“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.
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!
“We had really significant concerns about our ability to provide the level of support to help make that integration successful.”
(Rebecca Kiesow-Knudsen of Lutheran Social Services South Dakota)
Wow! I can’t believe a refugee contractor is actually telling the truth! No, they don’t have the resources and neither does South Dakota or America for that matter!
I was amazed to see that the AP reporter actually remembered that Noem was one of the virtue-signaling Republican governors who told Donald Trump no thanks in 2019 when he tried to give the governors veto power to stop refugee resettlement in their state.
Republican Governor Kristi Noem will get the credit, or the blame, for blocking the Afghans depending on which side of the great divide one resides.
I had a couple of other things I had planned to write about today until I saw this AP story.
Both other possibilities are stories written by John Binder at Breitbartwho is really on top of the news about the flood of ‘new American workers and voters’ Biden is pulling in from around the world.
Heck, they won’t have to cheat in elections once they change the electorate!
From AP(where they have gotten something right in their headline—these are mostly not refugees!):
South Dakota is 1 of 4 states not resettling Afghan evacuees
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota is one of four states, along with the District of Columbia, that won’t be resettling any of the nearly 37,000 Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. during the final days of its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last month.
Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota, which is the state’s refugee resettlement agency, decided not to accept any Afghans after weighing local conditions and its ability to resettle them.
Rebecca Kiesow-Knudsen, the group’s chief operating officer, said Thursday that those arriving from Afghanistan without special immigrant visas are currently not eligible to work or receive federal aid to help them resettle.
“We had really significant concerns about our ability to provide the level of support to help make that integration successful,” she said.
Kiesow-Knudsen said the agency was facing a “rapidly evolving situation” that could change depending on whether Congress decides to provide funding and work eligibility for evacuees who have not been granted refugee status.
How financially burdened will your state be?
The Biden administration this week began telling governors and state refugee coordinators how many Afghan evacuees they would receive.
The numbers ranged from more than 5,200 people who are headed to California to as few as 10 being resettled in Alabama and 10 in Mississippi.
South Dakota, along with Hawaii, West Virginia, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, are not expected to resettle anyone from the first group. [Really those Libs in DC and in Hawaii should be rewarded with refugees and they almost never get any!—ed]
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem last month expressed reservations about accepting evacuees from Afghanistan. She told KSFY-TV, “We do not want them coming here unless we know they are an ally and a friend, and that they don’t want to destroy this country.”
Noem in 2019 decided to continue allowing refugees to be resettled in the state after former President Donald Trump attempted to allow states to opt out of the program.
Remember this. In American anyone can move and that includes migrants of all stripes. Afghans may be placed in most states but they won’t end up there. As tribal people, as soon as they can they will be heading to enclaves where other Afghans have settled because they will want to be with their own kind of people.
LOL! We should take bets on how quickly the Afghans get out of places like Vermont (brrr!) and even places like Minnesota where the territorial Africans (who don’t see the ‘joys of diversity’) will be making it hard on the Afghans.
The other day I mentioned that you could check this listof existng resettlement sites and have a good idea if your community was going to be ‘welcoming’ Afghan evacuees and Special Immigrant Visa holders that Biden flew out of Afghanistan in the last week.
Of course there are caveats. First, longtime readers know that new arrivals can be placed within 100 miles of the listed office, and secondly, they are permitted to move anywhere they wish and many will. That is because they will want to live with their own kind of people where existing enclaves of their particular ethnic group have settled.
But, just you try to say you want to live with your kind of people and watch the moral outrage! Funny how it isn’t considered racist or phobic in any way when the situation is reversed.
I also saidI would tell you another method to find out if you were going to be the lucky recipients of mystery (they loaded up many who had no discernable reason to be getting seats on planes to America) Afghans is to (duh!) check your local papers as one of my readers did for Kentucky. See here:
Kentucky prepares to resettle up to 775 Afghan evacuees amid challenges
To test it out for you, I simply searched for Maryland and Afghan refugees (although most are NOT legitimate refugees) and presto up popped many articles from the last week or so including some about how our Republican Governor Larry Hogan has his arms open to invite them in!
Within a few minutes I saw stories from Michigan, Utah, New York, Massachusetts and Tennessee.
Another suggestion I have had in the past is to find someone with gumption to infiltrate your local ‘Interfaith group’ because they will be the first to be in on the action and in the know about who is coming especially if the new arrivals will be Muslims (which the majority of Afghans will be).
Okay, so when you get that information (assuming you are unhappy about it), what do you plan to do?
Are you planning to yak on social media about how it isn’t fair, that you had no say in the matter? Are you going to mount your high horse and fume about the Constitution and State’s rights as one “Constitutional Republican” did in recent days. In a comment shared with me, he fumed about Arizona’s Governor Ducey and asked why Ducey couldn’t just tell Biden NO, no Afghans should be dropped in Arizona.
WTH!!! Do you really think that the Open Borders Left plays fair and gives a flying c*** about prissy high-minded notions like what is Constitutional and what isn’t? And, besides, where were you all when President Trump did try to give governors the opportunity to stop resettlement? I reported extensively on his efforts.
Arizona’s Ducey was one of the Republican governors who told Trump, no thanks, the feds could continue sending refugees to Arizona at will.
Obviously not enough Arizona voters have told Ducey they are unhappy with him.
Only Texas Governor Abbott said he supported Trump in a bid to get his state’s right back! (If you are wondering, DeSantis and Kemp remained silent, the contractors sued and stopped Trump, and that was the end of it).
So, back to my question: what are you going to do besides fume on social media?
Are you simply going to read more news at sites that agree with you, shake your head and fume some more? I’ve already told you what you have to do in my series on Fighting Back Locally.
Sorry I never finished it, but I saw little interest in it from my readers. Frankly I assume that was because it takes more work than reading news and yakking to like-minded people on Facebook, etc.
In my opinion, that is what is wrong with conservatives generally —we think our high-minded ideas are going to sway the debate. Fat chance!
If it is too hard for you to stick your necks out (and I understand that) even with the help of a few friends to speak up locally, or organize group of activists like the Left does, then at least now, more than ever, you must get to work on political campaigns for 2022!
And, let those who are in office now know what you think about the migrant invasion from all fronts. Pounce every time they make a move that you disagree with.
Find good pro-America candidates at all levels of government!
Then you better find candidates who put America First and work on those campaigns. Go to every campaign debate you can get to and ask the candidates in front of the audience and the media about immigration and where they stand!
You can choose to stay silent and watch them change America by changing the people, or speak up now, risk being labelled a racist (who cares!) and maybe, just maybe, pull America back from the brink!
Endnote: I have an extensive archive on Kentucky if you are interested,click here.
First, let me say, I haven’t been doing my usual extensive reading of refugee news (I am taking a break, or was taking a break!), so you won’t be getting any deep analysis, but I can’t ignore the breaking news.
I guess Trump didn’t absorb a word of what Hungary’s Viktor Orbán told him about migration jihad!
On top of the hundreds of thousands streaming into America across our borders now we will have the airlift of Afghanistan to America put on steroids, or at least that is what Biden is signaling.
They are truly changing America by changing the people and it couldn’t be more clear than right now.
As for Trump, sometimes he doesn’t know when to shut up!
Trump Endorses Prioritizing Afghan Refugees Amid Series Of Attacks On Biden
Former President Donald Trump on Monday endorsed the idea of taking in Afghan refugees who assisted the U.S. military and are now under threat as the Taliban takes control of the country, a departure from his long held stance on refugees that appears primarily aimed at attacking President Joe Biden.
[….]
The U.S. reportedly aims to relocate as many as 30,000 Afghans who are in the special immigrant visa application process, a small portion of the estimated 88,000 seeking entry, though the State and Defense Departments said Sunday they have evacuated fewer than 2,000 thus far.
[….]
Trump’s stance on the Afghan refugees represents a break with some of his closest allies, like former aide Stephen Miller, who, echoing Trump’s long-held anti-immigrant views, has spoken out against taking in Afghan refugees.
Here is Miller’s tweet. He is right and Trump is wrong!
Refugee Contractors Heads Explode, Bash Biden
Meanwhile the Washington Post is reporting (via Religion News Service) that the State Department’s refugee resettlement contractors (paid by taxpayers on a per refugee client basis) are steaming mad over the debacle in Afghanistan.
They say Biden has moved too slowly to bring tens of thousands of Muslims out of Afghanistan to be placed in a town near you. (Like in Wisconsinwhere a Jewish resettlement contractor is jazzed to welcome Afghans.)
And, yes, they could very well end up in a town near you because housing is limited as America is being overrun.
Refugee aid groups criticize Biden for stumbles in evacuating ‘desperate’ Afghans
WASHINGTON (RNS) — As most Americans absorbed the shock of the Taliban’s full takeover of Afghanistan over the weekend, officials at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service followed the rapidly deteriorating situation with resignation, knowing it could have gone differently.
[….]
In May, leaders at LIRS, one of several faith-based agencies contracted with the U.S. government to resettle refugees in the United States, sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting it remove Afghan civilians (and their families) who have worked with the U.S. before its planned troop withdrawal.
Anyone familiar with the “bureaucratic maze” that is the country’s Special Immigrant Visa process knew the State Department visa office wouldn’t be agile enough to respond to the urgent need for evacuations, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of LIRS.
“We’ve been screaming from the rooftops for months now that we need to get these allies to Guam or another U.S. territory,” Vignarajah said.
[….]
In June, most of those organizations — including LIRS, World Relief, Church World Service, the Episcopal Church (which resettles refugees through Episcopal Migration Ministries) and HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) — urged President Joe Biden to implement plans to evacuate Afghan translators, soldiers, cultural advisers, embassy clerks and others who have worked with American armed forces, media or nonprofits and allies and to authorize as many SIVs as necessary to make that possible.
Keep reading, see what Mark Hetfield of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society says about the Biden administration and know that just in the last few days Hetfield was telling his people to press Secretary of State Antony Blinken to set the ceiling for refugees for the coming fiscal year at 125,000.
That would be 125,000 over and above the Special Immigrant Visas flown in from Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand coming across our borders.
The 125,000 would come from other Muslim countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Apropos of nothing… Here is Hoochie Coochie Blinken—the man who helped bring us the Afghan disaster and will decide who your new neighbors will be!
Meanwhile the Washington Post is reporting (via Religion News Service) that the State Department’s refugee resettlement contractors (paid by taxpayers on a per refugee client basis) are steaming mad over the debacle in Afghanistan.