There are some stories floating around that CEOs of some of America’s largest corporations are taking pay cuts to help keep more of their lower level workers on the job as the COVID-19 crisis continues. Here is one from Forbes published two days ago.
David Miliband President and CEO of the Manhattan-based ‘charity’ International Rescue Committee. Are they reducing salaries to help the refugees they brought to America?
At the same time we are learning that the refugee agencies continue to be shuttered (staff reduced) and refugees are struggling. See refugees struggling inBowling Green, KY and in Durham, NC.
So this morning I am wondering if ‘moneybags’ Miliband and other CEO’s of leading ‘charitable’ refugee agencies were giving up large salaries to help especially the refugees they have been dropping off across America for decades. And, to save some of their low level employees from getting the budget ax.
(If the Form 990 doesn’t open, visit Guidestar,here.)
If they and others of the nine refugee contractors have begun to reduce salaries of their top employees, let me know so I can report their humanitarian generosity toward the most vulnerable among us.
To be fair, David Miliband has the most outrageous salary of the ‘non-profit’ groups changing America by changing the people, but 6-digit salaries are the norm in the refugee industry.
As I have said on many previous occasions, salaries would be none of our business if the organization was not living almost entirely on taxpayer dollars.
This story is no surprise and I expect there will be many more like it in the coming days and weeks.
Refugees work at menial labor—cleaning hotel and dorm rooms, working in restaurant kitchens, etc. all no longer essential services—and they are increasingly unemployed (however $$$ is on the way from the feds).
I guess we can say it sure is a good thing that the Trump administration cut the flow of refugees to America starting last October or we would have even more unhappy, struggling people as those described here.
Refugees in Orange County struggle to make ends meet amid COVID-19 economic hardships
All those North Carolinians who have been ‘welcoming’ refugees to the state for the last decade need to get out there now and pay the rent, tutor the kids and feed/clothe the impoverished people they invited to their towns and cities.
Coronavirus has forced many families to alter their ways of life. Although COVID-19 has impacted almost every Orange County resident, a group that has been especially devastated is the local refugee community.
Refugees can already be a vulnerable population without something like the coronavirus, said Flicka Bateman, director of the Refugee Support Center, a volunteer-based organization that helps transition refugees in Orange County to their new lives.
“I know people who’ve been here less than three weeks, I can’t imagine what in the world for them it must be like,” she said. “They’re totally uprooted, they’ve left situations that were full of violence and uncertainty, and then they come here and instead of being able to learn English and get all these services, suddenly they’re told to stay where they are and people will do the best they can remotely. It’s just very tough.”
Orange County has about 1,200 refugees, primarily from Burma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria. [It would be many more if Trump had not cut the flow this year—ed]. Bateman said a lot of refugees in the area have lost their jobs or seen reduced hours, especially those who work in restaurants or hotels, or in food service and housekeeping at UNC, where dorms have been closed and dining services have been severely reduced.
Adam Clark, office director of World Relief Durham, a refugee resettlement agency based in Durham that serves refugees across the Triangle area, said programs that help refugees with employment have seen a spike in applications due to a greater amount of people needing sudden job assistance.
He said they’ve seen about 20-30 unemployment applications among refugees just in the last week, and a long list of people are already waiting.
“There are a lot of refugees worried about their rent, obviously the same things that are affecting everyone,” he said. “But I think it just affects them even more because of the sectors they work in.”
Hannah Olmstead, a junior at UNC who is a part-time caseworker at World Relief Durham, said as local school districts transition to online instruction, many refugee parents don’t have the English ability or understanding of American education to homeschool their children.
Unless you have escaped to your bunkers, you know that the Senate passed the COVID-19 stimulus funding yesterday. Here at USA Today:
Senate passes historic $2 trillion stimulus package to curb effects of coronavirus
WASHINGTON – The Senate approved its largest emergency aid package in modern history that will offer $2 trillion to help Americans, hospitals and businesses weather the effects of the coronavirus. The vote late Wednesday night was 96-0.
The bill will now go to the House for approval before it’s sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.
House Majority Leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., announced that the House will vote on the $2 trillion bill Friday, and that they will convene at 9 a.m.
“We expect the bill to pass by voice vote,” he said.
You have been hearing reports, like this one atBreitbart and hereat RRW (refugee contractors lobby for $$$) a couple of days ago that the package includes money for the Migration and Refugee Assistanceaccount that is the pot of money we use either overseas for refugee assistance or to resettle refugees in American towns and cities.
Here is a recent description of MRA from a Leftwing Open Borders advocacy group. They lobby for over $3 Billion annually for the fund.
Now see that the Senate bill includes an additional $350 Million that will end up in the hands of the refugee contractors***, especially those working elsewhere in the world, like HIAS.
The UN has temporarily stopped the placement of refugees, but the US State Department expects to resume resettlement here after April 6. Normalcy by Palm Sunday? I doubt it.
*** For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement and choosing which lucky towns and cities will be ‘welcoming’ refugees.
Church World Service one of the ‘religious charities’ responsible for changing America by changing the people with a ‘Christian message.’
And, they do not limit their advocacy toward only legal immigration programs, but are heavily involved in supporting the lawlessness at our borders.
The question isn’t as much about refugees per se, but about who is running federal immigration policy now and into the future?
I continue to argue that these nine contractors are the heart of America’s Open Borders movement and thus there can never be long-lasting reform of US immigration policy when these nine un-elected phony non-profits are paid by the taxpayers to work as community organizers pushing an open borders agenda.
Although as you know by now the arrival of refugees has all but stopped due to travel restrictions put in place worldwide.
The UN halted refugee travel a few days ago and the US State Department has reported that no new refugees will arrive now before April 6th.
However, I have been on the hunt to find out if Special Immigrant Visas are still coming in and sure enough they are.
Thanks to a reader for spotting this e-mail from Lutheran Social Services National Capital Area:
Now check this out! They want a piece of a House goody bag! You’ve been reading that Nancy and her Democrat pals are working on a massive giveaway that apparently the refugee contractors expect to benefit from!
I have been checking the data at Wrapsnet (Refugee Processing Center) and sure enough 211 Afghans (who receive all the benefits regular refugees are entitled to) arrived this week bringing the total for the month of March (3 weeks) to 660 from Afghanistan.
That brings the overall total to over 66,000 since FY2008 when this effort to bring Afghan ‘interpreters’ to American towns began.
Although there is no data readily available on where the 211 were placed in the last week, one might expect they were placed in the usual top sites—obviously in Virginia and Maryland as LSS reported in its e-mail.
In this fiscal year (FY2020) that began on October 1, 2019 these are the top five states that ‘welcomed’ Afghan interpreters and their relatives.
California (2,697)
Texas (1,280)
Virginia (730)
Maryland (510)
Washington (489)
So, as your travel is being restricted, planes are still in the air bringing Afghans here for American taxpayers to support!
And, btw, Afghanistan has COVID-19. Are the arriving special refugees being tested?
I’m posting this opinion piece by the former Democrat Representative from New York merely to continue to give ‘credit’ where credit is due to those who helped create the dysfunctional Refugee Admissions Program that turned forty last Tuesday.
Holtzman came out of the woodwork and used the occasion of the anniversary to pen yet another hit piece on the President with this, posted at CNN:
The Refugee Act reminds us to not forget our humanity — especially now
(CNN) As the global Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, it puts into sharp focus how the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies may lead to (yet another) humanitarian crisis — this time along the US-Mexico border, where thousands of asylum seekers are living in overcrowded makeshift encampments, many without running water. If there were a coronavirus outbreak in one of these encampments — which are already short on medical supplies — the results could be catastrophic.
Elizabeth Holtzman says she and Teddy Kennedy created the Refugee Program 40 years ago.
Meanwhile, the President is describing Covid-19 as a “Chinese virus” on Twitter and in news conferences, stoking xenophobia and fear — and continuing to undermine the United States’ global leadership.
It wasn’t always this way. Forty years ago this week, when Sen. Ted Kennedy and I co-authored the Refugee Act of 1980, the United States was a different country. It largely welcomed asylum seekers and refugees, and the Refugee Act reflected that humane view.In the act, our country made a permanent commitment to admitting refugees, based on the international non-discriminatory standard of fleeing persecution, and established an asylum procedure inside the United States.
The Refugee Act was not controversial. It sailed through the Senate unanimously and won overwhelming approval in the House before President Jimmy Carter signed it into law on March 17, 1980.
Apparentlyit was controversialbecause here we learn that 62% of Americans did not want to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees to America.
If Carter had a Twitter account at that time, I imagine he would have pointed to the United States’ proud tradition of welcoming the most vulnerable: the 360,000 people who fled Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba in the mid 1960s, the tens of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled the Soviet Union beginning in the 1970s, and the more than 400,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos who arrived here by 1980.
I see now how they got their inside track to the federal treasury money spigot.***
From 1980 to January 2017 — for 37 years and under six presidents — the Refugee Act worked well. More than 3 million refugees were admitted and overwhelmingly became productive participants in our country, just as my family did. [I can play that game too!For every successful refugee I can find you one who is a criminal, terrorist, murderer or just a plain old mooch!—ed]
Yet every year since Trump took office in 2017, he has slashed the number of refugees admitted under the Refugee Act. For this year, it is 18,000, a historic low, reflecting his ongoing battle against admitting new refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers.
The US State Department has said that refugee arrivals will resume on April 6th. How many of you think the virus crisis will be abating by then. Show of hands!
*** For fun I went back to the first Annual Report to Congress in 1980to see which resettlement contractors were operational (being paid by taxpayers to place refugees in your towns and cities) and found this list.
I’ve marked those that are still, 40 years later, receiving millions of your tax dollars. Six of nine have been in on the deal for those 4 decades. No wonder they are furious at the President for breaking their rice bowls.
Go here to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and see all of the Annual Reports to Congress. They are very informative and you might have a little extra time these days for reading ‘pleasure.’
