At first I didn’t think they were going to get to the crux of the matter when Tucker Carlson last night grilled Steve Forester,an attorney for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, about the upcoming Trump decision about whether to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti (we mentioned it herethe other day). Steve Forester of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Someone should look more deeply into this organization and who funds it. http://www.ijdh.org/
At first they beat around the bush on whether there were any criminals in the Haitian population living legally (temporarily!) in the US, but with continued questioning Forester finally mentioned the ‘R-word’—remittances!
The 50,000 or so Haitians who got in to the US (mostly illegally) prior to the earthquake of 2010 were given a temporary amnesty to stay and work in America and according to Forester in 2015 alone sent $1.3 billion American dollars back to their home country. That money is propping up Haiti and Forester says the country will be destabilized if those ‘temporary’ legal workers are returned to Haiti! However, the question I have is: so what about the fact that that money is now lost to the US economy? And are those Haitian workers taking jobs Americans can do (or legal refugees might do)?
You know I mostly write about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Programwhere of course refugees are also sending billions ‘home,’ but it’s important for you to know about the many other programs for legal immigration, like TPS and the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery’ I told you about herethe other day.
Disney wants the Haitian workers!
Forester told Tucker there were 50,000 Haitians here enjoying temporary protected status and have been here 7-15 years. I think Forester completely lost the audience (and Tucker) when he got to his final argument—Disney would lose 500 workers if TPS is not extended—instead of continuing his ‘humanitarian’ shtick.
Tucker commented that maybe Disney would have to pay higher wages to hire new (American) workers!
Watch the whole interview starting at 22:49 and ending at around 28:43. You might want to watch the segment prior to the Haiti piece about how Mexicans aren’t too happy with all the Central Americans parked in their country who are no longer headed to the US border!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsoti6j9BO4
I have a category on Haiti here, with 56 previous posts!
There is a short news item at Delaware Public Mediaabout how a Jewish refugee agency in Delaware is waiting for seven families (likely Muslim families based on their country of origin) they hope they will soon be settling in Delaware—the First State. So I thought I might revisit a topic I haven’t discussed for a long time and that is the origin of the Refugee Act of 1980. Senators Biden and Kennedy are responsible for the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program. See list below of other Senators deeply involved in 1979.
But, first here is a portion of the short piece at Delaware Public Media:
The state of Hawaii’s stay on Trump’s second travel ban suspends the FY17 cap for refugees – currently set at 50,000.
That opens the door for refugee families from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Eastern African country of Eritreain line to come to the First State, but none of them have travel plans in place yet.
Jewish Family Services of Delaware Refugee Resettlement Coordinator Sarah Green says that currently, the families are stuck in Jordan and Ethiopia.
“It’s hard to know what’s happening,” Green said. “We just have to wait and see. We get a very limited view of what’s happening over there.”
She says her agency is taking the approach that these families could arrive any day – and working to ensure they’ll be comfortable when they reach Delaware.
[….]
There’s reason to expect they could arrive soon. According to the U.S. State Department, 900 flights for refugees to the U.S. are being scheduled every week.
As of this morning, 831 new refugees arrived in the US in the past week (5/5-5/12) according toWrapsnet. And, that puts us at 44,072 this fiscal year.
At this rate the Trump Administration will hit 50,000 in about 7-8 weeks. Will they stop at 50,000 which should happen around the first week of July? That is the question!
Delaware, in some ways, is more interesting to me than some of the other very low refugee admission states (LOL! including Hawaii). See chart below.
And that is because then Senator Joe Biden was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate-generated Refugee Act of 1979(S.643) which became the Refugee Act of 1980 when Jimmy Carter signed it in to law the following year. You can learn more about it here. Pay special attention to the part about how states were NOT to be burdened with welfare costs of refugees.
Here are the co-sponsors of S.643 another of Senator Ted Kennedy’s swamp-America-with-immigrants bills:
Mostly Dems of course!
So how is it that Delaware is in the bottom ten locations for refugee seeding when then Senator and now former Vice President Joe Biden is that state’s most prominent political figure? Did he welcome refugees to America in 1979, but keep them from swamping Delaware with diversity for decades?
Wrapsnet data only goes back to FY2003, but that gives us enough years to see a pattern. (For researchers more diligent than I am, you can go back through all the previous annual reportsand put the data together from the very beginning, but I expect the pattern is similar in the early years.)
So from FY03 through today (in FY17) we admitted 886,324 refugees to America (not including asylum seekers) and Delaware got a whopping 139 of them!
In the years Joe Biden was Vice President, Delaware got only 50 refugees.
Here are the last ten locations for refugee placement from FY03 to the present. What the heck is “Unknown State?” Does that mean 68 refugees were placed secretly somewhere? Yikes!
If Delaware Public Mediareally wanted to do some important work, reporters there should try to find out exactly why and how Delaware dodged a bullet for so many years when their claim to fame, Veep Joe Biden, sponsored the original law and then apparently kept diversity-seeding from the state! (It is not because of the state’s small size since Rhode Island got thousands more than Delaware).
For new readers, this post is filed in my ‘where to find information’ category and in ‘Refugee statistics.’
It is really amazing to see how blatantly the mainstream media spins the facts!
Before I even get to the story, once again, here (below) is the data for the last ten plus years (from the Refugee Processing Center). FY2007 and FY2008 are Bush years. FY2009-2016 are Obama years. And, like it or not, FY2017 is Trump (even though the FY began on October 1, 2016).
First look at the ceilings set over the years. Did Obama ever set one near 110,000 (set in Sept. 2016) for any of his years prior to his final months in office?
Until Obama’s last years, he didn’t come close to the CEILING in his first 4 years, see especially FY11 and 12 (it is a ceiling not a TARGET)! Obama had two years under 60,000! Did the resettlement contractors complain and moan about Obama—NO!
Much is being made in the media about Trump’s March number (2,070) but who had lower months—both Bush AND Obama. See Obama’s October 2014. It is 1,810! March 2011 is lower too!
Is Trump’s April that far out of line from some of Obama’s months? NO! Obama had some months lower than 3,316!
Now have a look at the first 4 months for the last eleven years. Until Obama’s last months in office, have you ever seen the numbers so high in the first 4 months for all of the years? The Obama State Department began pouring refugees in at record numbers (in anticipation of a Trump slowdown?) and I bet they also skipped a lot of screening to get the flow going at that incredible rate.
Again look at the numbers! Trump is on target for a just below an average year of about 60,000 admissions, but much to my shock the AP is reporting that Congress has granted enough funds for 75,000 this year! 75,000 would put the admission number ABOVE any year from FY2007 to FY2015!
So who is APtrying to kid?
Here are some snips from the AP story by Meredith Hoffmann which begins with a Somali sob story. Why does no one ever ask how it came to be that this Somali man abandoned his family for seven years, got in to the US without them and left them to deal with poverty and war in Africa?
Besides the effort to make it look like numbers are “plummeting,” Hoffmann actually helps make the case why this program needs to be dumped or reformed. The first thing that Congress must do is stop the per head payment to NON-PROFIT resettlement agencies who then whine and moan whenever numbers drop (like Kekic here!). She also points out the many states that are trying to get out of the program. So where is Congress?
The family’s case illustrates how Trump’s travel bans have caused the number of refugees coming into the U.S. to plummet in the last two months, despite his executive orders largely being blocked in the courts. The number of refugees arriving in the U.S. dipped to 2,070 in March, which was a six-year low except for a period in 2013when the federal government was shut down. The figure was slightly higher in April, 3,200, but it was still much lower than the months preceding Trump’s order. [Note that we pointed out above that Obama had a couple of months below 2,070! I don’t recall any crying and moaning then!—ed]
[….]
It can’t be turned on and off like a faucet because the NGO contractors then can’t figure out how to pay their salaries! This is why Congress must get these middlemen phony religious contractors out this business!
“This program simply can’t be turned on and off like a faucet,” said Erol Kekic, executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Program for Church World Service, one of the world’s largest resettlement organizations.
[….]
Conservatives praise the decrease but insist a total halt in admissions is necessary. Refugee groups say the drop has forced them to lay off employeeswhile trapping thousands of people in war-torn nations, overflowing refugee camps and dangerous living conditions amid the world’s largest refugee crisis in modern history.
At the same time, Republican-controlled [state—ed] legislatures have been doing their part to limit the flow of refugees into their states.
[….]
The legal challenges returned the refugee cap number to 110,000, [No, see the chart above, it is in legal limbo—ed] but the slowdown from January to March and actions in Congress mean the U.S. will likely come nowhere close to reaching that number by the end of the fiscal year in October.
The U.S. is currently on pace for about 60,000, but a State Department spokesman said the agency was “not in a position to speculate as to the final number of refugees that will be admitted by the end of Fiscal Year 2017.” [Obama had two years under 60,000!—ed]
“Tickets were canceled, exit permits were canceled,” said Kay Bellor, vice president of programs for the resettlement agency Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. “You can’t just turn around and say, ‘everybody get back on the plane.'”
Congress has approved a budget for only 75,000 for this fiscal year. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the country is now resettling 900 refugee arrivals weekly, to remain within that budget.
On this next point, this for me is the Trump test!
Trump has the legal right to set the arrival number for FY2018 at zero if he wants to. What number will he propose in September? The other part of my personal Trump test is this: Will the Trump administration tell Congress (or lead Congress) to dump the law or do a complete legal re-write of the program? If he does not do it this year, it will never happen!
AP continues….
And Trump can set his preferred limit for fiscal year 2018 — likely a steep drop from former President Obama’s 110,000, said Anna Greene, senior director of policy for U.S. programs with the resettlement agency International Rescue Committee. [It is maddening how this 110,000, nothing more that a wish from a departing president, becomes the number the program is expected to submit!—ed]
Resettlement agencies get paid per refugee, causing them to cut back once the flow slowed down. Church World Service cut about 600 of its 640 employees in Sub-Saharan Africa but later rehired some of them, said Kekic.
You can read the rest of the AP story by clicking here.
The Trump Administration will defend the so-called “travel ban” in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals today in Richmond, Virginia. Next week, the 9th Circuit will hear the case that includes the “travel ban” and the refugee moratorium. Omar Jadwat (ACLU attorney) will argue the case against Trump in Richmond today where the entire 4th Circuit Court of Appeals will be present (in order to put on a good media show?). Photo: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/his-name-omar-jadwat-and-hes-aclu-lawyer-arguing-against-muslim-ban-heres-what-he USA Today cites the extraordinary efforts the 4th Circuit will make as the entire court will hear it:
….Both courts are among the most liberal in the country.
The Richmond hearing will be held in front of the entire 15-member U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which is extremely unusual. Appeals court cases usually go before three-judge panels; the full court only rarely agrees to hear cases even after a panel rules.
“It’s been more than half a century since the court has done it,” Tumlin [Karen Tumlin, NILC’s legal director] says. “It’s a bit of a legal unicorn. You don’t get this very often.”
Here is what Reuters is saying about the cases which most assume will end up in the Supreme Court, but not until the fall. By the way, one of the main issues the opponents of Trump are hanging their legal hats on is what Trump said while campaigning. I’m not a lawyer but I can’t see that as anything the Supreme Court would want to turn into a precedent.
Imagine the legal fun later if candidates’ campaign words were used in legal cases against them when they attempted to legislate after they were elected (by the voters!). It would truly mean that courts are ruling America and not elected representatives of the people. Reuters on Friday:
Legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban on people from some Muslim-majority countries heat up again next week when two U.S. appeals courts consider whether it is constitutional.
[….]
Omar Jadwat, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, who will be arguing the case at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia on Monday, said the fact that so much time has passed since the ban was issued is proof that there was no pressing national security need for it in the first place. [Ha! Not much of a legal argument! We can’t possibly know that yet! Someone admitted in the last few weeks could be an Islamic terrorist who doesn’t act for years!—ed]
[….]
The Department of Homeland Security “is, and will be, continuously examining ways to enhance the screening and vetting process to shut down terrorist and criminal pathways into the United States,” agency spokesman David Lapan said. “Some improvements will be classified, others will be public, but the Department has only just begun ways to enhance the security of our immigration system,” he said in an email.
Opponents – including states and civil rights groups – say that both the first ban and the revised ban, which also put a halt to all refugee admissions to the country for four months, discriminates against Muslims.
[….]
The 4th Circuit will decide the fate of a ruling from a Maryland district judge that struck down a section of the revised executive order barring visitors from Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia.
The hearing will take place before 14 full-time judges of the appellate court. Ten of them were appointed by Democrats, and four by Republicans.
Then, on March 15 [Must be May 15, thanks to a reader for catching this!—ed], a three-judge panel at the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will review a decision from a Hawaii judge that halted not just the travel portion of the ban but also the section that barred refugees. The judges – who will sit on a panel in Seattle – have been assigned but their identities have not been made public.
More from Reuters here.
Please see that the refugee portion of the EO is not being considered today in Richmond. Only the Hawaii judge was aggressive enough to include the refugee moratorium and reduced ceiling in his decision. The Maryland judge clearly must have recognized that refugee admissions across the board are within the power of the President to regulate according to the Refugee Act of 1980. Trump should have ignored the rogue Hawaiian judge on refugee admissions, but alas, he didn’t!
See RRW’s right hand side bar where I track numbers admitted in FY2017 every few days. This is from last Friday:
May 5, 2017: 43,241 admitted (this is 5,135 refugees since the supposed moratorium began and 13,119 since Trump was inaugurated).
Watch the 4th Circuit/ACLU show live today (2:30 Eastern) by going here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?427706-1/fourth-circuit-hears-oral-argument-travel-ban
By voting against a bill that would block life insurance payments to terrorists killed while killing Americans, Minnesota legislator Ilhan Omar shows her allegiance to her people.
From Leo Hohmann at WND:
She burst on the scene last August when she upset a 44-year incumbent Democrat in the Minnesota state primary elections to become the nation’s first female Muslim state legislator.
Omar as the inspiration for a Somali Muslim Barbie! Yuk!
Ilhan Omar, the 34-year-old community organizer who came to America as a refugee from Somalia, was touted by Democrats as a model success story.
“From a refugee camp to the State Capitol with intelligence and insight,” beamed former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who endorsed Omar. “This is a wonderful story to tell as Americans, and a great source of pride for the state of Minnesota’s open arms.”
But on Thursday Omar made her mark in another way.
She was one of only two members of the Minnesota State House to vote against a bill that would allow life insurance companies to deny payouts to the beneficiaries of terrorists who die in violent attacks on Americans.
The House voted 127-2 to pass the bill, which now moves on to a vote in the State Senate.
Omar, who represents the heavily immigrant Cedar Riverside area of Minneapolis, was joined by fellow Democratic Rep. John Lesch of St. Paul in voting against the bill.
Omar’s vote sticks out because at least 42 Somali refugees have been confirmed by the FBI to have left the U.S. to join overseas terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the al-Qaida affiliate in Somalia, and ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
[….]
The Minnesota insurance bill was introduced by Rep. Joe Hoppe, R-Chaska, in response to Syed Farook’s jihadist rampage in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015 in which he shot and killed 14 people and injured 22 at an office Christmas party. Farook made sure his life insurance policies worth $275,000 were valid before conducting the deadly shooting with help from his wife, Tashfeen Malik.
After Farook died in a shootout with police, his mother fought to remain the beneficiary of the life insurance policies. The insurance company balked and the case has gone to court.
There is much, much more including an interview with our friend Debra Anderson, continue here.
See our previous posts on Omar by clicking here. Why can’t someone in Congress introduce (and get passed!) a federal bill to bar life insurance payouts in cases like the San Bernardino slaughter. There will surely be more as the US Muslim population increases! Endnote: There will be many more Muslim legislators like Omar as well if this group has it’s way: See Jetpac Inc.
