More than half of refugees in US receive food stamps

08/14/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is from a recent Center for Immigration Studies report by Jason Richwine who analyzed the most recent Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Report to Congress.

Screenshot (620) — https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/arc_16_508.pdf

The news comes at a time when the President is deciding how many refugees could be admitted to the US in FY19 which begins on October first.

John Binder at Breitbart penned a short piece on the CIS study entitled:

More Than Half of Foreign Refugees Are on Taxpayer-Funded Food Stamps

More than half of the annual inflow of foreign refugees arriving in the United States are on food stamps, a government report reveals.

Since 2008, as Breitbart News reported, the U.S. has permanently resettled more than 1.7 million foreign nationals and refugees through a variety of humanitarian programs like the Special Immigrant Juveniles and the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. This is a foreign population larger than Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — a city with more than 1.5 million residents.

An annual report by the Office of Refugee Resettlement was analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jason Richwine, in which the analyst revealed that about 56 percent of households headed by foreign refugees who arrived in the U.S. between 2011 and 2015 are using taxpayer-funded food stamps.

Nearly 30 percent of refugees received cash welfare of some sort, while 34 percent of refugees 18-years-old or older said they had no health insurance. Of the refugees who said they did have health insurance, about 50 percent said they were either on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance, both of which are taxpayer-funded.

More here.

Frankly I suspect the numbers are much worse.

The sampling used by the Office of Refugee Resettlement is tiny and dependent on how many of the refugees they can find via phone calls and how many will even participate by answering questions if they are found.

A large number are not even participating in the survey because of language barriers.

We have told you about the Annual Reports for years. Here is just one post in 2013 where we reported that food stamp use was 70% in Obama’s first year in office—2009!

Even in spite of the possible under counting in the welfare use sections, the reports are treasure troves of information for those of you trying to better understand how the refugee program works and what it might be doing to your towns and cities.

One of the things you will see in the reports is information on how many other grants and goodies the contractors receive over and above their per refugee head payment.

The US is no doubt importing poverty, something that the designers of the original Refugee Act of 1980 promised would not happen.

And, if you are saying to yourselves that new immigrants aren’t supposed to be eligible for welfare, remember that prohibition does not apply to refugees!

Below is the table from the 2016 Annual Report:

Screenshot (621) — SNAP is of course food stamps. Note that nearly 20% receive Social Security disability benefits—yikes!

Screenshot (622) — Next after food stamps, taxpayers fund medical care for a very large percentage of refugees.

Just so you know we admitted 69,933 refugees to the US in FY2015 and for the whole accounting period above (FY11 through FY15) the total was 324,508 according to data at Wrapsnet.

Cutting numbers is a good start and we applaud the President, but the whole program must be reformed.

Do it now!

Contact the White House and tell the President what you think! See contact link in right hand sidebar here at RRW.

ORR Annual Reports to Congress are very useful

05/17/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Someone asked me today where to find the number of refugees who were resettled in each state in the US over the years and it reminded me that we have many many new readers every day who are just beginning to try to get a handle on how the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program works.

Very useful documents are the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports to Congress*** which are full of all sorts of data, not just the statistics on how many refugees were resettled in your state, but they include data on welfare use, employment, housing, and medical assistance, among other things.
They also include reports from the VOLAGs (the federal contractors) and discussions of special problems that some refugee populations encounter here. And, of course there is information about the myriad grants these contractors receive each year.
I can’t say it enough, but knowledge is power. If you want to begin to understand what is happening in your towns and cities, start by looking at one of these documents.
Click here for a list of available reports.
By the way, the Refugee Act of 1980 specifies that this report should be completed and sent to Congress by the end of January following the close of the fiscal year. Thus, the 2015 Annual Report should be available, but they are behind in producing it.
So what else is new! At one point a few years ago, they were three years behind!
For new readers we have a category entitled ‘where to find information,’ and you might want to have a look at it from time to time.
P.S. I just spent a few minutes examining Table 1 (of the Appendix) in the FY2009 Annual Report where it cataloged how many refugees and from what countries were resettled in each state between 1983 and 2009. Wow! Amazing!
***This is not to be confused with another report to Congress that accompanies the President’s proposal for the upcoming fiscal year. That report also has much useful data but is not as comprehensive as the reports found here.

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.

Senator Sessions wants Office of Refugee Resettlement to provide missing annual report

12/05/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Shaking my head, where were you guys when I needed you years ago!

Marsha+Blackburn+Jeff+Sessions+dLXpCJOWnJbm — Senator Jeff Sessions (center) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn sent a letter to HHS Secretary this week looking for ORR annual reports to Congress.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS) is required by law to provide annual reports to Congress and for years and years we squawked about the fact that for years (years!) they were way behind. In fact by the time I testified at a State Department hearing in 2012 they were 3 years behind. My complaints went on for years and for awhile they were starting to catch up. (I did complain to the House immigration subcommittee too!).
I know, I’m grateful that the Congress is finally scrutinizing the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program, but it was lonely there for awhile!
Here is Leo Hohmann at WND yesterday on the latest from Senator Sessions and others:

Several GOP members of Congress led by U.S. Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., have placed the Obama administration on notice that it is in violation of federal law with regard to the program that resettles foreign refugees in 180 U.S. cities and towns.

Sessions, along with Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Lamar Smith, R-Texas, released a letter Thursday that was sent the previous day to Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Burwell.

The Obama administration has said it will resettle 85,000 foreign refugees in the U.S. in the current fiscal year, followed by 100,000 in the next year. It has also asked for a substantial increase in funding for the program.

But the law requires annual reports on how those resettlements are carried out.

“Failure to provide Congress with required information on the resettlement of foreign nationals within the United States violates both the law and the public trust,” Sessions said in a statement. “These are grave matters.”

The letter accuses the administration of violating federal law by failing to submit an annual report to Congress on the activities of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates within Burwell’s department and doles out welfare benefits to refugees.

Continue reading here.

A trip down memory lane…..

Limon testifying — In 2013, my research indicated that those annual reports to Congress began going off track during the tenure of Lavinia Limon as Director of the ORR under Bill Clinton. Today Limon heads up one of the resettlement contracting agencies—USCRI.

This is what I said in 2012 at a US State Department scoping meeting (Ten Reasons there should be a moratorium on refugee resettlement):

5) The agencies, specifically the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), is in complete disarray as regards its legally mandated requirement to report to Congress every year on how refugees are doing and where the millions of tax dollars are going that run the program. The last (and most recent) annual report to be sent to Congress is the 2008 report—so they are out of compliance for fiscal years 2009, 2010 and 2011. A moratorium is necessary in order for the ORR to bring its records entirely up-to-date. Additionally, there needs to be an adequate tracking system designed to gather required data—frankly some of the numbers reported for such measures of dependence on welfare as food stamp usage, cash assistance and employment status are nothing more than guesses. (The lack of reports for recent years signals either bureaucratic incompetence and disregard for the law, or, causes one to wonder if there is something ORR is hiding.)

You might want to visit all of my ten reasons for a moratorium because they are as valid today as they were in 2012!

In 2013…..
I did further analysis of the annual reports and if they were sent to Congress according to law (here in March of 2013) and this is what I found:

My original plan was to start researching at 1990 and move toward the present time to see when they went off track and began breaking the law. It didn’t take long—1993!

So, I went back to 1980 and sure enough through the entire Reagan Presidency and the George HW Bush Presidency from 1980 to 1992 those Annual Reports were right on time—submitted to Congress on January 31st of the following year.

But, you know what the little cheaters did beginning with the 1993 report (and continued to do for the next 20 years)—they stopped putting publication dates on them. Oh, they had FY 1993 on the cover, but no information about when that actually went to Congress—heck it could have been three years late then!

So, who was the Director of the ORR during Bill Clinton’s time in office?

Lavinia Limon who now heads up one of the nine major federal contractors—the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants—was in charge of getting those reports to Congress.

For all of you especially in ‘Pockets of Resistance’ check out the annual reports (the list is here). They are a treasure-trove of information on the program.
Update: Re-posted my Ten reasons, here.

How to find those darn numbers! Found it! 7,600 Somalis to America in 2013

09/07/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update: Almost 1,000 additional Somalis admitted to the US in the past month, here. The number for FY2014 is now 8,278.

Almost every day someone asks us—where do I find numbers for this group of refugees admitted to the US, or that group. Let me tell you it isn’t easy!

This morning I was on the hunt for how many Somalis we admitted to the US in fiscal year 2013.

Eskinder Negash (right) Director of ORR and Larry Bartlett (left) Director of Refugee Admissions of the US State Department addressing an audience in “welcoming” Portland, Maine. Maine is a Somali resettlement site. http://www.pressherald.com/2013/01/30/growth-of-refugee-community-attributed-to-welcoming-city_2013-01-30/

We know that for fiscal year 2014, through July 31st (in ten months), we have admitted 7,326. You can always check this site at WRAPSnet.org for the on-going resettlement in a given year.

Update: Here in Statistical Abstracts you can learn about how many refugees/asylees etc. came to your state in FY2013.

The handiest place for all numbers is the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Annual Reports to Congress, here. However, since they are always behind in producing those, the most recent numbers are not available to us or to Congress. The numbers are in tables at the end of each report.

Another good source is the Annual Flow Reports from the Department of Homeland Security. Here is one for 2012.

You can find some information at the Migration Policy Institute (a pro-immigration ‘think tank’), here.

Then there is the massive data base at Homeland Security’s Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, here.

Where did I finally find the number I was looking for?

I found it in the text of a year-end wrap-up which we previously posted by the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Eskinder Negash, who said this on December 20, 2013 (posted here for the benefit of our new readers). Emphasis is mine:

Two thousand thirteen was another busy year for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Despite an extended moratorium on overseas refugee arrivals in October, Fiscal Year 2013 brought fairly steady arrivals each month, across all categories.

The largest group was refugees, with the United States welcoming refugees from 65 countries across the globe this past year. The highest number of overseas arrivals represented a slight switch from those of the past few years, with nearly 19,500 Iraqi refugee admissions and 16,300 Burmese refugees accounting for more than half of all refugee arrivals. They were followed by Bhutanese (9,100), Somali (7,600) and Cuban refugees (4,200), with Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia rounding out rest of the top ten admissions groups in FY2013.

The overall population served by ORR and its partners, however, grew to a projected 143,000 new arrivals in Fiscal Year 2013, including almost 72,000 refugees and Special Immigrant Visa holders, an estimated 46,000 asylees and Cuban/Haitian Entrants and Parolees; more than 500 Victims of Trafficking, and nearly 25,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC).

Negash: The best news! They are voting!

The numbers only tell part of the story: most of the 143,000 people ORR served last year are on a path to U.S. citizenship that began the day they arrived. Former refugees, asylees, and UAC are making positive changes in communities across the country—and will continue to do so throughout their lives—opening businesses, buying homes and raising families, and voting (and running!) in local elections. Three former refugees ran for public office in multi-cultural Clarkston, Georgia this past November—and for the first time in the city’s history, voters elected a refugee to a seat on the City Council.

Read it all.

We have two categories, now very full, to help you find reports, documents, statistics etc. One is ‘Where to find information’ and the other is ‘Refugee statistics.’

See also one of our most read posts from the last seven years, ‘How did we get so many Somali refugees…’ I put those numbers together by poring over each annual report that had become available. By the way, keep in mind that most Somalis in the US today came as refugees or are the children of refugees.