Category: Who is going where

Are these Cuban immigrants refugees?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I bet you were under the impression that the era of Cuban refugees streaming to the US had pretty much ended.  A reader sent this article about a Cuban family being resettled in Texas by the International Rescue Committee and commented about this line in the article:

 The family said they sought asylum in the U.S. three years ago for economic reasons.

The legal definition of a refugee is:

REFUGEE – Any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

So, we don’t just take people, even families like this one who sound like nice people, into the refugee program who are economic migrants as they appear to be.  They need to be persecuted or fear persecution.

What is the big deal?  Well, refugees are entitled to taxpayer subsidized airfare loans, subsidized housing, a case worker provided through the volag and funded by you, food stamps and other forms of welfare.    Other immigrants are on their own.

One bit of information I discovered is that the Cubans don’t even have to be outside of the country to seek asylum, we now process them in Cuba.  See this information.

A bucket of cold water on the International Rescue Committee

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

March 27th, 2013:  Now I know why everyone is here at this old post on the IRC—it’s because the IRC just hired former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband.  See my post today on the “dream job” which will allow Miliband to muck around in world affairs and collect a huge salary at the IRC—really a quasi-government agency, fueled with buckets of taxpayer dollars!  Type ‘International Rescue Committee’ (that once touted George Soros on its BOD) into our search function for more.

For everyone arriving here and looking for George Rupp’s salary, this is the latest I have:

The IRC is a $431 million dollar organization which gets $247 million from YOU, the US taxpayer (page 9 of their most recent Form 990, here).  And, guess where you have to go to find out the salaries being paid at the IRC?  Page 254 of their 299-page Form 990.  George Rupp, their head honcho makes a cool $447,432 in salary and benefits which beats Obama’s $400,000 salary!

March 26th, 2013:  For all of the readers arriving at this post today (for whatever reason) should know that Anne Richard cited below as the IRC’s Veep (a federal refugee contractor) has now revolved back into the government revolving door and heads the whole shebang as Asst. Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration.  Cool how that works (not!).

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the top ten volags resettling refugees in the US.   Yesterday the Mercury News published the usual puff piece on an IRC fundraising intiative they held recently in San Jose.

Then here comes Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees with a comment to throw some ice cold water on the warm and fuzzy piece:

Readers should know that the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has been mired for years with chronic problems in its refugee resettlement program in California and throughout the U.S.

At the IRC office in San Jose U.S. State Department inspectors found a refugee family living in a two-bedroom apartment with another family of three. Neither of the parents had received English lessons or job training and neither one of them had submitted a single job application. The family was barely scrapping by, and the father said that he was just waiting for IRC to find him a job and send him to English lessons. The government inspectors also met with two other IRC refugee client families – they reported that they had not received any furniture (basic household furniture is supposedly a “minimum requirement” of IRC’s refugee contracts with the government).

An inspection of the IRC office in San Francisco showed that early refugee employment outcomes to be a low 50% after one year – that is, only 50% of the refugees were employed after one year in the US, even though the US refugee program supposedly stresses early self-sufficiency for the refugees. Case files also contained a form which refugees were required to sign stating that they would accept “any job offered” (refugee resettlement agencies such as IRC receive public funds to refer refugees to jobs that will allow them to become economically self-sufficient, jobs which are sustainable – not simply to take any job offered). Home visits to the IRC San Francisco office’s refugee clients revealed one refugee family that reported that IRC had not given them any furniture. The parents were also not taking any English classes. Yet another refugee client reported that he had been placed in an apartment nearly bereft of furniture (with only a mattress and box springs, a small card table, and one folding metal chair).

The IRC needs to get its house in order.

Lest you think the IRC is a struggling outfit, here is what I wrote about them last October.  I was writing about how the volags create a kind of drumbeat by getting articles published about needy refugees.  Anne Richard (IRC vice president) had written such a piece about Iraqis that prompted my post.

… Anne Richard is a former employee of the US State Department having worked for Madeleine Albright (the revolving door in action). She makes a salary of between $100,000 and $200,000 (based on the salaries of other VP’s at IRC). But that is ’chump change’ compared to the IRC CEO’s salary. Dr. George Rupp, former Pres. of Columbia University, brings in a cool $357,657 a year salary according to the organization’s 2005 Form 990. Thats more than the Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court receive (no wonder public service is so unpopular).

The IRC is a $200 million plus a year organization that recieves close to half of its income from you, the taxpayer. Actually it was $88 million from government grants in 2005. The immigration industry is big business and in order to stay in business it needs to find “refugees” to move around the world.

See my post of June 23rd about a radio program from California and check out the ‘needy’ Iraqi refugees the IRC is bringing to a city near you.

Utah: Too many refugees? Just say, no! Wyoming did!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Utah is feeling the strain with too many refugees for the welfare system to handle. No sympathy here because you could just say, no! Tell the US State Department to tell their NGO contractors to cut the flow until you can get caught up with the needs of your own destitute people before they send you more from all corners of the world.  If you have trouble getting the State Department’s attention, then tell your Congressional delegation to get involved. 

Here is what the Salt Lake Tribune says today:

The dilemma has been raised on the governor’s advisory committee examining refugee services, said Michael Gallegos, director of the Salt Lake County Division of Community Resources and Development. “The question has come up: Can we turn the faucet down a little bit so we can get prepared and deal with issues already in front of us?” he said. “We don’t have the capacity to serve the refugees we have right now.”

Upon arrival, refugees are eligible for food stamps, cash assistance programs, Medicaid and other services, some of which are available for years, some for as little as eight months.

But after receiving initial housing assistance, refugee families join thousands of other Utahns hoping to obtain a federal subsidy that can significantly discount their rent. Many in this new wave of refugees will join more than 4,000 residents already on the Salt Lake City Housing Authority waiting list. They will have to wait at least two years to get a housing discount voucher

Frankly, I don’t get this. What is everyone so afraid of?  Afraid of looking “unwelcoming”?  Maybe someone will call you a racist?  There is nothing wrong with saying, we need a little breather here.  Wyoming does not participate in refugee resettlement and I don’t see that state maligned for the decision. 

Then this last line is really annoying.   

Refugees often feel helpless and alone when faced with a stack of critical documents linking them to food, medical care and other services .
“We’ve had people say, ‘It was better in the camps,’ ” Brown [Utah Refugee Services Director] said. 

We have from the earliest days of writing this blog advocated for the institution of a social and economic impact study of cities and states to help determine if a locale could handle new refugees.  If it was regularly updated better planning would surely result.

We have an extensive archive on Utah here.  Sadly Utah made the news a few months ago as the location where a little Burmese refugee girl was raped and murdered by another refugee in their housing complex.

Chris Coen weighs in on World Relief and Fort Wayne

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Earlier this month we reported on a volag “cat fight” going on in Ft. Wayne, IN.  It seems that volag World Relief (Corporation of National Association of Evangelicals) is trying to horn in on Catholic Charities lucrative territory in Ft. Wayne.  

As we have reported many times on this blog, these agencies are paid by the head to resettle refugees and so they are often competitive.   In the case of Ft. Wayne there are huge numbers of Burmese going to that city which has put out the refugee welcome mat.   Those refugees want to bring family members to Ft. Wayne, and refugees in camps in Thailand also request resettlement in Ft. Wayne because they want to live near people like themselves.

This week the Journal Gazette in Ft. Wayne published this letter (scroll down) from Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees: 

Refugee agencies rife with problems

I saw the editorial “Helping refugees”  regarding World Relief’s proposal to open an office in Fort Wayne. I don’t know whether its presence in Fort Wayne will be good for all or not, but my experience with World Relief has not been positive. I am an independent volunteer assisting refugees since 2001. I started a group to monitor the U.S. refugee resettlement program with a small group of volunteers in 2002.

We found refugees who were being neglected and abused by their World Relief agency in 2003-05 north of Tampa, Fla. That refugee program was subsequently shuttered by the Department of State in 2006 because of the neglect of the refugees.

World Relief also seems to have some irregularities in its accounting.

In fairness to World Relief, though, there seem to be quite a few irregularities and neglect of refugees in the U.S Refugee Resettlement Program. There is also extensive documentation of Catholic Charities and the other eight national refugee resettlement agencies neglecting refugees. The State Department has done very little to clean up the problems.

CHRISTOPHER COEN Friends of Refugees Minneapolis

I have on my desk a GAO (General Accounting Office) investigative report on World Relief from 2004.  The report is highly critical of the volag which could not properly account for over $2 million in federal funds.  I don’t know if they have cleaned up the shoddy accounting practices or not.

One interesting little bit in the report was that when refugee numbers declined dramatically in the years immediately following 9/11, World Relief spent more federal dollars than the GAO thought reasonable.  I’m going to bet however that all the volags had a shopping spree during this time because the federal government responded to their plea for funding at the same level as pre-September 11th because the volags complained that they needed to keep offices open and paying staff in anticipation of a return to the higher number of refugees.     Bottomline is that we taxpayers paid for all these non-profits to stay in business even though the refugee numbers were extremely low for a couple of years.

A related matter appeared in the Journal Gazette in mid-June.

The Health Department in Ft. Wayne has been financially strapped due to the huge number of refugees that need vacinations and treatment for HIV and TB.   Buried in another article about outdoor cooking rules is this information:

Waldron [Health Dept. Administrator] said the county commissioners have indicated they will approve $2 million toward relocation of the infectious disease clinic.

With the growing demands in refugee care, the health department needs additional space, and commissioners have asked the department to explore existing clinic sites or other buildings that could be used by the health department. 

But, what can you do?   As I said earlier Ft. Wayne has put out the word that it is a “welcoming” city.

Volunteers are good for refugees, while volag lets them down

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a story I missed from earlier in the month.   It’s a touching story from North Carolina about how a couple of women have been a Godsend to Burmese Karen Christian refugees who felt abandoned.   Read the whole story here.

There is a single sentence near the end of the article that caught the eye of one of our readers.

Paw Yeh shared how deserted her family felt when a refugee caseworker dropped them off at their Carrboro apartment with two days of rice and not even so much as a blanket.

Which volag left these poor scared people with some rice and nothing else?    Was it Lutheran Family Services, World Relief, or possibly the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, all paid government contractors operating in North Carolina?

Reforms needed

We see over and over again in differant parts of the country where the volags are actually discouraging citizen volunteer help with refugees while one of the important reforms we have advocated is increased involvement by the public with the care and assimilation of refugees, not less.    Had a church or other group been lined up to greet and care for this family they would never have been “dropped off” to an empty apartment.