Fiscal year 2020 began on October first, but President Trump only signed the final determination two days ago.
The primary reason given for the lower than normal number is that there exists a massive backlog of asylum claims for those who are already in the country and are insisting they are refugees too!
Suffice it to say the wailing in the refugee industry has begun!
Their PR machines have been working overtime for 4 weeks in an attempt to get the President to change his mind on the 18,000 cap announced in the closing days of September.
Why?
Because refugees chosen by the UN and flown-in represent paying clients that keep the nine major contractors afloat. Asylum seekers, may eventually seek the ‘services’ of the contractors, but there is no per head grant money coming with them (at least not yet!).
If the ‘humanitarians’ are looking for immigrants to love and help, there are plenty of asylum seekers they could help with their own private charitable donations, right—not to mention poor and vulnerable Americans!
The United Nations quickly put out a statementsaying the UN High Commissioner for refugees is “troubled” by the final decision by the US government to admit ‘only’ 18,000 third world refugees over the next 11 months.
Inhumane Presidential Determination Banning Refugees is Signed
Historic low admissions goal will dismantle the life-saving refugee program and America’s legacy of welcome.
New York City–Last night President Trump signed his discriminatory and cruel Fiscal Year 2020 refugee admissions goalthat will cap admissions at 18,000 and limit arrivals based on category and country of origin. The signing of the presidential determination will now end the unprecedented moratorium on refugee arrivals that has blocked refugees from arriving in the United States since October 1st of this year.
CWS President and CEO Rev. John L. McCullough issued the following statement:
“President Trump has ripped our country’s welcome mat out from under the most at-risk refugees in the world, people we have pledged to protect. The dire consequences of this refugee ban will last for years if not decades to come as the refugee resettlement program is dismantled and our nation’s legacy of compassion and welcome is finally snuffed out.
Families who have waited years to be reunited have little hope of ever being together again. Refugee communities within the U.S. will lose their support systems as the infrastructure in place to support them disappears.
“While we are thankful that some refugees who have had their cases put on hold while we awaited this policy to be signed will now be able to arrive, the number of people who will find protection is tragically low and simply unacceptable. Thousands of lives are at stake. People of faith across the nation implore Congress to step in and block the destruction of the life-saving refugee resettlement program, and restore it to historic norms before it is too late.”
Thanks to a reader for sending me the State Department’s press announcementyesterday!
Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2020
President Trump signed the Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2020, following consultations with Congress conducted by the State Department, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Our Departments will work closely to implement the President’s program, which provides for the resettlement of up to 18,000 refugees in the United States this fiscal year.
America’s support for refugees and other displaced people extends well beyond our immigration system. It includes diplomatic efforts around the world to find solutions to crises, like our support for the legitimate government in Venezuela against Maduro’s tyranny. Addressing the core problems that drive refugees away from their homes helps more people more rapidly than resettling them in the United States.
Keep refugees close to home until they can return and rebuild their countries!
Our support for displaced people also takes the form humanitarian assistance, and in Fiscal Year 2019 the United States contributed nearly $9.3 billion to supporting crisis response globally, the largest contribution of any country in the world.Helping displaced people as close to their homes as possible better facilitates their eventual safe and voluntary return. Their efforts to rebuild their communities help restore affected areas to stability, which is always in America’s interest.
[….]
Indeed, the security and humanitarian crisis along our southern border has contributed to a burden on our immigration system that must be alleviated before we can again resettle large numbers of refugees. Therefore, prioritizing the cases of those already in our country is simply a matter of common sense.The diplomatic agreements the United States has reached with our Western Hemisphere neighbors to address illegal immigration and border security will allow us to refocus resources on reducing the current backlog of asylum cases that now encompasses more than an estimated one million individuals.
One thing that never made sense to me is the fact that supposedly the contractors are so worried about saving refugees and yet are at the border egging-on more economic migrants to come in illegally.
If your concern is truly for refugees and their well-being, it makes no sense that one would support importing competition for refugee admissions. But it makes all the sense in the world if your goal is to change America by changing the people and that begins with hauling in more future Democrat voters.
Get the report!
One of the most useful documents available on the program each year is the report to Congress that accompanies the Presidential Determination. For serious students of the US Refugee Admissions Program it is worth reading and saving.
I admit I haven’t read it all yet, but will! Here are a couple of charts that jumped out at me. They support the President’s assertion that asylum claims are swamping the system (many will turn out to be illegitimate).
(For newbies, asylum seekers get here on their own and say they will be persecuted if returned to their home country. They go through one of two legal processes and if determined to have a legitimate claim to refugee status they are given all the welfare goodies and services that refugees flown-in receive.)
Incredible! Look at the column on asylum grants!
And, then below see the charts on the backlog in the two systems available for migrants to claim asylum (to say they are refugees). Many of these migrants came across our southern border, applied for asylum and disappeared!
So what happened to considering the views of citizens when placing refugees?
I see no reference in either the statement from the White House on Friday or from Secretary Pompeo about local communities and state governments having any say in the placement of refugees as the President had announced on September 26th, see here.
I’ve been writing here for so long (12 years) that I forget that new readers come along all the time who have never heard that there are nine federally-funded refugee resettlement contractors with a few hundred subcontractors*** working under them.
Here are the nine (we thought we might be down to seven by now, but the Trump Administration funded them all for another year even as the number of arriving refugees is dropping):
DFMS is Episcopal Migration Ministries. They have two names. Note the drop in revenue after Obama was gone!
RRW builds on itself, so I recommend that if you really want to know what is happening, either visit every day or subscribe, because it is hard (and boring!) for me to continuously repeat old news. Reporting on juicy new news is much more fun!
You might want to check my category ‘Where to find information‘ where I post most stories about, you guessed it, where to find information! However, there are at the moment 665 post archived there!
See all categories located in a drop-down in right hand side bar on my home page. (If you just read posts in e-mails or on your phone, you are missing important information.)
*** If you have an agency resettling refugees where you live and its name doesn’t match any of the nine major contractors, then know that you have a subcontractor of one of the nine because your taxpayer dollars flow through the nine and down to a local subcontractor. If you search that local agency’s website you will most likely find out who its mothership is!
The nine contractors work with the US State Department to decide where to place (with which subcontractor) the incoming refugee cases.
Well, I should say he is claiming credit for creating the present-day US Refugee Admissions Program in 1979.
Editor:By the way, I’ve been away at a conference to talk about how RRW was “deplatformed” by WordPressdotcom and am now back at my computer with news about why the US Refugee Admissions Program Mr. Purcell says he created must be dumped (and reformed if there is a will for some sort of program).
I know this might be getting too wonky, but it’s important to know how the program began and how it has gone wrong (or was wrong all along!)—something the speech police have been trying to stop me from telling you!
James N. Purcell, in anopinion piecein the Dallas News, says the refugee program was designed to leave out local and state government approval of refugee placement claiming it was “fairer” to leave them out of what he says is a federal decision.
I set up the U.S. refugee resettlement program that Trump is attacking
At a campaign rally last week in Minneapolis, the president trumpeted a recently issued executive order that would prohibit refugee resettlements unless states and cities expressly consented to them. He went on to say, “no other president would be doing that.”
There is a better way for state and local officials to make their views known that’s worked in the past.
This issue was a concern when I set up the U.S. refugee resettlement program in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter and when I was later named the official director of the program by President Ronald Reagan. We went out of our way to avoid the Damocles sword that President Donald Trump is now swinging.
Rather than force national decisions on state and local governments (which they were unable to make and has the effect of politicizing these decisions), we came up with a fairer and more humane approach that respected their unique roles. [So whatever happened to the Tenth Amendment?—ed]
The Refugee Act of 1980 recognized the essential contributions expected of state and local governments and made achievement of them possible.
What is he talking about! Were the “essential contributions expected” of the state and local governments the enormous costs associated with welfare, education, health care, housing and so forth—costs now borne by state and local taxpayers with little financial help from Washington?
And, get this, the role of state coordinator was created to help identify and resolve problems. How many of you reading this even knew you had state coordinators***?
The act required the federal government to coordinate and consult regularly with state refugee coordinators about proposed resettlements. Many potential problems were identified and resolved through monitoring and oversight, and record resettlement was achieved without serious incidents.
Now, without apparently knowing what he has revealed he tells us how the NGOs (the federally-funded refugee contractors, Leftwing phony ‘religious’ groups) really run the show he claims they tried not to “politicize.”
Perhaps that was why I was so perplexed in 1986 to receive a scathing letter from one of Minnesota’s leading politicians demanding that I cease resettlement of Hmong in Minnesota forthwith. This demand was so out of character for Minnesota that I immediately informed NGOs working on Hmong resettlement. By the end of the next week, Minnesotans were so outraged that I received letters reversing earlier criticisms and asking for more Hmong refugees.
Unbelievable! He was the US State Department’s director of the Refugee Admissions Program and he tipped off his contractors that an elected official in Minnesota was having a problem with the refugee program and they in turn ginned-up letters from their flocks (Catholics and Lutherans mostly) to send him asking for more Hmong refugees. (This was of course a few years before the major influx of Somalis to Minnesota began.)
So why wasn’t this all handled as he said they designed the program, through the State Refugee Coordinator? Why? Because the program is run by the contractors who are paid out of the US Treasury to place refugees wherever they choose! (See my recent post with a list of the present-day contractors, here.)
There will be no real reform of the US Refugee Program as long as the contractors are paid by us while acting as Leftwing political agitation groups.
*** Go here to see who your state refugee coordinator is. If you know anything about the program in your state you will notice that many of them are affiliated with a federal contractor.
Got a problem in your state, or just want to know more about the program there? Call your coordinator. You can start by asking for your state’s most recent Refugee Plan on file with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. Be polite and you will get some information (maybe not much!) but something.
Don’t miss my post on the major drug bust of Hmong in Wisconsin recently.
You all know it intuitively and maybe you’ve actually seen it where you live!
Forcing ethnic diversity on communities destroys cohesiveness, causes mistrust and ultimately destroys the social fabric.
Thanks to reader Chaz for this very useful (and politically incorrect) report from Voice of Europe:
“Ethnic diversity not a strength but a weakness”, study says
A new peer-reviewed study by Danish academics published in the Annual Review of Political Science has revealed that ethnic diversity erodes social trust in communities.
University of Copenhagen Professor Peter Thisted Dinesen
The study, conducted by professors at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University in Denmark, looked to answer the question of whether “continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity” had a positive impact on social cohesion, unity, and togetherness.
In short, the study found that “continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity” exerts the exact opposite effect on society, meaning that it undermines and degrades social cohesion, unity, and togetherness.
Following a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies from countries from the Western world, researchers found that there was indeed a “statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies”.
One of the study’s main researchers, Peter Thisted Dinesen wrote: “To be clear, the overall negative relationship between residential ethnic diversity and social trust is statistically significant and holds up when conditioning on a range of potential confounders and moderators.”
[….]
The study’s findings run counter to the ubiquitous narrative which is constantly repeated on globalist media platforms, at schools and universities, and by EU bureaucrats – namely that ‘Diversity is a Strength’.
As many of you may recall, at this time last year the Trump Administration set the CEILING, for resettlement of refugees largely chosen by the UN for the fiscal year, at 30,000. And, that is exactly how many refugees were admitted and distributed to 48 states and the District of Columbia.
That 30,000 does not include the Special Immigrant Visas (SIV)from Iraq (181) and Afghanistan (7,501!) who entered the US this past fiscal year with all of the benefits refugees receive (welfare, food stamps, job counseling, housing, medical care and the list goes on!)
For the fiscal year that begins today, the President hasreduced the ceiling (or cap) to 18,000and by doing so has lit a firestorm in the refugee industry that includes Open Borders advocacy groups, federal resettlement contractors, and businesses which are freely admitting that they need the steady flow of cheap legal labor (labor that doesn’t complain and can’t readily leave!).
So from what countries did they originate and which states were the most ‘welcoming?’
The top five sending countries (FY19) in descending order are these:
DR Congo
Burma
Ukraine
Afghanistan (if you add the SIVs, Afghans would make up the second highest number of taxpayer supported ‘refugees’ for this year.)
Eritrea
Muslim refugees made up about 16% of the 30,000. However, virtually all of the SIVs are Muslims so that would push the percentage of arriving ‘refugees’ who are Muslims to 33%. No Muslim ban!
Here is a map showing where the 30,000 were placed. There is a spread sheet detailing where the SIVs were placed, but it isn’t in this handy format.
I know the numbers are difficult to read so here are the top ten ‘welcoming’ states for FY19:
Texas
Washington
New York
California
Kentucky
Ohio
North Carolina
Arizona
Georgia
Michigan
Teddy and Uncle Joe were chief sponsors of the Refugee Act of 1980, yet Delaware, Biden’s home state, rarely gets any refugees. Hmmmmm!
Two states received no refugees.
Wyoming has never agreed to resettling refugees in the history of the program. And, then Hawaii rarely gets any.
Delaware got one refugee in FY19 and it also usually only gets a handful—a fact that has always made me laugh since their homeboy, Joe Biden, was one of Ted Kennedy’s sidekicks when the program was created in 1979/80. (Ha! And, don’t say it is because the state is geographically small, RI is smaller than Delaware and it usually gets a bundle!).
West Virginia got 2 refugees, and the District of Columbia got a whopping total of 5 refugees!
A reader asked me just the other day to post about how much money each gets to change our US towns and cities.
