the meeting.

In the meantime, I have been posting comments sent to the State Department from people who send their comments to me.   Below is the latest.   To see others go to our new category (Testimony for 5/1/2012 State Dept. Meeting) here.

Dear Sir/Madam:

I am writing to submit written comments on the President’s FY 2013 U.S. Refugee Admissions Program as part of the upcoming May 1st public hearing in Arlingon, VA.  Overall, I am writing to request that Refugee admissions be cut back dramatically to less than 5,000 admittances annually.  There are many reasons for this:

     1)   The USA cannot afford the high welfare cost of refugees.  Welfare use by refugees is staggering and is a huge cost to the USA at a time when it cannot afford this.  According to the 207 Report to Congress by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (p.91), among refugees who arrived during the 5 years previous to the survey 51% are on government medical assistance such as Medicaid, 25% have no health insurance at all, 49% are receiving food stamps, 25% are in public housing (an additional percentage is on a public housing waiting list), and 32 % are getting cash assistance such as TANF or SSI.   Related to this, I understand that 47% of loans made to refugees for transportation to the U.S. are unpaid leaving a balance of 450 million.  If interest is included on some of these unpaid loans, then the unpaid amount is well over a billion.  This is not affordable in a time of massive federal deficits.

   2)  Refugees and recent immigrants are often a source of Islamic terrorists and extremists – Somali refugees have been a source for Islamic terrorist recruits from Lewiston (Maine), Minnesota, and other parts of the USA such as Minnesota.   We should stop accepting refugees from countries with a history of producing Islamic terror as this brings terrorism and Islamic extremism into our country.  This should include Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Somalia, northern Nigeria, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and northern Sudan at a minimum.

    3)  I am especially concerned that refugees from the Muslim faith will and are advocating for Shariah Law in the USA which is incompatible with our society and governmental system in many ways.  This is happening much more extensively in Europe which has a higher Muslim population.  The incompatibility with our system includes:

a.       Shariah involves a merging of church and state, rather than separation.
b.       It opposes freedom of speech as criticism of Islam is prohibited under Shariah.
c.       Since a Muslim cannot leave Islam without threat of death or serious injury by other radical Muslims, their religion does not support  freedom of religion which is a key part of our society.
d.      Islamic Shariah law opposes equal protection under the law since Muslims and Muslim men are treated much better under Sharia Law than nonbelievers and Muslim women. This is contrary to our notions of equality.

    4)  Muslim refugee immigrants are not integrating – they are staying separate.  They are highly unemployed even after many years here.  Many of the refugees are a source of crime in the USA such as the recent Somali sex trafficking case in Tennessee.  Muslim refugees and recent immigrants are known for sending money home to support extremism back in their home countries.   All of this is even more true in the United Kingdom and Europe which have much larger Muslim populations – showing that the hope that these patterns will change with time is wrong.

Thank you for considering my views  (author wishes to remain anonymous)

Look for more testimony tomorrow.

New Hampshire resident commented to the State Department

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is another statement sent to the US State Department recently when citizens were invited to weigh-in on the Refugee Admissions program for FY 2013.   If you sent in comments and wish for me to post them here at RRW, please send them to Ann@vigilantfreedom.com.

Dear Representatives

My name is Jeannine Richardson and I am the President of Landlord Connection http://landlordconnection.com

We are a NH Company that offers rental history reports to landlords, property management companies and several housing authorities throughout the state of NH.  We have over 2,000 rental property owners/managers as our customers.

I can state that much of the government subsidized housing in NH is being taken by refugees leaving many lifelong NH residents on waiting lists of up to 4 years.  Many of these refugees have enormous trouble getting into the workforce and are competing with our residents for what few jobs are available. I suggest that a moratorium be in place unitl the time when our unemployment numbers fall below 5%.

My personal experience has been apartments left in disastrous conditions and after a few months, these refugees are abandoned by the agencies who brought them here.  The State of NH does not have the resources at this time to care for more refugees. As it is Manchester is spending over $1million per year teaching English as a second language to people who speak 70 different languages.

The system is out of control and has turned into a moneymaking scheme for several non-profits in NH.

Here is a link to some information regarding these Refugee Agencies

http://american-rattlesnake.org/2012/01/the-fugees/

I’m tired of the “we are a nation of immigrants” myth as well. It’s an urban legend. Some of us have ancestors who were here over 350 years ago. How far back do we have to go? Is England a nation of immigrants too? After all, the Vikings landed there thousands of years ago. If I remember correctly the Romans and Saxons immigrated there too.There have been several periods in our history when immigration was stopped. In fact it should be stopped now but instead the pace has accelerated to over 2.5 million per year when historically the high point was 500,000. Since 2000, 30 million immigrants have arrived. That’s as many people as in all of Canada. I say enough already. We don’t even have jobs for people already here so we want to bring in more competition? I know for a fact that the welfare rolls have increased because many of the disabled were working part time jobs as dishwashers, clean-up crews in restaurants, etc. Those jobs have been taken by these newcomers leaving the disabled with no opportunities. None of it makes sense to me. We are the third most populated country on the planet. Why do we import more people? Some of these refugees who are allegedly fleeing somehow feel safe enough to visit their village for a month. In fact, the Union Leader featured a story of one a few months ago who had gone home for a visit and his town had no water. when he returned to Manchester he told a group of nums of their plight and they flew over there a got the village a well. The refugee program is nothing more than a source of revenue from the Federal Government for these do-gooders. they are paid for each person they bring in while we are stuck paying for their airfare and everything else.I am tired of the scam being played by the UN on the American people.

I am hoping something can be done to stop the tremendous burden this is placing on Americans.

Sincerely and thank you for your time.

To Ms. Richardson and everyone else who commented, be sure to send your comments to your Member of Congress and your two US Senators.

An afterthought:  I’m posting comments you all share with me, here, in a special category for this meeting.