Your tax dollars paid for nearly 200,000 "humanitarian arrivals" of one sort or another in 2015

03/31/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And the numbers I’m about to give you don’t account for the millions of needy migrants you are still supporting through some welfare/medicaid program or another from previous years!
Thanks to Joanne for pouring over the FY2017 Budget document for the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. And, this is only half of the story since the US State Department is also shelling out millions for the same group of refugees. The US State Department budget likely adds another $2 billion to the $2 billion price tag below.
And remember! Much of this expenditure to care for these refugees/asylees/assorted other migrants (legal and illegal) flows through federal contractor middle men (for salaries, offices etc.)
Go here for the full report.

Now check out these numbers on page 240! 195,231 arrived in FY 2015 for us to take care of (it’s not just the resettled refugee numbers, 70,000-85,000, being bandied about).
If you can’t read the numbers here they are for 2015:

Refugees: 69,933

Special Immigrant Visas: 8,709

Cuban/Haitian Immigrants 61,000 (look at that column and see the massive expansion of Cubans you are caring for!)

Asylees: 21,000

Trafficking victims: 863

Unaccompanied Children: 33,726

You will see in the text that Obama is going to up the number in FY2017 to “213,000 humanitarian arrivals.”
This post is archived in our ‘where to find information’ and ‘refugee statistics’ categories.

Office of Refugee Resettlement finally gets around to releasing 2014 report to Congress

03/23/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Back to our daily grind (after yesterday’s record-breaking day)—working to educate you about the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program….

The law says that the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement must get their Annual Report to Congress out by January 31st of the year following the close of the fiscal year. The fiscal year closes on September 31st, so the Annual Report for 2104 was over a year overdue when it was released a few days ago.
Their flagrant lawbreaking is nothing new and at one point a few years ago they were THREE years behind. Until recently no one in Congress said boo!
Senator Jeff Sessions and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (and others) here in December 2015 did write to the Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services demanding the 2014 report. But, you should know that ORR is now behind (as of January 31, 2016) in producing 2015!
There are only a couple of reasons for the lawbreaking—incompetence, or they are hiding information until it is out of date.
Go here to read about the 2014 Report and follow links to the entire report. (Hat tip: Joanne) If you take the time to review it, you will see it is a treasure-trove of information for anyone wishing to learn more about how the refugee program effects you and your city (and the nation!).

That is the Director of ORR Bob Carey (on right and responsible for the report) campaigning on the prevention of refugee suicides. He came over to ORR from a lucrative job as a federal resettlement contractor. Photo: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/resource/national-suicide-prevention-month-social-media-campaign

I haven’t had time to open it, but the best sections are the statistics on refugee welfare use etc. (always shocking!).
Go here to see the list of annual reports going back decades.
For energetic researchers: Do you know how the interactive data base, here, only goes back to 2002? Well, using these reports you can go all the way back to the first one for 1980 and get statistics on who came to your state, etc. I wrote this 2008 post on how many Somalis the US admitted every year by going back through those annual reports.

Are you a new reader?

For all of the new readers who arrived here this week, we have a category entitled ‘where to find information’ with hundreds of posts where we cataloged reports and documents and so forth. I also recommend our fact sheet (a little out of date) and our Frequently Asked Questions both of which are linked in our header.
About the photo: Why are refugees committing suicides? They have found out that America’s streets are not paved with gold. Some have a very tough time transitioning to American life and they miss their culture, their homes. I wonder if the do-gooders ever consider that they may not being doing the humanitarian thing by ripping people from their cultures so they can become the cheap labor force, for example, BIG MEAT.

United Nations and US State Department have close working relationship when deciding who comes to America….

03/15/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..and thus who comes to your towns.
I just saw this photo on Twitter (right). Anne Richard Asst. Secretary of State signs a so-called ‘Framework for Cooperation‘ agreement with the new UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Richard and Grandi — Anne Richard, Asst. Sec. of State for PRM signing cooperation agreement with new UNHCR Filippo Grandi.

It seems that we began this ‘Framework for Cooperation’ with the UNHCR in the year 2000 (Madeleine Albright’s reign in Clinton’s last year in office and obviously continued through Bush and Obama).
I had always wondered when we began to rely almost completely on the UN for direction on who is resettled in America.

The Framework for Cooperation is a policy document that defines the priorities and commitments of the UN refugee agency and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (BPRM) for cooperation and collaboration throughout the year. The annual accord also acts as a guide to measure impact and performance.

The first such framework cooperation agreement between UNHCR and PRM was signed in 2000, and the practice has continued as a testament to the mutual confidence and commitment that the two sides have in each other as partners. The US Government continues to be UNHCR’s biggest donor.

So one way of looking at this is that we give UNHCR most of their money and then we let them tell us what to do. Huh?

And, who said we must have shared objectives and priorities with the UN in the first place? Calling President Trump, let’s fix this ASAP in January 2017.
After all, it is the UN that is picking mostly Muslim Syrians for resettlement to the US (as they are the Iraqis and Somalis!).
You know that refugee ‘reform’ bill being marked up tomorrow in the House Judiciary Committee, if they are serious about reform, how about an amendment to sever these ties. I’ll bet there was never a law in the first place that required us to cooperate in this formal manner with the UN refugee agency!
I didn’t have the patience to search for this year’s agreement (if it’s even available), but here is one for 2012-2013.

Office of Refugee Resettlement budget in the billions for FY2016

03/09/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A reader sent us this very nice summary of the cost of the refugee program and how it is structured. I urge you to read it yourself at Politically Short.
(As of this writing, I see writer Nick Short left out World Relief (Evangelicals) in his list of Volags, but otherwise this is excellent!)
Mr. Short also directs readers to this map of the resettlement placement cities for Fiscal Year 2016. Sorry I couldn’t reproduce it more clearly, go here for the original. Note the color coding in each city for which of the nine major resettlement contractors are working there. Amazing isn’t it that there are some cities with 4,5,6 or more contractors working the same territory!
I’ve updated our Frequently Asked Questions with this newest map.

Refugees by the numbers: Last year's list, but still useful

03/03/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update: Reader Jim sent us corrections to the table. LOL! must have been originally typed up by a government intern:
1. There is no Tampa, Alaska, it should be FL
2. Atlanta should be GA
3. Savannah should be GA
Haven’t had time to write today (except for this morning at American Resistance 2016! ) so was pleased to see this short news story (hat tip: Jim) so that I could put something up and not break my posting streak here at RRW. Only problem is that this writer at the US Herald says this is the list for right now, but FY2015 ended on September 30, 2015.
If you find a list like this for FY2016 you win a prize! (not really, but we will all love you for it!)
(Just resettled refugees below, does not include successful asylum seekers, unaccompanied alien children, or any other legal immigrants coming under the care of the US taxpayer.)

Obama is aiming for 85,000 for the present fiscal year (2016).
If your city is listed above expect numbers to be even higher this year. If your city is not on the list, it does not mean you are off the hook because the scramble is on to find more ‘welcoming’ towns and cities.
This post is filed in two important categories here at RRW: Where to find information and Refugee Statistics.