The stated reason to consider moving the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) to the independent USAID is to save money by bringing our admissions program and humanitarian foreign aid together under one roof. What will new Secretary of State Pompeo do? (outgoing Rex Tillerson appeared to have been hands-off when it came to refugees). I’m in no position to judge the wisest place to move it, but I am eager to see the little fiefdoms fall and cozy relationships broken between resettlement contractors and DOS bureaucrats. And, I have long maintained that refugee admission decisions should not be used as part of our foreign policy wheeling and dealing!
As early as 2012 (when the State Department did formerly invite comment on the program), I gave 10 reasons for a moratorium and this is my number seven:
7) Congress needs to specifically disallow the use of the refugee program for other purposes of the US Government, especially using certain refugee populations to address unrelated foreign policy objectives—Uzbeks, Kosovars, Meshketians and Bhutanese (Nepalese) people come to mind.
If I were to write that today, I would be adding those Australian detainees we are magically transforming in to legitimate refugees for your American towns!
Either people are legitimate refugees deserving a shot at a better life and have no other options, or not. The program shouldn’t be used in any carrot/stick foreign policy wrangling.
But, that is exactly what a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee is arguing at Foreign Policyin a story entitled:
White House Weighs Taking Refugee Programs Away From State Department
Mike Pompeo’s first test could be a plan to remove refugee aid from Foggy Bottom
Month number seven of fiscal year 2018 ended last night, and from the contractors*** point of view, it was another dismal one for agencies collecting a per head payment for refugees they place and ‘take care of’ for only a few months. April’s total was 1,607 which is below average for the previous six months (average 1,758 for previous months this FY).
The team….Bolton, Trump, Pompeo: It will be interesting to see what happens with the Refugee Program and those SIVs now that a couple of serious hardliners are in place. CAIR recently called Pompeo an “Islamophobe.”
“I saw first-hand the flagrant abuses and scams that permeate the refugee program.”
(Mary Doetsch, retired Foreign Service Officer)
Will President Donald Trump and soon-to-be Secretary of State Pompeo, do what must be done and overhaul the USRAP?
Mary Doetsch is a retired US State Department Foreign Service officer who spent eight years (of a 25-year career) as a Refugee Coordinator serving on four continents.
As someone who has worked on the inside, her op-ed at the Washington Examiner today carries more weight than anything I could ever write as an outsider looking in!
Entitled:
US refugee program needs a complete overhaul
Ms. Doetsch opines (emphasis is mine):
During my career in the State Department, I became a refugee coordinator in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP, because I wanted to help and support persecuted persons in legitimate need of international protection. But the pervasive fraud I saw during my eight years in the field was alarming.
It cries out for a fix, and President Trump might just be the person to do it.
Undoubtedly, many individuals who work within the refugee field have humanitarian aims. But refugee resettlement has morphed into a numbers-driven, financially motivated business, growing blindly at the expense of the American public and our national security.
There once was a time when private charities, civic groups and faith-based organizations provided the bulk of funds and volunteers to resettle and help assimilate refugees in the United States. Today’s deeply flawed system relies almost exclusively on nine federal contractors (paradoxically referred to as “Voluntary Agencies” or VOLAGS) to resettle refugees.
[….]
The contractors have a vested interest in processing ever-larger numbers of applicants, since they make money on every refugee settled. And as non-governmental organizations they can and do lobby for advantageous changes to law, something they could not do if they were government agencies. Their lobbying umbrella wields enormous influence over refugee admissions policy, pressuring Congress and the bureaucracy to increase admissions and provide ever greater funding.They stage political rallies, file lawsuits against unfavorable policies, and lobby for causes that coincidentally help their bottom lines, yet this linkage is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
This isn’t just important from the oft-discussed security perspective, but also because of the rampant fraud and abuse that has permeated this program for generations.
[….]
As a former Refugee Coordinator who served throughout the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Cuba, I saw first-hand the flagrant abuses and scams that permeate the refugee program. I witnessed widespread exploitation and misuse, from identity fraud to marriage and family relation scams, and from private individuals profiting from their involvement in USRAP to distortion of the actual refugee definition to ensure greater numbers of people who should really just be migrants are admitted as refugees.
[….]
While refugee admissions have been declining under the Trump administration, without structural reform in the USRAP these numbers could again skyrocket under a new administration more favorable to the refugee industry.
Midway into fiscal year 2018, fewer than a quarter of the 45,000 individuals proposed in the FY18 refugee ceiling have entered the country. This slow-down in admissions may reduce the problem of fraud, but it cannot be eliminated without a complete overhaul of the program.
I’ve only snipped a portion of Doetsch’s op-ed, click here to read it all.
What you can do…. Contact the White House and tell the President it is now or never to overhaul the US Refugee Admissions Program, or once out of office the program will go back in to high gear. Reducing numbers for a few years is not enough!
When I saw this Washington Post Op-edpenned by British National David Miliband whose organization, one of nine federal refugee contractors*** (the International Rescue Committee) depends on just short of a half a billion! (see below) from the US Treasury each year, I thought it was kind of dumb to bite the hand that feeds them (and offers him, Miliband, a comfortable annual income of nearly $700,000). Perhaps I am wrong, maybe David Miliband is giving most of his nearly $700,000 annual salary as charitable gifts to the refugees he sends to your towns. Does anyone know?
But, this is what the arrogant and entitled Far Left does because they have come to expect those millions as their just rewards for their ‘humanitarian’ zeal. Of course I can’t resist an opportunity to write about “Moneybags” Miliband either.
From the WaPo(which has never to my knowledge ever looked in to the cushy deals and ginormous taxpayer-funded salaries the resettlement contractors have been receiving over the years). There is nothing more annoying than a British Leftist lecturing us, and Trump, about retreating from our US principles and practices!
David Miliband is president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee.
At a time of widespread need, the United States is in headlong retreat from the principles and practices that for so long has made it a global beacon. It is no exaggeration to say that if current trends continue, the U.S. government will have no refugee resettlement program at the end of this administration.
In other policy domains, scholars have asked whether the Trump administration is malevolent or incompetent. In the case of refugees the answer is clear: There is animus towards this program and that is being translated into action in a highly organized and efficient manner. It is the worst of all worlds.
[….]
Despite the success of this bipartisan program, it is being slowly and silently strangled. Bureaucratic means are being used to subvert an agreed interagency decision. There have been no hearings in Congress, no accounting for the result.
Here is one of many deceptions Miliband regularly peddles. He says the 45,000 CEILING, the CAP, is a target! It is not! The President only needs to stay under the ceiling he himself set. If he wants to exceed the ceiling he would have to consult with Congress.
It is not too late to arrest the decline. Congress should be calling on the administration to expedite refugee interviews to hit the 45,000 target. Homeland Security should speed up the process for vetting refugees, which already takes far too long. And there is no excuse for the shortfall in issuance of special admissions for brave Afghans and Iraqis who have put their lives on the line for the United States.
More here.
I agree with Miliband that Congress should look in to the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for other reasons, but frankly they are all a bunch of do-nothings on both sides of the aisle.
Below is a screenshot of the most recent Form 990 for the IRC. Government grants is your money!
(For salaries of officers, scroll past page 9. They are on a ‘continuation sheet’ that follows page 12. Eleven officers are in the 6-digit salary range!) The IRC would have a hard time surviving without the infusion of federal dollars at this incredible level each year!
*** I post the contractor list almost every day because I want new readers to know exactly who is responsible for driving the US Refugee Admissions Program (in addition to the UN!). The IRC is the financially largest of the contractors. However if you add up the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and all the individual Catholic Charities that receive federal funding the Catholics might be getting the most boodle.
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of the nine VOLAGs’ income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees, line them up with (low paying) jobs in food production and cleaning hotel rooms, and get them signed up for their services (welfare)! From most recent accounting, here.
We knew this was happening, but this article at The Indypendent has some useful nuggets of information on the internal turmoil involving the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program which began in 1980 as a supposed public-private partnership, but has evolved in to an almost entirely publicly (taxpayer) funded industry.
I’m guessing that the average uninformed reader of this story is scratching his or her head and asking, how can the federal government ask non-profits to close their doors?
It is because the ‘non-profits’ are really fake charities and they can’t survive without the continuous infusion of federal dollars.
Here are a few nuggets from the story:
The Trump Administration is Dismantling the Refugee Resettlement System
April 1 marked the halfway point in the federal government’s fiscal year and, so far, the United States has only admitted 10,548 refugees, placing it on track to fall far short of its already record low admission ceiling of 45,000 individuals. Resettlement workers and refugee advocates say that this is further evidence of the Trump administration’s deliberate efforts to sabotage the refugee resettlement system now and for years to come.
“The program is being torn down from the top!”
“The program is being torn down from the top,” says Dr. Shelly Callahan, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center in Utica, which works to resettle refugees.
[….]
The U.S. government works with nine private nonprofit organizations***, known as voluntary agencies, to assign refugees to host communities around the United States.
Voluntary agencies receive $2,125 in federal funding for each refugee they resettle and administer networks of local offices that provide services directly to the refugees. All of the approximately 320 local offices provide new arrivals with housing and social services including language training, job-search assistance, school-enrollment assistance and help integrating into the community during their first months in the United States. [They can never bring themselves to say they are signing them up for welfare, medical care and food stamps!—ed]
In practice, virtually all resettlement offices also provide a variety of services to other immigrant, minority, and vulnerable communities alongside refugees, and assist refugees beyond the first months of resettlement. [Yes, we know they are providing taxpayer-funded services to illegal migrants too!—ed] They rely on private donations for these programs. [No they don’t! Only small amounts!—ed]
[….]
Erol Kekic of Church World Service says they are trying to find a more sustainable model. Does that mean trying to raise private money now that the easy federal money, doled out on a refugee per head basis, is drying up?
In December, the State Department informed the voluntary agencies of its intention to close all local affiliate offices [aka subcontractors.—ed] that are not projected to receive at least 100 refugees in fiscal year 2018. According to a plan drawn up by the voluntary agencies and obtained by Reuters, some 74 offices are expected to be closed this year.
Eleven new offices that were in the planning phase at the time will not be opening, although some of them may still be able to operate as sub-offices dependent on other offices for cases and funding.
“We’re trying to look into what would be the best make up of our network and how do we change what currently exists into something more sustainable that can still meet its moral and legal commitments,” says Erol Kekic, executive director of Church World Service, one of the national voluntary agencies. Church World Service has closed 17 offices this fiscal year, bringing its total to just 19.
[….]
The layoffs and closures being engineered by the Trump administration will impact the refugee resettlement system for years to come.
More here.
The article references a cool Reuters interactive graph showing how many offices are closing in each state. See the whole thing here. This is just a portion of a screen shot. Hereis where the original list of over 300 subcontractors is archived, but it looks like the list has not been updated for over a year.
Partial screenshot. See full image here: http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-IMMIGRATION-REFUGEES/010060WC1Q2/index.html
*** I post the contractor list almost every day because I want new readers to know exactly who is responsible for driving the US Refugee Admissions Program (in addition to the UN!). We are hearing reports that all nine might not survive the year.
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of the nine VOLAGs’ income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees, line them up with (low paying) jobs in food production and cleaning hotel rooms, and get them signed up for their services (welfare)! From most recent accounting, here.
