Refugee advocates think Trump can't change Obama's 110,000 refugee goal for this year

01/03/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have no time to say much about this sob story in South Carolina’s The State newspaper about Muslim refugees resettled in the Carolinas (mostly in North Carolina) because I have to dash to jury duty again today. But, I can’t not mention this little blip from Jason Lee. We wrote about him on many occasions when he was chosen to work for a refugee contractor, World Relief, in Spartanburg, SC in 2015.

trump-and-sessions — Trump Test! Trump here with Senator Jeff Sessions his Attorney General nominee, can and must pause the Refugee Admissions Program. He can do it on day one, but I give him 4 weeks (I’m being generous)—until February 16th to do it! Sessions knows what can and should be done!

That was a resettlement plan that resulted in a heated controversy. Spartanburg is also in Rep. Trey Gowdy’s district and despite efforts by the Immigration Subcommittee chairman (Gowdy!) to question the choice of Spartanburg as a new resettlement site (he wrote a letter to Sec. of State Kerry), it went ahead as planned.
Jason Lee is wrong. Congress does not approve the level of resettlement for the coming year (it is not an act of Congress).
The President of the United States proposes the level in September preceding the fiscal year and sends his determination to Congress for “consultation,” but there is no legal requirement for Congress to agree to whatever number the President has chosen. Of course, if they give the President money to admit a certain number of refugees through the Appropriations process, then that is tantamount agreement to the numbers.
That said, Donald Trump can and should, because he has the power to do it, limit the number set by Obama on day one of his Presidency. He can halt immigration from certain regions of the world, or pause the refugee program altogether. In fact, he would not be the first to pause the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program. In 2002, the program was almost ground to a halt as fear grew in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

jason-lee — Jason Lee’s wishful thinking?

Here is what Lee told The State:

Congress has approved admitting 110,000 refugees in fiscal 2017.

It will be difficult for President Trump to cut that number, said Jason Lee, former director of the refugee assistance group World Relief Spartanburg. [As you know, World Relief is one of nine major federal refugee resettlement contractors, paid by the head to place refugees in your towns—ed]

“A number of questions won’t be answered until President Trump takes office,” Lee said. “(But) he’s already backed off not allowing Muslim immigrants into the country.”

Read it all here.
See our archive on Spartanburg by clicking here. (I warn you there are many posts there!)
It is through the Spartanburg controversy that I formed my opinion of SC Governor Nikki Haley (Trump’s nominee to be Ambassador to the UN).

BT! Church World Service working hard to get Syrian Muslims placed in Lancaster, PA

01/02/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

BT=Before Trump
This is the first of two posts (second one is here) on Lancaster, PA this morning. I’ve been interested in Lancaster ever since that city’s refugee program was linked to Church World Service’s (CWS) placement of refugees in my county seat. Those were mostly Meshketian (Russian Turkish Muslims) back in 2007.
Five years later, I traveled to Lancaster to a meeting of the refugee industry there—the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement was meeting with refugee contractors and advocates in 2013. A federal ORR employee shocked me by referring to any of the communities questioning the program as “pockets of resistance.” He was happy to tell the gathering that Pennsylvania was ‘welcoming’ and didn’t have any PORs.

cws-mccullough-arrest — Church World Service does not just resettle refugees, but they advocate for illegal aliens as well. CWS CEO Rev. John McCullough being arrested in Washington, DC protesting in support of Obama’s executive amnesty. Photo and story here: http://njfon.org/2015/04/08/faith-groups-challenge-fifth-circuit-court-on-presidents-immigration-actions/ McCullough pulls down an annual salary of over $300,000 a year from his CWS work and from “related organizations.” Page 13- 14 http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/134/080/2015-134080201-0c44e710-9.pdf

If you would like to get some background on Lancaster before reading this below, click here for our Lancaster archive.
This is the news that appeared in the New York Times and reposted here in Vermont newspaper. Church World Service (with the NYT) is trying so hard to make everything look so perfect in Lancaster. But, it isn’t and you will see what I mean in my next post.

Their [Syrian family—ed] imminent arrival explains all the commotion inside this slate-colored house in the small city of Lancaster, in south-central Pennsylvania. The state may have gone to Donald Trump, who likened the Syrian resettlement program to a “a great Trojan horse” for terrorists. But he isn’t president yet.

[….]

He [Josh, CWS’s 26 year old housing guy—ed] scours a government checklist of housing requirements for a resettlement [Contractors sign contracts to provide essential items for the refugees’ new home—ed], mindful that whatever he spends is deducted from a refugee’s one-time government grant of no more than $1,125. A family’s combined grants must cover its rent and other expenses until the nonprofit has helped the adults acquire Social Security numbers and jobs.

I want you to know (and the NYT doesn’t) that it is $1,125 per family member, so the Syrian family of 6 being discussed here will get $6,750 (plus welfare) and that CWS will get another approximately $6,750 as their share (of your tax dollars) to resettle this family (for their salaries and overhead).

Such encounters [Josh meets a refugee at Walmart***] happen often in Lancaster, whose rich history of acceptance is rooted, in part, in the influence of the Mennonites, Amish and other faiths. A glimpse of the local worldview came in January when a supportive rally of more than 200 people drowned out a much smaller anti-immigrant protest outside the Church World Service office in Lancaster. [See our report on the resistors rally, here.]

Sheila Mastropietro, the group’s longtime supervisor in Lancaster, took heart in the moment. It reflected a communal understanding of both the global refugee crisis and the rigorous screening process that refugees undergo before coming to the United States. [The communal understanding is wearing thin as you will see in my next post.—ed]

The big question for the resettlement contractors is: What will Trump do and when will he do it?

Still, given a president-elect who seems averse to the country’s modest commitment to refugee relocation, Mastropietro says, “We don’t know what to expect.”

[….]

Last fiscal year, the Lancaster office of the Church World Service helped to resettle 407 of the 85,000 refugees admitted to this country; this fiscal year, its target is 550 of a hoped-for 110,000.

“We are acting as if the numbers are going to be the same — until we hear something different,” she says.

Lancaster a happy “medley of cultures” (then why did Lancaster County go 57% for Trump):

Decades of resettlement work have transformed the Lancaster area into a medley of cultures so rich that Amer Alfayadh, 34, a senior case manager, struggles to name them all: “Syrians, Iraqis, Somalis, Congolese, Ukrainians, Belorussians, people from Kazakhstan. Then, of course, Lebanese, Palestinians. Bhutanese, Nepalese, Burmese, Sri Lankans …”

***I would love to know what the deal is with Walmart. Wherever I traveled on my middle America tour this past summer, I heard that Walmart was a gathering place for Muslim refugees. Is Walmart giving them gift cards or other goodies? Does anyone know?

Refugees with low education levels needed for jobs like meatpacking

12/31/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart yesterday analyzed the education levels of refugees arriving at record numbers in the US right now as Obama gets ready to vacate the White House.

cargill-somalis — Residents told me that Somalis working for Cargill have changed the town of Ft. Morgan, Colorado. Photo: http://madworldnews.com/colorado-biz-200-muslims-job/

Readers here know that I have been for years discussing the role that BIG MEAT plays in the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program and my 6,000 mile tour of America this past summer took me to several major meatpacking towns being changed by the influx of large numbers of Somalis to supply cheap labor to meat industry giants like JBS in Greeley, Colorado and Cargill in Ft. Morgan.
(I also visited meatpacking towns in Minnesota and North and South Dakota.)
Here is Leahy reporting on the fact that Somalis enter the US with the least education of any refugee group thus making them desirable employees for the beef and poultry industry (LOL! Not pork!).

Somalis are the least educated group of refugees who have arrived in the United States during the first three months of FY 2017.

As Breitbart News reported previously, the Obama administration has resettled 25,671 refugees in the country during the three month period beginning October 1, 2016 and ending December 30, 2016. This is almost double the number of refugees resettled in the United States during the same period in the prior fiscal year, FY 2016.

More than 85 percent of these refugees arrived from just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Burma, Ukraine, Bhutan, and Iran.

[….]

The levels of education of arriving refugees from these eight countries vary widely. More than 71 percent of refugees arriving from the Ukraine have achieved high school level or higher training (secondary, university, professional, or technical degrees). At the other end of the spectrum, less than nine percent of refugees from Somalia arrived with high school level or higher training.

[….]

Somalis, in particular, are heavily employed in the meat packing industry.

The consequence of the availability of low skill, low wage refugees to fill jobs in the meat packing and related industries has been to keep wages down and limit employment opportunities in those industries for low skilled American citizens living near those meat packing plants. The plants also need a steady supply of new healthy workers to replace the workers whose hands are eventually damaged by the rapid repetitive motions required in the high-speed, low-tech slaughterhouse line.

A number of communities have experienced this problem over the past decade, including Shelbyville, Tennessee; Liberal, Kansas; Fort Morgan, Colorado; Austin, Minnesota; and Grand Island, Nebraska.

It is an extensive report, continue reading here.
I have been told by readers over the years, and by some living in meatpacking towns, that meatpacking was a desirable job for Americans a couple of decades ago, but when these global corporations discovered immigrant (cheap!) labor all that changed. Refugees supplement their wages with your welfare subsidies!

Refugee Resettlement was big news in 2016

12/31/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just now as I read through news on my various alerts I saw several year-end wrap-up local news stories including from Poughkeepsie, NY and Rutland, VT which ranked refugee resettlement controversies among their top stories of the year.
The one from Idaho places refugee resettlement right up there with the 2016 Presidential election as a leading story for 2016!

I’ve been writing RRW since 2007 and I must say, this has not happened in those nearly ten years—that the refugee issue would be a leading story of the year anywhere, so keep up the good work.
When you are feeling frustrated that your concerns about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program are not being addressed, know that getting those concerns reported in your local media (within an overarching theme of agitating your elected officials) is a first important step toward reaching a political tipping point.
Here is some of what MagicValley.com had to say:

Refugee resettlement, which was a controversial issue in Twin Falls in 2015 and continued to be on in 2016, was also a major issue in the presidential race, and the debate over Medicaid expansion in Idaho will be shifted drastically because of the outcome. [By the way, the Office of Refugee Resettlement itself says that if your state has expanded Medicaid it makes it a more ‘welcoming’ target for the placement of refugees.—ed]

[….]

A movement to shut down the College of Southern Idaho Refugee Center started last year, after news came out that some Syrians could be among the refugees to be resettled in Twin Falls. (None have been to date.) As the Syrian civil war dragged on, displacing millions of people, refugee resettlement became a topic of worldwide debate and a major issue in the presidential race, with Trump’s hard-line views on refugee admissions and anti-Muslim rhetoric energizing some and horrifying others. As for Twin Falls, it started to attract national media attention as an example of a town divided over what was becoming a focus of national political arguments.

A drive for a countywide referendum on whether to shut down the refugee center fizzled this spring when organizers got about a quarter of the number of signatures they would need to get on the ballot. In June, however, the debate flared back up after news came out about a 5-year-old girl at the Fawnbrook Apartments being sexually assaulted by three boys from Middle Eastern refugee families.

Continue reading here.
LOL! That is all I am snipping. I am really careful about not taking too much of published news accounts, however, this publication is the only one in the nation to ever send me a legal letter telling me I have snipped too much of their report.
Does anyone know where the case is regarding the sexual assault from last June?
Our archive on Twin Falls may be found by clicking here.

Obama hates the reds (red states that is): more refugees sent to red states

12/30/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart has an interesting analysis of the numbers of refugees being seeded across America at an accelerated rate right now and reports that on a per capita basis, red states (states Trump won) are at the top of the list in terms of numbers of resettled refugees.

tillerson-and-trump — What will Trump and Tillerson (Secretary of State designee) do? Being generous, I’m giving them until February 16th to turn off the spigot.

In 2013 I first suggested that the US Refugee Admissions Program is part of a plan to TURN RED STATES BLUE! (See my post about Tennessee, here.)
Bill Clinton was one of the engineers, GW Bush seemed oblivious, but Obama and his people have been open about changing the demographic makeup of the US. He was changing America by changing the people.
So it is no surprise to see Leahy’s analysis with Nebraska headlining his piece:

President Barack Obama’s deputies have dropped 502 additional refugees into Nebraska during the first three months of FY 2017, according to the Department of State.

The refugee resettlement rate for FY 2017 to date is significantly higher in Nebraska than it has been during any other year in the more three decades the state has participated in the federal refugee resettlement program.

[….]

Nebraska, a red state, voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election by a 60 percent to 34 percent margin.

Four more red states round out the top five recipients of resettled refugees on a per capita basis during the first three months of FY 2017.

In North Dakota, where Donald Trump won by a 64 percent to 28 percent margin, the federal government resettled 21.6 refugees per 100,000 residents.

In Kentucky, where Donald Trump won by a 62 percent to 32 percent margin, the federal government resettled 19.7 refugees per 100,000 residents.

In Arizona, where Donald Trump won by a 49 percent to 45 percent margin, the federal government resettled 19.5 refugees per 100,000 residents.

In Idaho, where Donald Trump won by a 59 percent to 28 percent margin, the federal government resettled 19.0 refugees per 100,000 residents.

But…..the big question is what will Trump do?

President-elect Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail that he will pause the resettlement of refugees from Syria and other countries that are hostile to the United States, so the current inflow will likely drop after his inauguration as the 45th president on Jan. 20.

For more analysis and to follow links go here.