Tag: Congolese Refugees

First refugees to arrive in Missoula, MT are homeless; time for local do-gooders to step up

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They aren’t on the street, but live in temporary housing (what! some motel?).
I can’t believe this! After all the hoopla and excitement about shoving refugees down the throats of Montanans who don’t want the poverty and cultural disruption third worlders bring to communities, the mighty International Rescue Committee (IRC) headquartered in New York City doesn’t have homes and apartments lined up for the former camp-dwelling Congolese whose arrival has been predicted for months!

Miliband and Soros
That is David Miliband in the middle giving George Soros and his son the IRC’s top award in 2013. LOL! It is called the Freedom Award. Miliband, a British citizen, runs the major US resettlement contractor with a salary of almost $600,000 a year. Maybe he, or Soros, could co-sign leases for the poor Africans being brought to Montana.

Where is Missoula’s R & P Abstract, did the IRC lie to the US State Department about the availability of reasonably priced housing for large families?
Didn’t the IRC sign a contract with the US State Department that said the refugees must have a home (with a requirement for a certain number of bedrooms for family members) to go to from the airport with the refrigerator stocked with culturally appropriate food?

When do-gooders don’t do good!

I’m going to rage a bit before I give you some snips from The Missoulian (Missoula Refugees face housing issues).
The International Rescue Committee is a behemoth in the Refugee Industry. It is the richest of the nine federal contractors with an annual income in 2014 of $688,920,920 and $454 million of that comes from YOU, the taxpayer. Its CEO, Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband*** is making $591,846 annually and probably lives in some swanky digs in Manhattan!  (See recent Form 990 here)
But, the IRC refuses to co-sign the housing rental agreements with the refugees they are dropping off in Missoula!
It is an outrage! They expect local landlords to waive their rules for the refugees that obviously have no credit and no background checks and no job prospects and take a gamble on them that they can pay the rent for months and years to come!  Not to mention the fact that over the last nine years I’ve heard many stories, especially about refugees who have lived in camps, that they do not know how to use modern appliances and often trash them in the process of learning how to operate dish washers, stoves, etc.
Here is the story that got my blood boiling this morning!

Congolese refugees and the people trying to help them get settled in Missoula are facing a housing crisis.

Five families from refugee camps in East Africa will be in town by the end of September, none of them with a source of steady income or credit history.

It’s the job of the local resettlement agency, the International Rescue Committee, to help them secure both as quickly as possible, said IRC director Molly Short Carr.

But record home sales prices in Missoula have placed rentals at a premium. And in a town that swells this time of year with university students – many with no credit ratings themselves – property managers and landlords can afford to be picky about who they rent to.

“We’re kind of hitting a bit of a brick wall,” Carr admitted.

[….]

Missoula has been approved [Why were they approved by the Dept. of State if housing was not available?—ed] as the destination for families of five, four and three people – 25 refugees in all – in the next few weeks, so the hunt for housing is becoming critical.

What a bunch of B.S. this is! We are expected to believe that local landlords should carry the burden of helping teach refugees how to be self-sufficient! Continue reading:

The IRC doesn’t allow its offices to co-sign for refugees.

“Our focus is really on getting them self-sufficient,” said Carr. “Co-signing is kind of a contradiction to self-sufficiency and being able to guide their own lives.”

Hey, here is an idea! maybe Mary Poole and other members of her group could take on the responsibility of co-signing rental agreements with landlords for the families they have ‘welcomed’ to Montana! Maybe put a little of their own skin in the game!

Readers!

If your town is contemplating ‘welcoming’ refugees, please pay attention. The uber-wealthy resettlement contractor will be out of the refugees’ lives in only a few months and the burden of these third world families will be on you—the taxpayers, the landlords, the social services, the school system and the health services of your town!

***David Miliband is a pal of the Clintons, click here for many posts we have written about him in recent years. BTW, Miliband was the first of the resettlement contractors to call for 65,000 Syrians for America before Obama leaves office and he subsequently joined the chorus for an even larger number.
Addendum: After I posted this I thought you might be interested to know that Anne Richard (Asst. Secretary of State for PRM) and Robert Carey (Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement) were both former Vice Presidents at the IRC pulling down 6-figure salaries and are now the two top officials responsible for the entire US Refugee Admissions Program (the revolving door between government and contractor on full display).
Update: Soros spent $600,000 on a pro-refugee PR campaign in Europe (see here). How many refugees might he have helped personally with that kind of money? Or maybe Miliband would forego that huge salary and help needy refugees with it! Nah, he needs it to maintain the jet-setting lifestyle!

Congolese refugees are going to Ogden, UT, volunteers needed, but whites should not apply

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Catholic Charities in Utah is recruiting volunteers who look like the Congolese!
Many people believe that Utah is resettling refugees through the Mormon church.  Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints encourages the resettlement of refugees, including Muslim refugees, it is actually the Catholic Church in charge here.
An aside: every time I see something from Utah I wonder who had the bright idea to place a Burmese Muslim refugee in an apartment complex filled with Burmese Christians.  The end result was the brutal murder of a little Christian girl and now the taxpayers of Utah get to pay for Esar Met’s life in prison.

Aden Batar
Former Somali refugee Aden Batar runs Catholic Community Service’s program in Utah. http://m.deseretnews.com/photo/865590204?nm=1

We have been writing about new resettlement sites lately (Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Ithaca, NY) as the federal government and its refugee contractors are scrambling for new places in which to seed third world diversity.  Now it is Ogden Utah’s turn.
From the Standard Examiner:

OGDEN — Diverse populations of Ogden: You are wanted.

The community is invited to a meeting for future volunteers to gear up to welcome refugees from the Congo beginning sometime this summer.

A refugee resettlement conversation is planned for 6 p.m to 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 23, at the Marshall White Center, 222 28th Street in Ogden.

“We want to involve Ogden’s diverse communities with this initiative,” said Jenny Gnagey, community awareness building specialist for Catholic Community Services and also an assistant professor of economics at Weber State University. “We want to be able to connect these refugees with people that look like them.”

[….]

“Each year, Catholic Community Services resettles 600 refugees from all around the world in the state of Utah,” Gnagey said. “This summer we are expanding our resettlement efforts to the Ogden community. In the coming year, we expect that Ogden will receive approximately 20 primarily Congolese refugee families.”

They must have problems in Utah with landlords fearful of renting to refugees or they wouldn’t be saying this:

Catholic Community Services also is looking for landlords who will rent to these families.

The rental agreement comes with supervision of Catholic Community Services to assure that the families fulfill their obligations.

“If you rent to a refugee and they have any issue, we will be there to support them,” Batar said. “We want to assure landlords that they don’t have to worry.”

Batar wants future landlords to know that the refugees coming to Ogden are legally documented new American citizens.  [To be accurate, they aren’t US citizens until they go through the citizenship process—ed]

For more, continue reading here.
Most of the Congolese refugees entering the US right now are from the DR Congo. We committed to taking 50,000 of them, here in 2013.
Below is a map (source: US State Department Refugee Processing Center) of where 20,967 of them have been placed in the last 4 years.  (Over 29,000 yet to be placed by the State Dept. target date of 2019!)
Please note that only a small number (846) are Muslims, but many Christian faiths are represented.  I wanted to mention that here because there are some misunderstandings flying around that all of our refugees are Muslims, they aren’t!
However, remember as we learned here, many from the DR Congo are women with (costly) mental health needs, and they likely won’t be supporting their families anytime soon.
DR congo map

Stickin'-it to Rep. Trey Gowdy, US State Dept. contractor World Relief brings first refugees to Spartanburg

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update June 6th: World Net Daily wrote about this yesterday, here.  Also, be sure to see the exchange of comments to this post which we highlight here.
It is not really World Relief so much as the Obama State Department and Secretary of State John Kerry.  Gowdy had asked that no refugees be resettled in his district until his many questions had been answered to his satisfaction.   See our post yesterday about the inadequate response Gowdy has received so far.

Resettlement of refugees from DR Congo well underway. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/03/04/us-resettlement-of-tens-of-thousands-of-un-chosen-congolese-refugees-well-underway/

The refugees from DR Congo*** resettled in Spartanburg apparently about a week or so ago could just as easily have been taken to any one of 190 (more!) cities in the US, but clearly the State Department is sending a message to Gowdy—(expletive you!).

As we said previously, Spartanburg is pivotal in the battle for determining who controls the resettlement process—will the UN/US State Department ram third-worlders down the throats of small town America, or will cities and states play any role in the present secretive resettlement process?

Just a reminder!  Rep. Trey Gowdy is not just any Congressman with concern for his district, he is Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee responsible for the refugee program!

If anyone has any power in Congress on this issue, it is Gowdy.  The question is, is he willing to exercise his power?

Here is the latest from GoUpstate.

In this pivotal showdown, score one for Secretary of State John Kerry!

Spartanburg churches are welcoming refugees who recently arrived here.

Jason Lee, director of World Relief Spartanburg, said two refugees from the Congo arrived in Spartanburg in late May. He would not provide a specific date, citing security reasons. He pointed out that they are persecuted.

Meanwhile, Rep. Trey Gowdy called the U.S. State Department’s response to his latest questions about a resettlement agency’s plan to sponsor refugees in Spartanburg “sorely inadequate.”

Gowdy has invited the federal agency to brief elected officials on the refugee resettlement.

The Republican congressman issued a statement Wednesday after receiving the State Department’s response.

Gowdy has written the federal agency twice to obtain details about plans to sponsor refugees in Spartanburg. World Relief, a faith-based refugee resettlement agency, opened a Spartanburg office earlier this year. The state Department of Social Services approved Spartanburg as a new refugee resettlement site, according to the State Department’s response.

World Relief Spartanburg has been authorized to resettle up to 60 refugees in the 2015 fiscal year.  [FY2015 ends on September 30, 2015, so they should be coming in pretty quickly now—ed]

There is a lot more, continue reading here.

Here is my question:  Is the US State Department getting even with Gowdy over Benghazi? 

***The Congolese

Asst. Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration: We will take most of the 50,000 from DR Congo that the UN wants us to take!

We are assuming that Jason Lee is referring to refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), a poor corrupt country in central Africa, and not simply the Congo.
In 2013 Asst. Secretary of State Anne Richard reported that the UN wants 50,000 from the DR Congo resettled over the next few years and that we will take most of them.
If you visit the State Department’s data base, here, we have admitted only 34 refugees from the Congo this fiscal year, but 2,921 this fiscal year so far from DR Congo.  So again, we assume Spartansburg’s new American “seedlings” are from DR Congo.
The majority from the DR Congo are not Muslims although a few are as we reported here.
A large number from DR Congo are abused women and children.  We learned, here, that many of the women need extensive mental health care due to the abuse they have suffered.
By the way, the UN is always in a hurry to clean out its camps and send refugees to the first world rather than waiting out conflicts and then returning refugees to their homes or to countries with a similar culture.  However, in the irony of ironies, they are not in any hurry to resettle Palestinians (that is good for us!) leaving them in ‘camps’ on the border of Israel in order to harass that country for the last 6 decades.
For new readers, our original post on Spartanburg, with updates, may be found here.

US: resettlement of tens of thousands of UN-chosen Congolese refugees well underway

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Our many new readers may not know that the US State Department has agreed to a UN request to resettle 50,000 or so impoverished, uneducated, (mostly) women from DR Congo over a period of several years.

 

Congolese women and children waiting for their turn to come to America.

 

This is an informative article from Episcopal News Service that basically reports how needy these refugees are.

It is also interesting to me because we rarely see articles about refugee resettlement contractor Episcopal Migration Ministries, one of the top nine.  Apparently they are less media savvy as they rarely turn up in news stories (like this one) intended to be puff pieces on refugees.

We previously reported on the great need for mental health services for women from DR Congo, here.

From Episcopal News Service:

A Congolese refugee, Zaburiya arrived in Tucson seven months ago with five children, aged 10 to 26, after spending 18 years in a refugee camp in Rwanda.

Illiterate and not speaking a word of English, she became a member of a women’s empowerment group operated by Refugee Focus, which receives support from The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society’s Episcopal Migration Ministries service through funding from the United States government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.

(The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society is the legal and canonical name under which The Episcopal Church is incorporated, conducts business, and carries out mission.)***

[….]

Through Episcopal Migration Ministries, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society partners with 30 resettlement affiliates in 26 dioceses nationwide. It is one of nine agencies working in partnership with the U.S. Department of State to welcome and resettle refugees to the United States.

For the umpteenth time, the UN is picking our refugees!

In 2014, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society and its partners worked to resettle 5,155 of the tens of thousands of refugees who came to the United States through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) screening process.

[….]

Over the next several years, UNHCR plans to resettle 50,000 refugees from the Congo, with 70 to 90 percent to be resettled to the United States, said Kurt Bonz, Episcopal Migration Ministries’ program manager…

[….]

“Most of the refugees have been in camps an average of 20 years, education is low, and many are single women with children who continue to experience trauma related to living in the Congo, the journey out and living in a refugee camp,” he said.

There is a lot in this story, read it all here.

So who are these refugees from DR Congo and where are they going?

I checked the State Department’s data base for the following dates:  10/1/2012 through 2/28/2015 and this is what I found:

We resettled 9,022 Congolese refugee “seedlings” in that approximate 2 and 1/2 year period.  Most were Christians of some sort, but I was surprised to learn that 356 were Muslims (from DR Congo?).

Then here is a list of the states that received over 200 Congolese refugees over that same 2 and 1/2 year time period (apparently all of these states have run out of American poor people to care for):

Arizona (862)

Colorado (290)

Florida (236)

Georgia (398)

Idaho (303)

Illinois (339)

Kentucky (405)

Maryland (259)

Massachusetts (322)

Michigan (417)

Missouri (301)

New Hampshire (260)

New York (325)

North Carolina (379)

Ohio (288)

Pennsylvania (445)

Texas (1078)  Working hard to turn Texas blue!

Utah (200)

Washington (273)

*** When you visit this post, you will see more about why this structure of the Episcopal Migration Ministries makes it hard to track their finances.  They must be claiming they are a ‘church’ and as such do not have to do a Form 990.

Why are we taking “refugees” from South Africa? (admission in KY Thanksgiving dinner story)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Reader Robin sent us this on Wednesday, but I didn’t post earlier simply because I didn’t want to sound mean by begrudging anyone a nice Thanksgiving dinner, but today is different—call me mean if it makes you feel better!

You should know that one of the favorite PR gambits of the US refugee resettlement contractors is to get lovely refugees-first-Thanksgiving stories published at this time of year.  They are masters at planting warm and fuzzy propaganda, and that is one reason we write this blog—LOL! to balance the news!

John Koehlinger, Director Kentucky Refugee Ministries: “This is the one holiday we feel like all of the clients can celebrate.” Does he mean whether they are Muslims or Christians?

If you search around today, you will see that stories were published in several cities about the generosity of the contractors (no doubt using your tax dollars!) in feeding a scrumptious dinner to newly arrived refugees (their “clients”).   But, that isn’t why I’m writing.  There were a few lines in the USA Today story that got my attention and I want to share them with you.

Remember that legitimate asylum seekers must be able to prove persecution (for religion, race, or political persuasion) when they get to the first SAFE COUNTRY after leaving their place of persecution.  They are to ask for asylum in that first safe country.   They aren’t supposed to be hopping around the world from safe country to safe country shopping for the best deal!

So why the hell are we taking black African “refugees” from the Rainbow Nation of South Africa which was supposedly built on the notion that no matter what color you were, you were in a country that WELCOMED everyone!

Mulungula “Nico” Mungela is the Congolese ‘star of the story’ (this must be J-school 101, put a sympathetic character in your opening paragraph!) at USA Today and in 2006 he left DR Congo and arrived in South Africa—the Rainbow Nation—a SAFE country.

Now does this sound like a “refugee?”  Within 3 years he had two new Master’s degrees, and a good college instructor job in the Rainbow Nation.   Are we to believe that all that equality talk from Nelson Mandela was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo? (It may be for South African whites, but Mungela was a black man in a country run by all black leaders!).

By the way, this isn’t to criticize Mr. Mungela who just took advantage of a good thing, it is to question UNHCR and US State Department policy that has become a  lawless free-for-all policy without any supervision by Congress where we are just slapping on that refugee label and bringing them in from anywhere!

From USA Today (emphasis is mine):

His journey took him south through Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and finally into South Africa, by bus, boat, ship, and hitching rides. He was robbed once right in the middle of a road in Tanzania.

Through a Congo pastor who’d rescued him from the beach, he landed a job as a parking lot guard in Durban. Later, after he sent for his family, he secured a loan to return to college and earned two master’s degrees.

Although he and his wife could support their family — he through a college instructor’s job working with special-needs students and Dorcas by operating a home day care — the family still struggled to gain a foothold. The country is still rife with discrimination, Mungela said.  [What! The Rainbow Nation discriminates against blacks? Has anyone told Obama that the whole Mandela rainbow thing is a myth?—ed]

In May 2009, the couple applied for refugee status and resettlement through the International Organization for Migration, which partners with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Their category covers survivors of violence.

So now he and his 8 kids largely live on your dime in Kentucky. Wouldn’t it have been of greater benefit to South Africa to leave a well-educated man there to help South Africa?

What are we thinking!  We resettled 322 UN designated “refugees” from South Africa in the first month of FY2015 alone!  See here. I bet not one of them is white, or even Asian, they are likely all black fellow African brothers!

About the photo and Kentucky Refugees Ministries.  In its most recent Form 990 KRM took in $4,703,422 from government contracts as part of a total revenue stream of $5,287,956 which means they are 89% funded by taxpayer dollars in a Wilson Fish state where the resettlement program is run by the federal government’s contractors (with no say by elected representatives of the state government of Kentucky).

When you visit that Form 990 be sure to check out the costs of running this ‘non-profit’ for salaries, office expenses, travel etc.

See our archive on South Africa, here.  And, on Kentucky, here.

One last thing you need to know! We are in the process of bringing 50,000 Congolese “refugees” to America over the next few years.