Update October 16th: James Simpson at Bomb Throwers takes on Ms. Wolfe and gives a good summary of the resistance movement going on across America.
I thought Foreign Policymagazine was supposed to be a credible, thoughtful place where foreign policy eggheads debated the big issues of the day. I guess not!
writer Lauren Wolfe says this (below) about RRW (and the Center for Immigration Studies) showing a complete lack of understanding of the on-going debate raised to new heights about the use of the words “assimilation” and “integration” during Obama’s tenure.
This is a postI wrote to explain it to my readers. Although it began before Obama, Obama’s open borders agitators were bent on getting the word “assimilation” out of use throughout the government. Trump has just brought it back. If Ms. Wolfe is giving me credit, I’ll take it!
Keep it up girls! Everytime I think that 10 years of putting out the facts about refugee resettlement is long enough, along comes someone like Ms. Lauren here to inspire me to keep going!
You will have to read the whole story yourself, but here is the part that appears in my alerts today.
(You see how these Leftwing ‘journalists’ write, and Foreign Policy goes along with it, using hot button words to describe me, and then she doesn’t even link to the post I wrote on the subect, so readers won’t see what I did say!)
Ms. Wolfe….
Indeed, the language in the directive is suspiciously similar to the language used online by white supremacists and members of the alt-right, including Ann Corcoran, who in June 2013 lamented on her nationalist website, Refugee Resettlement Watch, that the term “‘assimilation’ is no longer a part of government lexicon and does not even occur in dozens of recent reports and papers generated about refugee resettlement.The operative term in vogue now is ‘integration’ with its clear intent of maintenance of ethnic identity.” And it’s not just that Trump’s determination echoes the language of racists and hate groups — such groups seem to have played a direct role in this language modification. The Sept. 29 White House fact sheet cites as a source the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group because of the “fear-mongering misinformation” it publishes about immigrants.
Do you know why she is so angry?
Hint: It is not about great-grand-pa!
She is angry because the Left has always controlled the language and they can’t stand it when we demonstrate that the jig is up!
CEO Harpstead pulls down a salary and benefits package of over $300,000 annually to head the $91 million a year operation. Link to Form 990 below.
If they succeed they will be placing 27 more than they did in FY17 which ended on the 30th of September.
Checking Wrapsnet, here is a summary (below) of the refugees (mostly Muslims) who were placed by a subcontractor (Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota) of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service mothership located in Baltimore.
Refugees who went to St. Cloud in direct resettlement (there are no reliable numbers on secondary migrants) last year are below.
Secondary migrants are refugees placed elsewhere who migrate (legally!) on their own to another town or city.
Minnesota does have the highest number of secondary migrants in the country as we learned a few years ago when such information was published.
In FY17 St. Cloud received 198 of the 1,623 refugees resettled in the entire state.
Burma (4)
Ethiopia (19)
Iraq (9)
Somalia (166)
St. Cloud had the second highest Somali resettlement after Minneapolis (364).
Here (below) is the FY18 R & P Abstract for St. Cloud.
This is the document that should be made available to the public BEFORE it goes to Washington. These numbers are determined by Lutheran Social Service in Minnesota (Harpstead’s organization) with the help of “stakeholders.” Stakeholders should include your local elected officials!
Normally this document is kept from the general public, but we were fortunate enough to obtain it. Knowledge is power and that is the primary reason there is so little transparency with refugee resettlement. The feds and the contractors don’t want citizens to have all the facts!
I maintain that if the program is a good one for the community, they should be able to sell it with all the facts on the table!
Below are screenshots of the pages. Serious students should go to this post where I explained some of the numbers, categories etc. But, I am far from an expert!
Documents like this (reporting the capacity of your town to ‘welcome’ refugees and from where) come in to Washington from hundreds of towns and cities and are put together to become the basis for the Presidential determination which we know is a maximum 45,000 refugees for FY18(which is now underway as of Oct. 1).
Again, knowledge is power!
I leave it to you, again with the help ofthis postto examine the plans that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in conjunction with the US State Department and the US Department of Health and Human Services have in the works for St. Cloud.
LOL! Do you see that line in the last chart about voluntary hours/miles? What that represents is the number of hours and the miles that volunteers put on their own vehicles converted to a cash value. The contractor uses that figure to show the federal government that they have put some skin in the game (it is supposed to be a public-private partnership after all). I wonder do volunteers know that they are worth money to the contractor?
Check out the actual cash from foundations/corporations in FY16 and the enormous jump estimated for FY18. Is that realistic? Can they just make up numbers?
Housing specialist? So the refugees get a housing specialist? Do just regular poor Americans get one from LSS of MN?
The most recent Form 990 for LSS of Minnesota is here (or see LSS financials page):
Citizens in St. Cloud, see my complete archive on what I’ve reported about your city since 2008.
Concerned citizens elsewhere, go to the list of contractor/subcontractors I linked above. Call one near you and ask for the FY18 R & P Abstract(Reception and Placement Abstract). Ask your local elected officials—mayor and council—if any of them have ever seen the plans for their town/city?
Addendum! If you get a runaround complain to your elected officials in Washington—your member of Congress and US Senators. If they can’t (or won’t!) get it for you, then you have even more to complain about!
I confess I didn’t read the whole opinion piece in the New York Times as carefully as I should have (I have so little patience for this sort of excruciating hand wringing analysis).
But, I read far enough to know that the gist of the schism, between our two major political parties, has to do with the rapid racial and ethnic diversification of America with the Dems on the side of the ‘new Americans’ and showing little interest in helping white working class American citizens.
Much of the current polarization is driven by difference of opinion on issues of race and immigration.
In fact one of those pontificating about how the Dems should proceed suggests that the Dems don’t hesitate to move in the direction of more catering to their immigrant base and forget the white working class altogether.
Begala is in favor of trying to get the white working class back in the fold
And then author, Thomas Edsall, mentions Paul Begala (remember him from the Clinton inner circle, Rush calls him the “forehead”) who is on the side of trying harder to reach the white working class.
Begala says something that I know many readers here will relate to (after you get past his painting of some whites as drunks and drug-addled).
Edsall at the NYT:
Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant and adviser to Bill Clinton, also comes back to the cultural breach between upscale Democrats and the white working class and poses this basic question:
If you look at the Democratic platform, or Hillary’s speeches on the economy, Democrats have a raft of good ideas, loads of sound policies that would make life better for the white working class. So why have they rejected us?
White working-class Americans are “dying before their time,” Begala wrote in an email, specifically citing the rise in alcoholism, cirrhosis, drug addiction, overdoses, suicide and poisoning:
If the life expectancy of, say, Somali immigrants in Minnesota suddenly took a dive, Democrats would be falling all over each other trying to ascertain the causes and advocate the cures. We owe white working-class Americans no less.
Ain’t it the truth!
This post is filed in my ‘Laugh of the day’ category, here.
I continue to be amazed that a quasi-government agency receiving millions of dollars from the US taxpayer is a leading agitator in marches against the hand that feeds them—in this case the Trump Administration. Chutzpah! I suppose!
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is helping get people out to the #NoMuslimBanEver rally scheduled for a week from tomorrow—October 18th—in Washington, DC.
Before I get to their latest appeal for marching bodies, here is just a reminder of their financial position.
According to the most recent Form 990for 2016, they had income from government grants to the tune of $24,493,763 in a category (p. 9) of contributions, gifts and grants of $41,855,465 putting them at 58% funded by the US taxpayer.
58% of courseisn’t as bad as some contractors***—Episcopal Migration Ministries is 99.5% funded from the US Treasury, but it is still a significant chunk of change.
According to that same Form 990, CEO Mark Hetfield pulls down a salary, benefits and other compensation package of $343,630 (p. 8).
If the nine contractors*** were truly private non-profit charitable organizations, salaries would not be any of our business, but when organizations like these (really quasi-government agencies) receive taxpayer dollars, it becomes our business.
It seems to me that HIAS is always out as the leader of the pack when it comes to demonstrating against the Trump Administration and filing lawsuits to stop them, all the while taking money from Washington (from us!).
Here they are again!
You should know that HIAS has long supported a ‘religious test’ known as the Lautenberg Amendment that gave preferential treatment to Jews and other religious minorities coming from places like Russia and Iran.
The above is a screenshot so the links are not ‘hot.’ Go to facebook to learn more about the #NoMuslimBanEver event.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1142753212491355
I sure would like to know who is behind this event??? Muslim Brotherhood? CAIR?
***For new readers, these are the nine major federal refugee resettlement contractors. There are over 350 subcontractors working for them throughout the country. Basically they pass federal grant money through their headquarters to their subcontractors and keep a certain amount of it for their headquarters/office/travel/salaries etc.
This Syrian family and the brothers left behind were in Saudi Arabia (one of the brothers had already emigrated to S.A.). Saudi Arabia is a safe country! Therefore, why are these people now the responsibility of the US taxpayer? They weren’t living in some sqaulid camp.
They were in arguably the richest country in the Middle East!
So tell us again why Saudi Arabia couldn’t house millions of Muslim refugees in their tent cities reserved for the brief Hajj period? Instead we are taking Syrian ‘refugees’ from S.A.!
It is worth reading the whole article because there are lots of useful nuggets and some important comments by critics of the program (besides the story of a Syrian family that came to the US as ‘refugees’ from Saudi Arabia!)
By the way, I’m sure many of you are saying—yes! If we must have them, keep them in California!
Even though overall arrival numbers in fiscal 2017 dropped by more than half from the previous year, San Diego County continued its legacy as the California county that took in the most refugees.
In a year that began with a promise of more refugees than ever before coming to the U.S. and ended with an ongoing court battle over how many and whom the president could block from coming, about 1,500 refugees resettled in San Diego County, according to data from the State Department. That’s down from just over 3,100 the year before, and it’s the only time that number has dipped below 2,000 in the last decade.
“The fact that we remained the largest county, it definitely makes us proud to continue the tradition of San Diego being a safe haven,” said Etleva Bejko, director of refugee and immigration services for Jewish Family Service, a resettlement agency.
Where refugees resettle once the U.S. agrees to take them is a complicated decision-making process that factors in whether they already have family living here, which agencies have the bandwidth to support them and which places have infrastructure in place to help them succeed. That often means that places like San Diego that already have large populations of people from a country will continue to take refugees from that country. [Multiplier effect! Like Ft. Wayne in my previous post—ed]
San Diego County has been known for leading the state in refugee arrivals since large numbers of Iraqis fleeing war began arriving in late summer of 2007.
Confirmation again! Federal resettlement contractors paid by the head!
Bejko said her organization has had to reorganize support efforts because of the overall decreases in arrivals. Resettlement agencies receive funding based on the number of refugees that they help.
[….]
Three members of the Tarakji family, originally from Damascus, Syria, were some of the few who made it to the U.S. after the travel ban. The slowdown in accepting refugees has separated them from two other members of their family.
Catholic Charities resettled mother Alshifaa Hammoush, 52, father Manaf Tarakji, 58, and daughter Maria Tarakji, 21, in April. Two sons, Yasser Tarakji, 29, and Yaman Tarakji, 27, remain in Saudi Arabia.
They had already been trying to immigrate to the U.S.to reunite with their extended family who live in San Diego County when the war in Syria broke out. [They hit the jackpot because the refugee category is the most desirable way to get into the country. They get their hands held by a federal contractor who helps them get all of their welfare (not available to other categories of legal immigrant)!—ed]
After bombing destroyed the pharmacy where Hammoush worked and scared off Manf Tarakji’s clients for his electronics repair business, and a car exploded outside their building, the family fled in 2013 to Saudi Arabia, where the oldest son was already living and working.
Once in Saudi Arabia, they couldn’t continue the process to get family-sponsored green cards.
They stayed there in limbo, unable to fully establish new lives because they were on visitor visas that they had to renew every three months, until they were accepted as refugees to the U.S. Yaman Tarakji was separated into his own refugee case because of his age, and he is still waiting for processing.
The oldest brother, Yasser Tarakji also tried to apply but never heard back from the U.N. agency that registers refugees.
[….]
Still, separation from the two sons is painful for all of them. Whenever Maria Tarakji looks at photos from their last day together in Saudi Arabia, her eyes wet with tears.
“The U.S. was accepting refugees forever. It’s unfair to do this now,” Maria Tarakji said. “It’s really hard to live here, and our brother is not here.”
She said she’s had to take responsibility for tasks that her brothers used to handle, like choosing an internet router.
Both brothers work in computer programming and repair.
