Category: Where to find information

Ten Governors (So Far) Silent on Whether they Will Welcome More Poverty to Their States

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 2 Comments

I am sick of writing about the governors and wasn’t going to start out with a tally this morning, that is until I saw this story about how the Lutherans are waiting on their big fish—Governor Abbott of Texas.

It is the same old boiler-plate BS, you can read it yourself at the Texas Tribune.

However, this made me laugh!

The reporter references the fact that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) , one of nine federal refugee contractors***, headquartered in Baltimore’s posh Inner Harbor, has been keeping a tally of those who have consented (both the governors and the locals).  I directed you to it here on Friday.

Well get this! They now have it password protected! 

***Update*** A reader reported that they have removed the password protection.  LOL!  You think they might be reading RRW!

Only special people can access their website. No deplorables allowed!

And, think about it!  LIRS is 90% taxpayer funded!  They are paid nearly $50 million a year to do their ‘good works’! 

Requiring a password to access their website confirms once again that these Leftwing ‘religious’ charities take our money and then operate in secrecy!

(Because they are ostensibly private groups you can’t even use the Freedom of Information Act to get find out how exactly your money is spent.)

 

https://www.lirs.org/refugee-consents-2020

 

See what LIRS (new) CEO told the Texas Tribune:

LIRS new CEO, Krish Vignarajah, a former employee of Michelle Obama, took over at LIRS in the wake of a very messy internal battle that saw the previous CEO Linda Hartke eased out. Hartke was pulling down a salary and benefits package of over $300,000 as the scandal unfolded.  We reported the whole nasty business here. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/02/14/lutherans-announce-departure-of-ceo-hartke-amid-claims-of-financial-irregularities-poor-management/

I wonder if they are paying Ms. Vignarajah that exorbitant salary as she presides over a quasi-government agency that is 90% funded by taxpayers.

Below she is quoted at the Texas Tribune story (which of course doesn’t mention that these ‘humanitarians’ are funded, not by Christian charitable giving, but by the US taxpayers):

As of Thursday, 39 governors [actually 40–ed] and 86 mayors and other local authorities had provided consent, according to the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a resettlement agency keeping a regular tally of the latest decisions. Krish Vignarajah, the group’s president, said she is hopeful Abbott will join the other GOP governors who have stayed in the program despite the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on immigration across the board.

However, just in case they can’t pull this off politically they have their ace-in-a-hole!

Lawsuit!

LIRS, which did I mention is 90% funded with your tax dollars, has filed a lawsuit in a friendly court against the President to stop this whole exercise.

They want to continue to place refugees in locations of their choosing as they have been doing for decades!

So, that is why I’ve been saying that the Republicans who have caved so far, virtue-signalling to their state’s Leftwing agitators, are dumb.

Before this month’s deadline, a federal judge could decide the matter for the states — at least temporarily. The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Church World Service sued the Trump administration in November alleging the executive order violates federal law.

[….]

A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Wednesday.

 

***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.

CWS poster girl! CWS is one of three federally funded contractors suing to stop the President’s effort to reform the UN-driven Refugee Admissions Program.

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 plan to say this once a day from now on!)

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.

 

Maine: Writer Says Lewiston’s Somali Makeover is Good for the City; But Was She Completely Honest?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 5 Comments

Mainer Cynthia Anderson recently published a book about how 6,000 plus Somali refugees are busy resuscitating a supposedly dying Maine city.

No surprise that the Star Tribune, in the heart of Little Mogadishu, MN, reviewed Anderson’s book.  One quote in the review stands out and it makes my blood boil!

“I also think journalists, including me, sometimes don’t push for answers lest they appear insensitive or out of fear they’ll provide ammunition to haters.”

Just think about that, she is admitting she might have pulled some punches so as not to give us (haters! and Islamophobes!), critics of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, any ammunition. WHAT THE H***!

If so-called journalists were HONEST, for one thing there would be no need for me to write this blog and secondly if they were HONEST then maybe government programs like this one might be reevaluated, reformed or trashed.

From the Star Tribune:

Review: ‘Home Now: How 6,000 Refugees Transformed an American Town,’ by Cynthia Anderson

“Home Now” by Cynthia Anderson; Public Affairs (318 pages, $28)

“A moving chronicle of who belongs in America.” Guess you can see the bias right there at Amazon.

At a campaign rally in Portland, Maine, President Donald Trump linked worsening crime in Maine to the influx of Somali refugees there. He blamed their large community in Minnesota for straining the state’s social safety net and bringing potential recruits for Islamic terrorist groups.

“You see it happening,” Trump said. “You read about it.”

The above is a reminder to all those wimpy Republican governors who are ‘welcoming’ more Somalis, Iraqis, and Syrians to your states that the President wants to rein-in the program. Duh!

Long before Trump turned refugee resettlement into a national flash point, Cynthia Anderson was immersing herself in Lewiston, Maine, a small white town that came to host one of the largest populations of Somali-Americans in the country, for her timely, richly detailed book “Home Now.”

Anderson grew up in a village 45 miles away and recalled the area’s gradual decline leading up to 2001, when the first Somali refugees arrived in nearby Portland.

She reported on Lewiston’s transformation for more than a decade, moving from seeing Somali newcomers as passive victims traumatized by war to people with complex, resilient trajectories.

[….]

Fatuma Hussein at 2017 Women’s march. “We are the future of Maine. We are the face of Maine.” See one of my posts on the Somali community organizer here in 2014: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/01/11/maine-somalisothers-protest-welfare-rule-change-proposal/

Anderson also writes about Fatuma Hussein, a community leader and advocate for Somali women who admires Maine’s civility and is optimistic about relations between natives and newcomers. She speaks out in opposition to Trump’s election, yet she is also forthright about the challenges of merging different cultures in Lewiston.

The town is not prepared to absorb the arrivals so quickly; the mayor draws headlines for saying Lewiston is “maxed out.”

Anderson deftly sums up the tension by noting that the new refugees were not ungrateful but nor were they just grateful.

[….]

Though the book paints a mostly rosy picture of how refugees can revitalize a community, Anderson is honest [?—how honest?—ed] about her qualms.

There is a brief mention of the murder of Donald Giusti killed by a gang of African migrant teens in Lewiston’s city park. https://fraudscrookscriminals.com/2019/04/15/arrests-made-in-lewiston-me-death-of-white-man-at-the-hands-of-a-gang-of-african-refugees/

During debates over a state bill aimed at the Somali-American community to ban female genital mutilation (FGM), she admits to being conflicted. Anderson is initially opposed, and doesn’t want to see the Somali community hurt, but nor does she want harm to come to any Somali girls.

[What woman could possibly be conflicted about the brutal practice of slicing off a portion of a girl’s genitals?—ed]

Anderson also acknowledges that the refugee vetting process warrants examination, noting that records can be inadequate in war-torn countries.

She considers it fair to question how long refugees take to become self-sufficient, finding answers inconsistent and hard to find. [No kidding—this program is run in secrecy! The refugee contractors and the government don’t want anyone to find out how poorly the refugees are doing!—ed]

“I also think journalists, including me, sometimes don’t push for answers lest they appear insensitive or out of fear they’ll provide ammunition to haters,” she admits. “But not asking and not knowing provides fertile ground for rumors to flourish. It’s also patronizing; Lewiston’s newcomers can withstand the scrutiny.”  [Note that she deftly suggests that those of us with concerns are trafficking in rumors!—ed]

Anderson raises these questions through her portrait of Jared Bristol, driven after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to become an activist against Islamic extremism. Bristol advocates for the FGM bill during a hearing that’s one of the only times Anderson sees Muslims and anti-Islamists in the same place.

Such activists, Anderson writes, “are wrong if they believe I absorbed nothing they and other anti-Islamists said or that my thinking didn’t shift, however incrementally.”  [So what good is absorbing if she then pulls punches?—ed]

Scrutiny comes anew when a man dies of a fatal head injury after being attacked by several teens of African descent.

Nevertheless, and moving right along, the expert concludes:

….that Mainers feel that integrating refugees is worth the effort, even as it has taken time and money.

That is not what I’m hearing!!!

See my extensive, and I mean extensive archive on Lewiston here at RRW (there is more at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’)!

Gee, I wonder if Ms. Anderson used any of the material I’ve compiled over the years?  Did she get the story about the Somali teen who burned down four apartment buildings in 2013 for example? Or the one about the ISIS fighter whose wife lived in Lewiston?  Or the Somali health care scammers?  And, as far back as 2009 Somali ‘youths’ were roaming the streets and attacking people.

Maybe a journalist should write a book!

How Many and Where Did Federal Contractors Place their Refugee Clients in 2019?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 4 Comments

I meant to post on the numbers and geographic distribution of refugees in 2019 yesterday, but got sidetracked by the feckless GOP governors again.

So here is what I learned about calendar year 2019. 

(We normally talk about refugee data on a fiscal year basis but because this is the time of year for look-backs on the previous year, I thought I would look back at 2019.)

We admitted a total of 27,513 refugees as your new neighbors during the course of 2019.  13% of those were Muslims from a variety of countries.  The others represented many many religions, or none at all.

And, in light of the newest Middle East flare-up you should know that we admitted almost equal numbers of Shiites and Sunnis and so we have invited both of the warring factions to come live among us!

I’ll give you some more interesting data below, but first I want you to see where the federal refugee contractors*** placed the refugees.

Always humorous is the fact that Delaware hardly ever gets refugees, although it was then Senator Joe Biden who joined Ted Kennedy’s team to create the dysfunctional program back in 1979 (Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1980).

(I love this pic of Joe and Ted! Do you think this pair had our best interests at heart when they figured out how to fund Leftwing ‘non-profit’ groups with taxpayer dollars to distribute refugees around America?  But, of course we can’t expect Republican governors to know anything about the history of the program or how it works! That would be expecting way too much!).

From the Refugee Processing Center:

I know it is hard to read the numbers, but the top five ‘welcoming’ states in calendar year 2019 were Texas, Washington, California, New York and Kentucky (slaughterhouse workers?).

The bottom five were Washington DC with 3, and big fat zeros for Delaware, Hawaii, West Virginia and Wyoming.

The top sending country was the DR Congo by far with 11,152 impoverished, poorly educated and low-skilled Africans delivered to many states (I need to do another post just on the DR Congo).  Obama told the UN we would take 50,000 over five years and we are way beyond that number now.

Burma (4,681) and Ukraine (4,013) were the next two big senders.  I need to look into this Ukraine conveyor belt because now that we have confirmed that refugees are used as pawns/bargaining chips for other purposes of the State Department, I’m wondering if that is driving that resettlement.

Of the 4,681 Burmese, 689 are the Muslim Rohingya which gets me to the point I made recently.

If you think that we are saving Middle Eastern Christians and other minorities from the three largest distribution centers in the Middle East—Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria—we are not.

During 2019 we admitted 1,364 Afghans and 1,290 of those were Muslims.

We admitted 631 Syrians and 565 were Muslims (so of course CAIR is cheering Maryland Governor Hogan).

We admitted 512 Iraqis and 385 were Muslims.

But that ain’t all!

Coming to you at the rate of about 10,000 a year, Afghan and Iraqi men (and families) who supposedly helped us. I think this is another of those bargaining chips we have been hearing about!  Their numbers help keep the refugee contractors financially afloat we are told.  https://fraudscrookscriminals.com/2019/05/31/special-immigrant-visa-holders-coming-in-by-the-thousands-from-afghanistan-but-iraqi-flow-has-slowed/

 

In addition to the 27,513 regular refugees we admitted in 2019, another 9,561 Special Immigrant Visa holders from Afghanistan and Iraq arrived.  You can bet they are all Muslims and are treated just like regular refugees in that they can access social services and bring their families!

So we can safely say that in calendar year 2019 we admitted 37,000 refugees/SIVs and that approximately 38% of the total are Muslims.

And, get this!  According to the Funding Guidance I’ve been yakking about for days, we will be taking another 10,000 SIVs from Iraq and Afghanistan (maybe Syria!) in the 2020 fiscal year. That is over and above the 18,000 ceiling that the President determined for the year.

The FY 2020 ceiling for refugee admissions established by the President, after consultation with Congress, is 18,000.  In addition, applicants should include 10,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients in their planning. Applicants should assume similar admissions and recipient numbers for performance periods beyond FY 2020.

 

***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.

Church World Service poster girl!

For decades they have decided in secrecy where to place refugees and they don’t want to lose that power because even as they pontificate about their religious convictions and humanitarian zeal, they are Leftwing political activist groups working to change America by changing the people and using your money to do it!

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 plan to say this once a day from now on!)

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.

(If you are new and are confused because your local resettlement agency doesn’t have one of these names, just know that they are a subcontractor of one of the nine and you can usually find out which one by going to their website.)

 

 

Tucker Carlson Nails It! All You Need to Know About GOP Governors Who Turned on Trump!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 9 Comments

In just a little over 5 minutes last night Tucker Carlson in a segment on the US Refugee Admissions Program and the President’s efforts to reform it, explains exactly what we have been saying for weeks in dozens of posts.

Especially interesting is the focus on phony Christian charity as Carlson’s millions of viewers learn that it is federal contractors masquerading as charitable religious groups that have successfully lobbied Republican governors—18 so far—to thumb their noses at Trump and ask for more refugees for their states!

It is vitally important that you send this far and wide. Hat tip: Brenda.

The segment begins here:

Don’t miss my post yesterday about CAIR sending wet kisses to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan when he became the 18th governor to say his state welcomes more poverty from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Lutherans Report on their Refugee Consent Lobbying Efforts; Falling Short on Counties

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I know I’ll hear from Lutherans who disavow everything that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) is doing (and don’t like being lumped in with them), but indeed it is this faction (the Leftwing) of the Lutheran ‘faith’ making all the news.

When I saw this website this morning (thanks to a reader) where LIRS (one of nine federal refugee contractors that monopolize all refugee resettlement in America***) is running a tally of their successes in gaining consents for their placement of refugees, I am struck by a couple of things.

LIRS National Headquarters are in this building owned by the Lutherans and located in a prime Inner Harbor Baltimore neighborhood. Taxpayers fund LIRS about $50 million a year (90% of their budget is taxpayer funded). LIRS is one of three contractors suing Trump to stop the President’s refugee reform plan.

First, where the heck is the Department of State that promised a running tally would be publicly available.

As of this writing the DOS website is pathetic compared to LIRS.

Of course since LIRS is almost completely funded by the federal government (taxpayers like you and me!), funding based on the number of refugees they place, they have a lot to lose if they can’t get enough consents when applying for their contract with the State Department.

(From its most recent Form 990 (page 9) we see that LIRS is 90% funded from the US Treasury!)

Weak Governors are falling like dominoes as we have been reporting, see here yesterday, but where are the counties?

The US State Department’s Funding Guidance (the rules for the President’s reform initiative) specifically says that in addition to governors, the contractors must get consent from COUNTY governments.  There is no mention of Mayors of cities having any say!

By the way, the contractors hate Trump’s new reform plan because they have had free rein for decades to place refugees pretty much wherever they wanted with guidance from friendly and ideologically aligned bureaucrats in the State Department.

And, they certainly never had to solicit support from elected officials to get their MONEY for the year (actually now only a portion of the year from June to the end of September 2020).

Here is the pertinent section of the Funding Guidance:

Consistent with Section 412(a) of the INA and Executive Order 13888, Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement, PRM and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) seek to promote the involvement of states and localities in the selection of locations for initial resettlement. In addition, PRM and ORR seek strong environments to support resettlement and speedy integration, and regard state and local consent for resettlement activity as important evidence of such strength. For each state and locality where the applicant proposes to resettle refugees during the award period, the applicant should seek written consent for resettlement of refugees from the state governor’s office and the chief executive officer of the local government (county or county equivalent). PRM will take into account such consents to the maximum extent permitted by law, including Section 412(a) of the INA and antidiscrimination laws, in deciding where to place refugees.  [A little wiggle room here at the end, but still no mention that mayors must approve.—ed]

Now go here and check out LIRS lineup of support.

Notice that only a small number of counties have submitted consents (29 out of a list of 86 local consents), see if yours is on the list!  Also, see if your mayor has said sure send us more poverty we don’t have enough of our own!

So to my readers who have been asking if it’s too late to put pressure on your county to say NO, the answer is NO IT ISN’T TOO LATE!

P.S. Your federal representatives—US Senators and Congressmen—have nothing to do with this plan so don’t waste time on them right now! It is county elected officials and a few remaining governors that matter!

 

***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.

Church World Service poster girl!

For decades they have decided in secrecy where to place refugees and they don’t want to lose that power because even as they pontificate about their religious convictions and humanitarian zeal, they are Leftwing political activist groups working to change America by changing the people and using your money to do it!

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 plan to say this once a day from now on!)

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.

(If you are new and are confused because your local resettlement agency doesn’t have one of these names, just know that they are a subcontractor of one of the nine and you can usually find out which one by going to their website.)