My alerts are full to overflowing with news about when and where the Biden Administration is distributing the Afghan evacuees. The ‘how’ of it all is a bit tricky because the entire refugee program (the Afghans aren’t refugees!) is in disarray as I reported here a few days ago.
I picked the Nebraska story because I traveled through the state on my road trip to have a look at refugee overloaded towns in the west and midwest back in 2016 and I chuckled when I saw this news because I can’t see the Afghans rushing the slaughterhouse employment offices.
And, why should they? According to a report from John Binder, see it here, your tax dollars will flow to them either directly or through the ‘social safety net’ (aka welfare) you pay for.
Binder wraps his piece with this line:
The data revealed also that most Afghan arrivals in the U.S. live on welfare.
About 500 Afghan refugees have arrived in Nebraska; resettlement agencies swamped
The number of Afghan evacuees coming to Nebraska has grown to over 1,000, and about 500 of them have already reached the state.
So far, 469 people evacuated from Afghanistan since the nation’s Aug. 15 collapse have arrived in Nebraska, or are on their way, from U.S. military bases around the nation.
Another 635 Afghan evacuees destined for Nebraska were still at bases, Nebraska State Refugee Coordinator Sara Bockelman said Wednesday. [See her Linked in page —ed]
This is the image on Bockelman’s Linked in page. It appears to be one of those overloaded migrant invasion ships in the Mediterranean. Hopefully not arriving in Nebraska anytime soon!Bockelman
That’s in addition to a smaller, undetermined number of people who came directly to Omaha from Afghanistan or otherwise have ended up in Nebraska.
Bockelman, speaking to a meeting of the Omaha Refugee Task Force, said a total of 1,104 Afghan evacuees are currently expected in Nebraska.
Initially, it was projected that about 655 Afghan evacuees would be placed in Nebraska. But officials said all along that they expected that number to grow.
About 300 of the Afghan evacuees so far have been placed in metropolitan Omaha by Lutheran Family Services and the Refugee Empowerment Center, the two resettlement agencies that place people in Omaha. Others have been placed in Lincoln and Council Bluffs.
To give you some idea of the rapid pace at which people are coming to Nebraska, Lutheran Family Services received 92 Afghan evacuees, including 39 school-age children, in November alone, an official of the agency said at Wednesday’s meeting. And the Refugee Empowerment Center was expecting 20 people to arrive in Omaha on Wednesday.
[….]
Because of the rush of evacuations, a lot of the Afghans of working age are coming without the employment documents that most refugees have when they arrive. So they will need financial help for longer than the usually expected three months until they can start working.
Useful nugget of info here…
Meanwhile, it appears that the pace of Afghan evacuees’ arrival to Nebraska will only pick up. The federal government has set a deadline of Feb. 15 for all people at U.S. military bases to be sent to cities around the nation. Officials at two of those bases have set an earlier deadline, the end of this year.
Guess they will have to be clearing out Ft. Dix in New Jersey pretty quick. Again, don’t miss Breitbarton that ‘welcoming’ arrival location.
FAIR also has more newson your hard earned tax dollars (or borrowed Chinese bucks) going to the Afghan relocation to a town near you.
Endnote: I think I have the spam blocked for now that was overwhelming the comment option here at RRW. You might want to check it out for me and see if you can leave a comment.
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting.” [From the Biden Administration]
Angie Plummer, Ohio resettlement contractor
Hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving with your friends and family. No promises, but I will try to post from time to time so I won’t have too big a gap in my now nearly 15 year running catalog of ills surrounding the US Refugee Admissions Program.
Reminder: there are over 9,000 posts archived here at RRW and the search function works pretty well. Choose a few key words and see what is here.
You surely know by now that the tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees are being treated like legitimate refugees and have swamped the refugee program causing complaints to surface from other ethnic groups and from contractors*** who do not want the Afghans to completely wipe out the chances of others, like the Somali starring in thisColumbus Dispatchreport, getting their extended family members into the US.
Biden’s pause on refugee resettlement worries agencies, advocates in Greater Columbus
Aden Hassan wants his mother here. He blamed Trump for not moving faster and now he blames Biden.
Biden has paused the regular resettlement program in order to accommodate the Afghans, many of whom have not been vetted and likely will never be legal refugees.
Columbus is a top Somali resettlement target city
Angie Plummer, executive director of local refugee resettlement agency Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) [CRIS is a subcontractor of Church World Service—ed], which resettled Hassan, said there’s no reason why Afghans and refugees from other countries can’t be helped simultaneously.
“When we were asked do we want to pause (refugee) arrivals, I said no because it’s apples and oranges,” Plummer said. “We don’t think that it’s necessary. It’s not a competition for resources to have these folks come.”
[….]
“I fear there’s only so much bandwidth and that it’s shifted to focusing on Afghans, and we can’t take our eyes off these other crises that are happening,” Plummer said. “We want to serve the Afghans well, but we also feel committed to serving those people whose cases we started and who got the shaft under Trump.”
In light of the pause, refugee resettlement advocates are lamenting the fact that Biden did not prioritize rebuilding the refugee resettlement program as soon as he was inaugurated in January.
Plummer said she is concerned because the program’s capacity is still being rebuilt after Trump’s administration decimated its infrastructure.
“Any stopping and starting creates pains,” Plummer said. “I worry about that. Even if their intentions are to try to exempt out certain groups, we should be trying to ramp it back up and help this machinery work again.”
[….]
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting,” Plummer said. “I really thought some wrongs would be righted and they haven’t been, and it feels like they’ve been shuffled down the road.”
Meredith Owen, Church World Service
The fact that the administration hasn’t prioritized restoring resettlement capacity sooner makes Meredith Owen, director of policy and advocacy at the national refugee resettlement agency Church World Service (CWS), furious.
“The problem is you never want to undermine or harm one refugee population in the name of another,” Owen said.
But, that is exactly what is happening. Muslim Afghans are apparently Biden’s priority. There is much more, visit theColumbus Dispatch for additional details.
*** For new readers, these are the nine major federal resettlement agencies which have contracts with the US State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement to place refugees (find housing!) and get them signed up for their welfare benefits, their medical care and get the refugee kids in school.
If you have an agency working near you and it doesn’t have the same name as one of the nine below, check its website carefully and you will most likely find it is a subcontractor of one of the nine (like CRIS is a CWS subcontractor).
Poor mouthing….
Know that when they “got the shaft” under the Trump Administration they were fundraising on their plight something they can’t do now that their guy is in charge of the taxpayer portion of their money stream.
So good ol’ Joe isn’t going to be able to reach his 125,000 refugee admissions ceiling the way things are going. (Most of the arriving Afghans are not legitimate refugees.)
A couple of weeks ago I checked the numbers at the severely limited Refugee Processing Center data base and noted that in the first month of the new fiscal year (October), Biden had admitted only 400 refugees from parts of the world other than Afghanistan.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not crying about that paltry number, but I am really amazed by the dearth of criticism from the contractors and their leftist media chorus. Oh, they are critical, but the tone of their criticism is muted apparently to protect their man in the White House, you know, the guy who got 81 million votes!
Muslim Afghans crowd out other refugees
However, I suspect there is one group of Americans who are jumping for joy and that would be CAIR members and other Islamists because the refugee program is not admitting a wide variety of ‘persecuted’ other religions, namely Christians, as the Afghans (demanding stuff) are virtually all Muslims.
(See the Center for Immigration Studies 2021 Refugee Resettlement Roundup and note that we are no longer permitted to see data on the religions of refugees. We can’t entirely blame Biden for that since it was the Trump administration that closed much of the data base to the public.)
So, I didn’t get around to writing my post on the Biden refugee slowdown, but Voxdid and I am posting it here because I doubt many of you bother reading Vox. I don’t either, but it appeared in my alerts, so here it is below.
First, however, you might be amused to see what Voxsaid about me in 2017:
Why Biden is struggling to revive the US refugee program
After the US refugee program hit historic lows during Donald Trump’s administration, President Joe Biden attempted to revive the program by raising the annual cap on admissions to 125,000.
Despite these efforts, the US is still not taking in more refugees.
Tens of thousands of Afghans have arrived in the US since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The urgent need — and the lasting damage done by the Trump administration — has overtaxed a refugee program that has slowed to a crawl in recent months.
In fiscal year 2021, which ended in September, the US resettled the lowest number of refugees in the history of its refugee program. Recently, the State Department reported the US resettled just 401 refugees in October, down from 3,774 the month before, one month after Biden’s new cap went into effect.
A State Department spokesperson told Vox that the agency had temporarily halted refugee admissions as of October 29 through January 11, 2022, with some exceptions.
At the current pace, the US won’t come within striking distance of the 125,000 cap by the end of the fiscal year — and, given the State Department’s new refugee guidance, it’s unlikely that refugee agencies will be able to expand capacity to ramp up that pace soon.
There are legitimate reasons why the recent resettlement numbers are so low. The US government and refugee agencies have been primarily focused on resettling Afghans who fled their home country amid the US withdrawal. And the entire refugee apparatus — from the federal officials who assess refugee claims to the agencies that help with resettlement — shrank significantly during the Trump administration due to severe funding cuts. [Nah! I told you herethat they all didn’t take a financial “beating.” —ed]
About 70,000 Afghans have been admitted to the US on “parole,” a temporary form of humanitarian relief that allows them to apply for work permits and shields them from deportation for a period of two years. [Then what???—ed]
Keep reading and look around at news stories (my inbox is full of them) on the refugee program and how the Afghan flood has created chaos especially as housing is limited, jobs are limited and welfare is limited and the contractors are scrambling to cope with the chaos Biden (their man) has handed them.
For new readers, here are the contractors that monopolize all refugee resettlement in America:
In an article, one of MANY I am seeing, refugee contractors are complaining that they can’t find enough housing for the Afghan evacuees most states, including New Hampshire, are welcoming.
Ten days ago, I reported on the lack of affordable housing for Biden’s newest wave of ‘new Americans,’ see here:
I found this particular story at the Concord Monitor interesting, and useful for readers, because it demonstrates the web of resettlement agencies and sub-agencies that may have you confused.
Agency struggles to find housing for Afghan evacuees coming to New Hampshire
The agency responsible for coordinating the arrival of Afghan evacuees to New Hampshire is struggling to find places for them to live just as they are set to arrive in the Concord area.
Memory lane! Ascentria (formerly Lutheran Social Services of New England) made news here at RRW when its then new President and CEO, Angela Bovill stated publicly that refugee resettlement was a “business”—a business that needed federal cash to survive. We knew that, but it was a big deal when Bovill admitted it. Just checked their recent IRS Form 990*** and wow! Bovill pulls down an annual salary package of $300,000! Doing well by doing good! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/07/19/refugee-contractors-increasingly-admitting-they-cant-survive-without-your-money/
Crissie Ferrara, the program manager for services for New Americans at Ascentria Care Alliance, said a mother with five daughters will be moving soon, and likely staying with another family. Two individual men will also likely be arriving in Concord soon. Ferrara’s organization is responsible for finding housing for refugees and humanitarian evacuees, like the ones coming from Afghanistan.
Ferrara said that Ascentria has received an outpouring of support from people willing to share rooms in their homes with those coming from Afghanistan. Ideally, new families and individuals would be able to have the autonomy and independence of renting their own private housing, located near services in Concord.
The organization’s online form for landlords or property owners who want to provide housing to Afghan arrivals in New Hampshire and Massachusetts explains that independent affordable apartment housing options will be prioritized over people offering to host people in their homes. [What the heck! Let people take them to their homes! After all, what could go wrong!—ed]
Ferrara said Ascentria has suggested that single men without family in the United States be sent to [white rural!–ed] New Hampshire first, including men who may have made friends with another individual during the eviction [evacuation?] process.
See that there are additional ‘non-profits’ in on the action.
Use my search window for over two dozen post on New Hampshire—the ‘Live Free or Die’ state.
*** Most recent IRS Form 990 is here. Take a look at those salaries beginning on page 7! As I have said before, tell your kids to grow up to be executives at non-profit do-gooder religious charities!
It drives the open borders refugee contractors crazy because they have never gotten a foothold in Wyoming!
They have been trying for years to open Wyoming’s borders to the world, but the state has resisted for forty years as the only state in the nation that never set up a refugee program and never invited a refugee contractor*** in to do their dirty work.
The most recent effort to shove diversity down the throats of Wyoming’s mostly rural population came in 2014—an effort that was thwarted by vocal hardworking citizen activists. (I met some of those citizens on my 2016 road trip through the West and Midwest.)
I wrote extensively about efforts to bring a refugee office to the state in a series of posts. The topic of refugee resettlement became a major issue in a gubernatorial race on-going at that time.
Serious students of the refugee program should have a look at my Wyoming archive by clicking here.
By the way, they did break Montanaa few years ago and Idaho is being radically changed through refugee resettlement.
Thanks to reader Edward for sending a link and tipping me offto John Binder’s report on the latest push.
WaPo: Diversify ‘Overwhelmingly White and Christian’ Wyoming with Afghans
The Washington Post is promoting a proposal to diversify the “overwhelmingly white and Christian” state of Wyoming by resettling Afghans in the region.
As part of President Joe Biden’s massive resettlement operation out of Afghanistan, his administration plans to resettle at least 95,000 Afghans across 46 states. The only states or territories not taking Afghans are Hawaii, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Washington, DC.
Wyoming is the only state in the nation where the federal government does not annually resettle refugees. That is mostly because none of the nine taxpayer-funded refugee contractors have offices in the state.
Believe it or not, when the Refugee Act of 1980 (Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter) became law, states could choose whether to become a resettlement state.
Wyoming (wisely) managed to stay out of the resettlement system all these years and that rankles those who are working to change America by changing the people.
In a piece titled “One state has never taken in refugees. Will it welcome Afghans?,” the Post explores a proposal by a local Episcopal church in Casper, Wyoming, to take in Afghans.
The Post interviewed a series of individuals for the piece, including those who said Afghan resettlement in Wyoming could “help with diversification” and break from their “conservative beliefs.”
For new readers here are the nine major refugee contractors financed by the US taxpayer who are now busy placing Afghans (who are not refugees!) in cities and towns from sea to shining sea.
They operate with the assistance of at least 100 subcontractors all linked back to one of the nine motherships.
The nine along with the US State Department determine target resettlement sites.
A couple of weeks ago I checked the numbers at the severely limited Refugee Processing Center data base and noted that in the first month of the new fiscal year (October), Biden had admitted only 400 refugees from parts of the world other than Afghanistan.
Believe it or not, when the Refugee Act of 1980 (Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter) became law, states could choose whether to become a resettlement state.