Tag: Arkansas

Republican Governors who Consented to Accept Refugees in FY2020 Scrambling to Explain

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 5 Comments

I can’t possibly write an all-encompassing post about all the feedback I’m getting from concerned citizens who are hopping mad that their Republican governor foolishly (and prematurely) jumped on the bandwagon to accept more refugees for their states just so the nine federal contractors*** could get their requests for MONEY into the US State Department ASAP.

Here are the 19 Rs who have thumbed their nose at the President’s effort to rein-in the UN-driven Refugee Admissions Program.

The first wave of governors to pander to the Left are marked in orange, and the second wave is in hot pink.

If your governor hasn’t caved yet, keep up the pressure.  Florida, Georgia and Texas are the big targets for Open Borders Inc.

 

Last night John Binder at Breitbart published a letter from Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson to his legislators who want answers.

Since most of the governors are completely unfamiliar with this 4-decades-old program, we can only assume that someone is feeding them talking points like those in the memo Binder published.

Go here to read it all.

Exclusive: Memo Reveals How GOP Governors are Pitching Refugee Resettlement to Opponents

I want to just focus on a couple of points in the governor’s attempt to explain himself.  First this:

Refugees are eligible for 36 months of case management assistance and financial assistance when they first arrive through a combination of federal and private funds, which Canopy manages. They do not receive any other special financial assistance aside from typical public assistance available to other low-income Arkansans (Medicaid, SNAP, TANF etc.). 100% of refugee households have seen reductions or terminations of this public assistance because of income within the first 6 months of arrival in the state.

LOL!  They don’t get any public assistance other than Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), TANF, etc!  What is the etc.?

100% have seen reductions in their welfare use?  Where is the data governor? Or is the governor just parroting what the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service SUBCONTRACTOR is telling him.

I also want to bring to your attention this section of his talking points memo.

Who will be placed in Arkansas?

African nations and those countries in which the United States has engaged in military actions and cooperating nationals are at risk.

I would be asking the governor which African nations?  Somalia? And, then he is lumping the Special Immigrant Visas (mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq, but possibly soon Syria) in with the regular refugees.  I told you here that the Trump administration is predicting 10,000 SIVs on top of the 18.000 regular refugees for 2020.

And, get this!  According to the Funding Guidance I’ve been yakking about for days, we will be taking another 10,000 SIVs from Iraq and Afghanistan (maybe Syria!) in the 2020 fiscal year. That is over and above the 18,000 ceiling that the President determined for the year.

The FY 2020 ceiling for refugee admissions established by the President, after consultation with Congress, is 18,000.  In addition, applicants should include 10,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients in their planning. Applicants should assume similar admissions and recipient numbers for performance periods beyond FY 2020.

Note that last bit—the contractors should expect similar numbers beyond 2020.

One more thing, don’t miss LIRS getting direct payola from Tyson Foods!

Starting later today (I hope), I’m starting a new series of posts I’ll call ‘Knowledge is Power’ to go back for many new readers and help you get up to speed on how the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program operates and how you can find out more about your state’s involvement (or lack of involvement) with the program.

 

***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.

A ‘religious’ message from CWS one of three federally funded contractors suing to stop the President’s effort to reform the UN-driven Refugee Admissions Program.

And, they do not limit their advocacy toward only legal immigration programs, but are heavily involved in supporting the lawlessness at our borders.

The question isn’t as much about refugees per se, but about who is running federal immigration policy now and into the future?  

(I plan to say this once a day from now on!)

I continue to argue that these nine contractors are the heart of America’s Open Borders movement and thus there can never be long-lasting reform of US immigration policy when these nine un-elected phony non-profits are paid by the taxpayers to work as community organizers pushing an open borders agenda.

Suck-up Letters from Republican Governors Causing me to Start Swearing

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 2 Comments

And, if governors like Arkansas’s Asa Hutchinson are an example, their Leftwing Refugee contractors aren’t even very appreciative of the caving that one Republican governor after the other is doing—-I suspect at the behest of Secretary of State Pompeo who is (I believe) attempting to undermine his nemesis in the White House Stephen Miller (more on that later).

Hutchinson abandons the President on refugee program! Caves to the Religious Left! (Or was it to Tyson Foods?). He could have kept his letter simple, but oh no, he had to demonstrate his ignorance and suck-up to the ‘religious’ Leftwingers in his state.

As the Republicans are lining up to oppose the President (yes, that is what they are doing!), I said I wasn’t going to write about each capitulation, but a few might be worth it to demonstrate the governors’ ignorance of the refugee program that Trump wants to seriously bring under control.

This just in: 15 Republican Governors have turned against the President so far!  See if yours is one of them!

 

Check out Hutchinson’s ‘kiss-ass’ comments at Arkansas Online:

At least he could have been honest and mentioned that he has to keep Tyson Foods happy (See Lutherans in Arkansas get a $50,000 grant from Tyson Foods!) just like ol’Bill Clinton did when he supplied Big Meat with refugee labor.

Refugee order appreciated, state advocates say

FAYETTEVILLE — A leader with Canopy Northwest Arkansas on Tuesday welcomed Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s executive order that Arkansas will continue to accept legally immigrating refugee families.

Faint praise for the governor who capitulated:

“I don’t want to make it more than it is, which is that we will continue to do what we are doing, but we appreciate the governor’s support,” said Clint Schnekloth, chairman of the board of Canopy, a refugee assistance nonprofit group.

Clint Schnekloth

An executive order from President Donald Trump allows states to refuse further refugees. The U.S. Department of State coordinates refugee relocation with nine charitable organizations [federal contractors—ed]*** through agreements [aka federal contracts—ed] with the government.

The Northwest Arkansas group worked with two of those nine groups — Catholic Charities Immigration Services and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service — to get the region accepted in 2016 as a refugee resettlement site. [This was the period at the end of the Obama Administration when his State Department was rapidly expanding resettlement sites—ed].

“Previously, there was no coordination with the state and little awareness,” Hutchinson said in a statement Tuesday. “Under the new executive order, the state will have more visibility. The approval will need to be each year, and the state will be able to assure the refugees are assimilating into the community and have access to jobs, education and job training. I have confidence that local communities will provide the support necessary, but we will be able to monitor.”

WTH the state will be able to assure the refugees are assimilating. Really? Monitor how? And, if you, governor, somehow figure out that they are not assimilating will you have the backbone to say NO next year?

States have until Jan. 21 to declare whether they will allow placement of refugee families through the federal admissions program under the executive order. More than 30 governors have agreed to accept refugees, according to The Associated Press.  [Only a tiny fraction of the consent letters have been received by the State Department as of this writing.  What! bureaucrats on vacation?—ed]

[….]

Schnekloth said the Canopy group appreciates the degree of support and clarity in Hutchinson’s decision to beat the deadline by a month and to reiterate the importance of helping legal refugees. The governor announced his decision Monday in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Dumb Asa didn’t have to send any consent for at least another month and the squishy language of the funding guidance allows even more foot-dragging by governors beyond January 21, 2020.

The Contractors wanted quick consents so they can prepare their requests for YOUR money by January 21st.

“While we fully support control of our borders and oppose illegal immigration, we also value the contribution of immigrants and understand the importance of America continuing to be a welcoming nation for those truly seeking refuge and following the legal path to our land,” reads Hutchinson’s letter to the secretary. [Contractor boiler-plate language!—ed]

“To that end, I have received confirmation from local municipalities, members of the faith-based community, as well as members of the nonprofit community, confirming they will coordinate support and facilitate employment opportunities for refugees that are approved for relocation to Arkansas,” the letter says. [More contractor boiler-plate language—ed]  

How does Hutchinson plan to monitor the “faith-based community” to make sure they will support and find jobs for refugees?

And, in reference to his earlier opposition to the Obama plan for a mass movement of Syrians to America, he says this:

The family-by-family relocation by the admissions program is not the same, and recent efforts by the administration “enhancing security checks to ensure proper screenings are carried out” in the program are appreciated, the governor’s letter says.

It is the same program Obama used! 

There is nothing new because the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program HAS NOT BEEN REFORMED.  And, in this, one small effort by Trump to rein-in the dysfunctional program, we have spineless governors kissing-up to ungrateful (anti-Trump) Lefties.

 

***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.  For decades they have decided in secrecy where to place refugees and they don’t want to lose that power because even as they pontificate about their religious convictions and humanitarian zeal, they are Leftwing political activist groups working to change America by changing the people and using your money to do it!

And, they do not limit their advocacy toward only legal immigration programs, but are heavily involved in supporting the lawlessness at our borders.

The question isn’t as much about refugees per se, but about who is running federal immigration policy now and into the future?  

(I plan to say this once a day from now on!)

I continue to argue that these nine contractors are the heart of America’s Open Borders movement and thus there can never be long-lasting reform of US immigration policy when these nine un-elected phony non-profits are paid by the taxpayers to work as community organizers pushing an open borders agenda.

Do Arkansas college students understand that refugees are there to supply Tyson Foods with cheap labor?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor:  There was an announcement posted here for an Arkansas college event for Canopy NWA to promote refugee resettlement in the state. The original photo was lost when the speech police had RRW removed from WordPress this past summer. 

 

Canopy NWA is a relatively new subcontractor of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), their ‘mothership’ headquartered in Baltimore, MD. We told you about Canopy here last October.

We told you here this October, on October 24th, that LIRS has signed a contract with JBS Swift the foreign-owned globalist meatpacking giant whose North American headquarters are in Greeley, CO to find, and help them retain, cheap and compliant refugee labor for its plants in four states.

But that isn’t the only arrangement that LIRS has made with globalist corporations—they have an agreement with Tyson Foods whose headquarters are in guess where? Arkansas! (Original home of Bill and Hill and cattle futures—remember that!)

We were able to obtain this confirmation, that yes, LIRS, has a deal with Tyson Foods for a $50,000 pilot project to teach “financial literacy” to refugees, whatever the heck that means!

See here:

From: Nina Zelic
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:03:02 PM
To: Linda Hartke
Subject: Tyson Foods–good news!

Dear Linda,
This evening we received some good news from Tyson Foods regarding our proposal for a pilot financial literacy project in northwest Arkansas/Missouri. Our proposal was accepted and we will be moving forward with Tyson. This is incredible news for LIRS because the clear goal of Tyson Foods is to provide financial literacy in all of their plants and to all of their team members (over 10,000) nationwide.

To quote Tyson:

“We are pleased to announce that your organization has been selected as our financial literacy award recipient. We want to formally congratulate your team on an exceptional proposal. In particular, we were impressed with the cultural and gender sensitivities it included, the overall structure of your pilot, and the local partnership networks you were able to identify. We were also encouraged to learn about your organizational experience working with one of our major competitors – JBS. We hope this will give LIRS insight into our specific industry and will help you maximize programmatic traction early on.”

Our proposal would not have been possible without Kirsten’s singular efforts, and finance’s inputs. Also, Canopy of NWA, LFS-RM, and LSS-MN played roles.

Thank you,
Nina
—
Nina Zelic
Director for Refugee Services | NZelic@lirs.org | 410-230-2765 |
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service
700 Light Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21230 | www.lirs.org

Note that Canopy of NWA helped make this possible along with Lutheran Family Service-Rocky Mountains, and our old pals in Minnesota—-Lutheran Social Service-MN!

LOL! I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a small price to pay for Tyson Foods to have an inside track with a resettlement contractor who might then alert them to fresh batches of refugees (aka laborers) entering the US.

By the way, I did try to reach Ms. Zelic by e-mail, but never got a response perhaps because we hear the Baltimore office is going through some tough times?

So, would someone please tell those well-intentioned students that they are shilling for the globalists—-BIG MEAT! (and BIG CHICKEN!).

Do none of the privileged students at the University of Arkansas have friends back home who would love to work in a meat plant for good wages—the kind of wages meatpackers did pay before they discovered immigrant labor?

Three Arkansas members of Congress question new resettlement plan for Fayetteville area

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Fayetteville, Arkansas is one of the newest resettlement sites approved by the US State Department to accommodate the large number of refugees that Barack Obama has proposed for FY2017. We previously learned that there are 47 new sites, most chosen in secrecy.  Below is the list of those we have heard about so far.***
From Talk Business & Politics:

Canopy Northwest Arkansas received final approval from the State Department on Sept. 30 and is waiting for the assignment of its first refugee family, which could come as early as mid-November.

steve-womack
Real test for Rep. Steve Womack (R) is whether he will support defunding the Refugee Admissions Program when Congress addresses the FY17 budget starting this week! Womack is on the Appropriations Committee: http://womack.house.gov/biography/committees.htm

Canopy partners with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of nine national resettlement agencies that contract with the State Department to run the refugee resettlement program. LIRS is the agency that will assign refugees to Canopy after the refugees go through an extensive screening process, sometimes lasting more than two years. [Learn more about LIRS, here, 95% taxpayer funded!—ed]

Over the course of the coming year, Emily Crane Linn, resettlement director at Canopy, said they expect to settle 20 to 25 families in Northwest Arkansas. [That would likely be over 100 refugees—ed]

[….]

It is the Syrian refugee possibility that caused U.S. Reps. Rick Crawford, R-Jonesboro, Bruce Westerman, R-Hot Springs, and Steve Womack, R-Rogers, to send a letter dated Oct. 24 to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to “express our concern” about the resettlement program. (Link here for a PDF of the letter.)

Sending a letter won’t cut it.

Sending a letter makes constituents feel better, but….
….we know how that turned out when Rep. Trey Gowdy thought that he could slow the flow to then new resettlement site Spartanburg, SC by writing to John Kerry. It did nothing!!!

Defund! Defund! Defund!

Only one thing matters, and if there is a ‘pocket of resistance’ forming in Arkansas you must tell these three members of Congress to work to cut the funding in the upcoming lame duck budget battle!

I see (here) that Arkansas has no members of Congress who have tried to lift a finger to cut the funding so far.
See Conservative Review’s Liberty score card for the Arkansas delegation.
BTW, how many poultry processing plants in Arkansas are hankering for cheap refugee labor?
***Is your city one of the newest targets for resettlement of third worlders?

Asheville, NC

Rutland, VT

Reno, NV

Ithaca, NY

Missoula, MT

Aberdeen, SD (may have been thwarted as a primary resettlement site!)

Charleston, WV

Fayetteville, AR

Blacksburg, VA

Pittsfield, MA

Northhampton, MA

Flint, MI

Bloomington, IN

Traverse City, MI

Poughkeepsie, NY

Wilmington, DE

Watertown, NY (maybe)

Youngstown, OH (maybe)

 

100 refugees approved for Northwest Arkansas

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Arkansas, like West Virginia and Montana, has received very few refugees over the years, but all that will change with the Dept. of State’s (DOS) approval of a new resettlement agency that will ‘welcome’ 100 refugees beginning next month.
All of the new sites*** are needed because Obama has ‘determined’ that the US will admit a huge increase (to 110,000) in the number of refugees admitted to your towns and cities in FY2017.

donald-j-trump-2016-with-flag
The Obama Administration is moving fast to get as many new refugee sites open as possible before January in case Donald Trump is elected.

The Obama DOS is on a crash program now to get as many placed in your towns as they can by Inauguration Day in January (in case Trump is elected) and place as many in the pipeline as they can making it more difficult for a new administration to put the breaks on.
There is only one entity that could slow the flow and they can do it next month and that is Congress (if there is a will)!  Congress (not Obama!) has the ultimate power to DEFUND the large increase in the number of refugees coming in. These contractors, like this new one in Northwest Arkansas have virtually zero money of their own!
The story, here, and below demonstrates how impotent Arkansas’s governor is to do anything to stop the migration to the state.
From KATV Little Rock:

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS (TALK BUSINESS & POLITICS) — The questions surrounding refugees from the Middle East and other parts of the world will soon come to Arkansas as Canopy Northwest Arkansas works to bring 100 or more refugees from around the world to the region.

emily-linn
Emily Linn is the executive director of Canopy. She says Arkansas has great jobs in poultry plants (yippee!). How much is this resettlement being driven behind the scenes by BIG MEAT? LOL! BIG CHICKEN in this case! http://www.canopynwa.org/about/

[….]

In response to news publicity about the global refugee crisis, concerned residents in Northwest Arkansas (NWA) began meeting in January and formed Canopy Northwest Arkansas, a 501(c)3 non-profit with the mission of settling refugees in NWA.

“We consulted with refugee agencies operating nationally and we learned that there’s a need for new communities to open up to refugees. So we started looking into what it might look like for refugees to come to NWA and what we found is that our community has an incredible capacity to welcome refugees and help them really thrive here,” said Emily Linn, director of Canopy Northwest Arkansas.

Linn cited the growing economy in NWA as a reason refugees would do well.

Here comes the poultry industry! Surely, the Chamber of Commerce is not far behind. (I always wonder if they tell the incoming refugees that they are going to a meat or poultry plant town).

“We have great jobs for folks who don’t even speak English, for example, in the manufacturing or poultry processing industry or agriculture. We also have great jobs and we have a need for people to come and work in very high skilled jobs,” she said. “For instance, we have a brand new hospital opening up in Springdale, Arkansas Children’s and the Washington Regional Hospital is growing and expanding, and there’s a need for very highly educated individuals as well, and so we have this wide variety of employment options.”

I keep seeing this nonsense about skilled labor in the refugee flow. It is bogus. If there are doctors and engineers etc. in the flow they must become re certified in the US which is a long and expensive process. The closest any refugee doctor will get to a hospital is scrubbing the floors at night.
Canopy is a subcontractor of LIRS (see my previous post this morning, here).

Canopy Northwest Arkansas partners with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of nine national resettlement agencies that contract with the State Department to run the refugee resettlement program. LIRS is the agency that will assign refugees to Canopy after the refugees go through an extensive screening process, sometimes lasting more than two years.

Continue reading here.  I see no evidence, at least in this story, that there is any pocket of resistance in Northwest Arkansas.
***Here are some of the new sites we have learned about in recent weeks being set up to accommodate, among other ethnic groups, a large number of Syrian Sunni Muslims.  We heard that there are 47 of these new target sites:
Asheville, NC
Rutland, VT
Reno, NV
Ithaca, NY
Missoula, MT
Aberdeen, SD
Charleston, WV
Fayetteville, AR
Blacksburg, VA
Pittsfield, MA
Northhampton, MA
Flint, MI
Bloomington, IN
Traverse City, MI
Watertown, NY (maybe)
I just created a new ‘tag’ and I should have done it a long time ago, will try to keep it up going forward—New resettlement sites.  For new readers, here is the old list of sites.  Apparently the feds are not updating the list because they likely don’t want you to know where all of the new offices are located. Secrecy is the watchword of refugee resettlement in America!