That would be in places like Jamestown, New York where a community meeting was held recently floating the idea of the city, about 70 miles from Buffalo, becoming a new hub for refugee placement.
The article at The Post-Journal does not mention Afghans (they are not real refugees anyway), but surely some would be in the mix if the city welcomes a resettlement contractor*** to town.
Remember that Biden is still shooting to admit 125,000 refugees other than Afghan evacuees this fiscal year.
As we have pointed out previously, housing almost everywhere is in short supply and so Small City, USA will be targeted.
Editor: In my previous postI might have left the impression that I had a list of where the Afghans will be going after they are evicted from military bases before February 15th. I don’t know that there is a list, but you need only enter your city or state into a search engine along with the word refugees, or Afghans and you can find the answer yourself if plans are in the works (usually in relative secrecy) for your community.
I’m posting this not because I need to warn Jamestown residents, they should already know about the meeting held last week, but because there are some nuggets in here that I need to warn all of you about.
‘Embracing Diversity’: City Eyed As Potential Location For Refugee Resettlement
The potential benefits of Jamestown becoming a resettlement location for refugees were discussed Thursday evening during a well-attended gathering at St Luke’s Episcopal Church.
The get together included representatives from a host of local and regional nonprofits and organizations and has been several months in the making. The discussion Thursday centered on refugees — people who have fled war, violence or conflict and are seeking safety in another country — and whether Jamestown has the resources available to welcome them.
Democrat Mayor Sundquist virtue-signals about “embracing diversity!”
“When we started to see an increase of refugees across the states, we heard a lot of comments, got a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls about ways our community could help and support those refugees,” Mayor Eddie Sundquist told a crowd of about 50 at St. Lukes. “It’s not often that we would see refugees here in the city, but as you all know we are a city built on immigration, built on a melting pot of different people, different ideas. That’s what made us strong many, many years ago and could make us even stronger as we continue.”
City officials have been in contact with Journey’s End, a refugee resettlement agency in Buffalo. Sundquist said on average, Journey’s End takes in about 500 refugees a year; this year they are also expecting an additional 500 refugees.
An issue arising in the Buffalo area for resettlement, Sundquist said following talks with Journey’s End, is the increase in housing costs. Resettlement agencies receive a set amount of money per refugee to assist them with housing, groceries and travel.
“Since they couldn’t even find housing, many of the refugees are actually being put up in hotels in the Buffalo area until they are able to find suitable housing,” the mayor said.
[….]
The mayor’s administration has been working with resettlement agencies, including Journey’s End, to look into establishing a pilot program in Jamestown. If it’s found the city has the right resources in place — appropriate housing, workforce development, health care and educational partners — as many as 20 refugees could be brought over initially.
Sounds reasonable, right? Here is the problem, pay attention! There is no such thing as a pilot program! Once your community has begun bringing in refugees, you can’t stop the flow!
The contractors will not honor any limit you set! Believe me there are many cities in America where mayors have tried and failed to stop the flow once they realized that their city was in overload.
Indeed once the immigrant seed community arrives, it is the contractor’s job to bring the extended family members, and, if you say no more, then you (the mean citizens) will be called racist and unwelcoming!
Sundquist said the pilot program could help set the framework for the community “embracing diversity.”
[….]
Also raised was the topic of safety for the refugees, with some stating that not everyone in the community may be as open to the idea of refugees settling in the city. Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone, also in attendance, said safety is a legitimate concern that would need to be taken into account.
That is the other major red flag in this story. You see how it is set up, if you voice an objection for legitimate reasons (housing, cost of health care and education etc.), then they have already pegged you as someone who might actually physically hurt a refugee!
Sundquist said his administration would take all the notes and input received Thursday and continue working with state and local partners on establishing a pilot program. Another community meeting could be set in the next couple of weeks.
If you live in Jamestown or anywhere nearby (refugees can be resettled within a hundred mile radius of the primary resettlement office), and have a problem with this you better get to the next meeting!
As I have said till I’m blue in the face, organizing locally is all you have!
And, if you aren’t in Jamestown, you need to search the web for media reports (or even reports directly on contractors’ websites) for plans for your community as the political Leftists are working as fast as they can (as Biden’s popularity plummets) to change America by changing the people.
I love the chance to post my favorite Church World Service pic!
*** For new readers, these are the nine major resettlement contractors. Whenever you read about some local resettlement agency, it is helpful to figure out which of the nine the local contractor subcontracts for.
In this case Journey’s End is a subcontractor of Church World Service.
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.
So good ol’ Joe isn’t going to be able to reach his 125,000 refugee admissions ceiling the way things are going. (Most of the arriving Afghans are not legitimate refugees.)
A couple of weeks ago I checked the numbers at the severely limited Refugee Processing Center data base and noted that in the first month of the new fiscal year (October), Biden had admitted only 400 refugees from parts of the world other than Afghanistan.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not crying about that paltry number, but I am really amazed by the dearth of criticism from the contractors and their leftist media chorus. Oh, they are critical, but the tone of their criticism is muted apparently to protect their man in the White House, you know, the guy who got 81 million votes!
Muslim Afghans crowd out other refugees
However, I suspect there is one group of Americans who are jumping for joy and that would be CAIR members and other Islamists because the refugee program is not admitting a wide variety of ‘persecuted’ other religions, namely Christians, as the Afghans (demanding stuff) are virtually all Muslims.
(See the Center for Immigration Studies 2021 Refugee Resettlement Roundup and note that we are no longer permitted to see data on the religions of refugees. We can’t entirely blame Biden for that since it was the Trump administration that closed much of the data base to the public.)
So, I didn’t get around to writing my post on the Biden refugee slowdown, but Voxdid and I am posting it here because I doubt many of you bother reading Vox. I don’t either, but it appeared in my alerts, so here it is below.
First, however, you might be amused to see what Voxsaid about me in 2017:
Why Biden is struggling to revive the US refugee program
After the US refugee program hit historic lows during Donald Trump’s administration, President Joe Biden attempted to revive the program by raising the annual cap on admissions to 125,000.
Despite these efforts, the US is still not taking in more refugees.
Tens of thousands of Afghans have arrived in the US since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The urgent need — and the lasting damage done by the Trump administration — has overtaxed a refugee program that has slowed to a crawl in recent months.
In fiscal year 2021, which ended in September, the US resettled the lowest number of refugees in the history of its refugee program. Recently, the State Department reported the US resettled just 401 refugees in October, down from 3,774 the month before, one month after Biden’s new cap went into effect.
A State Department spokesperson told Vox that the agency had temporarily halted refugee admissions as of October 29 through January 11, 2022, with some exceptions.
At the current pace, the US won’t come within striking distance of the 125,000 cap by the end of the fiscal year — and, given the State Department’s new refugee guidance, it’s unlikely that refugee agencies will be able to expand capacity to ramp up that pace soon.
There are legitimate reasons why the recent resettlement numbers are so low. The US government and refugee agencies have been primarily focused on resettling Afghans who fled their home country amid the US withdrawal. And the entire refugee apparatus — from the federal officials who assess refugee claims to the agencies that help with resettlement — shrank significantly during the Trump administration due to severe funding cuts. [Nah! I told you herethat they all didn’t take a financial “beating.” —ed]
About 70,000 Afghans have been admitted to the US on “parole,” a temporary form of humanitarian relief that allows them to apply for work permits and shields them from deportation for a period of two years. [Then what???—ed]
Keep reading and look around at news stories (my inbox is full of them) on the refugee program and how the Afghan flood has created chaos especially as housing is limited, jobs are limited and welfare is limited and the contractors are scrambling to cope with the chaos Biden (their man) has handed them.
For new readers, here are the contractors that monopolize all refugee resettlement in America:
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!
A couple of weeks ago I checked the numbers at the severely limited Refugee Processing Center data base and noted that in the first month of the new fiscal year (October), Biden had admitted only 400 refugees from parts of the world other than Afghanistan.
