Don Barnett, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies reports on how the resettlement contracting business works in an opinion piece in the Washington Times, here on Sunday. Don Barnett, a resident of Tennessee, is a longtime expert on the US Refugee Admissions Program, and is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
In his opening paragraphs he reports on a little known (declassified) report for the National War College published in 2000. The author was (and may still be) a longtime employee of the US State Department and intimately involved in refugee resettlement.
I urge all of you to read the Robinson study, we reported on it here in 2010 (you will find a link to the study in that post), because it demonstrates how supposed ‘refugees’ became political pawns for the Clinton Administration’s justification for its phony-baloney Bosnian war, and how the contractors looking for more paying clients (aka refugees) urged an airlift of Kosovar ‘refugees’ who didn’t even want to come to America! The airlift was a twofer!
The report is entitled: ‘How public opinion shaped refugee policy in Kosovo.’
Barnett at theWashington Times:
Despite the exposure refugee resettlement has received lately, there has been little discussion of how the program actually operates.
Each year the administration establishes source regions and numbers for next year’s quota. The U.N. refugee agency refers most of the refugees that come through the system, though embassy staff and State Department contractors may also make referrals. An influential network of private contractors implements the program.
Speaking of the contractors running refugee resettlement, David M. Robinson, a former acting director of the refugee bureau in the State Department, wrote in 2000,
“The agencies [the resettlement contractors—ed] form a single body [that] wields enormous influence over the Administration’s refugee admissions policy. It lobbies the hill effectively to increase the number of refugees admitted for permanent resettlement each year and at the same time provides overseas processing for admissions under contract to the State Department. In fact, the federal government provides about ninety percent of its collective budget. If there is a conflict of interest, it is never mentioned.”
“[Its] solution to every refugee crisis is simplistic and the same: increase the number of admissions to the United States without regard to budgets or competing foreign policy considerations.”
Continue reading here. Readers! For the first time in 35 years you are helping to create a serious roadblock to these nine federal contractors that have ruled the roost and called the shots for decades, please keep up the pressure.
The most important thing you can do today is laid out for you in our post yesterday on the Omnibus funding bill before Congress!
Addendum: As I reread my post from 2010, I was reminded that one of the terrorists arrested as part of the Ft. Dix Six terror plot was a refugee—add him to the list of refugee terrorists that the contractors say do not exist! And a note to any reporters reading this: we have an enormous body of work here—over 7,000 posts—use our search function for key words for anything you are working on!
Action Alert: Call your members of the House and Senate at 202-224-3121 and ask them to vigorously oppose the Refugee Resettlement funding contained in the Omnibus Spending Bill that will be voted on by 12-11-15! Please call by this Friday, Dec. 4th.
Editor: From time to time we post guest columns and other notable comments from readers. This one is from someone who knows the US Refugee Admissions Program better than anyone else on the outside (LOL! maybe better than some on the inside!). Don Barnett has been following the refugee industry for over 25 years and is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.I’m happy to call him a longtime colleague and friend.
Below, Mr. Barnett addresses some of the ridiculous ‘studies’ being promoted around the US which posit that resettling impoverished third worlders will bring economic boom times to states losing population, or that refugee-run ‘businesses’ can rescue financially strapped cities.
The refugee resettlement program is perhaps the federal government’s most advanced case of politicized, Orwellian speech.
Don Barnett (See also: Time for the refugee program to come out of the shadows!) https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/03/24/wyoming-op-ed-time-for-the-refugee-program-to-come-out-of-the-shadows/
Are refugees too dependent on government hand-outs? Simply re-define the term “self-sufficiency” so that those dependent on government hand-outs are declared officially “self-sufficient”. According to the feds, a refugee can be on every welfare program except TANF and still be considered “self-sufficient”. Thus the media dutifully report the absurd claims of the refugee contractors about refugee “self-sufficiency” for individuals who may be in public housing, receiving Food Stamps, cash assistance from SSI and on Medicaid.
So much ignorance abounds that a “task force” recently formed to study the possibility of introducing refugee resettlement in Wyoming allowed itself to be assured by U. of Wyoming College of professor and immigration law specialist, Noah Novogrodsky, that the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees ‘pay 100 percent of the costs of refugee resettlement for many years. It’s not like we’re going to get stuck with an unfunded mandate’.
Of course it is a massive unfunded obligation placed upon states and localities by a federal program. Most refugees are placed into one or more public assistance programs by the refugee resettlement contractors. In recent weeks Congressional Research Services provided data about welfare usage among refugees. Among refugees who had arrived in a recent 5-year period, 56 percent were receiving Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance, 74.2 percent were on food stamps, and 22.8 percent were in public housing. 47.1 percent were on some form of cash assistance. (1)
State tax payers fund a portion of some federal programs such as Medicaid. When the 1980 act was passed the federal government promised to reimburse states for their cost share of refugee usage of SSI, AFDC (today TANF) and Medicaid at 100% for 3 full years. Even 3 years of coverage was acknowledged to be inadequate, but was better than nothing. By 1991 the states were getting nothing: all reimbursements for state refugee costs were eliminated.
Newspeak and Newthought permeate the cottage industry of studies “proving” the net positive economic benefits of refugee resettlement. A look at 2 past studies shows just how willing the media is to be spoon fed information rather than seeking, finding and questioning.
According to Tennessee’s state refugee coordinator – an employee of Catholic Charities, the state’s largest refugee resettlement contractor – a “comprehensive” study by the Tennessee legislature “found …that refugees pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits — in fact, twice as much.”
The 2013 study made no such finding. In assessing the cost of publicly funded benefits for refugees, the study looked at just 2 programs – public education (including ELL) and Tenncare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid). It ignored a whole range of programs which refugees use and which Tennessee tax payers fund both with state tax dollars and as federal tax payers.
The study assumed that refugees were using Medicaid at the same rate as average Tennesseans even though up to 59% of refugees have been placed into Medicaid upon arrival in recent years.
Also, the report assumed refugees pay state taxes at the same rate as average Tennesseans while federal studies find very high usage of welfare, high unemployment and low wages among those refugees with jobs.
The study authors themselves concluded “The information necessary to complete a comprehensive study on the possible cost shifting from the federal government to the state for the resettlement of refugees is not available.” Nevertheless, The Tennessean and other media reported more or less as fact the “take away” that refugees bring in twice as much in taxes as they use in benefits.
The study’s outcome – more accurately, lack of outcome – was likely foreordained by a Chamber of Commerce/left wing coalition that had hijacked other supposedly objective fiscal reviews of state operations.
Another study of refugee economic impact sponsored by an amorphous, shape-shifting Chamber of Commerce/left wing coalition calling itself The Refugee Services Collaborative of Cleveland got more traction than the embarrassing Tennessee study. It found, according to an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that “Three resettlement agencies spend about $4.8 million a year helping refugees to start new lives in the Cleveland area. From that investment of mostly federal dollars comes an annual economic impact of nearly $50 million.”
Now the tax dollars invested are paying back 10 to 1!
The study looked at 3 areas where refugees make an economic contribution in the Cleveland area: refugee service organizations, refugee-owned businesses and household spending of refugee families.
Speaking of refugee service organizations, the study notes that the “preponderance of funding for these organizations is derived from federal sources”. That is not a negative finding for the authors of the study; after all it still represents a net inflow of money into the Cleveland area and employment for 95. I assume most of the employees are refugees or immigrants, but the study does not say. An interesting question for a study is why an area which in the year of the study resettled 598 refugees and resettled less than 400 per year in the previous 12 years needs 95 federal taxpayer funded employees focused exclusively on serving refugees.
The next category of economic contribution comes from refugee-owned businesses of which the study reports: “The Chmura survey indicated that over the last ten years, at least 38 businesses were started by refugees in the Cleveland area with a total of 141 employees (including owners). In addition, it is estimated that almost all of those employed by refugee-owned businesses are refugees themselves. Though the survey did not gather information of the types of businesses that were started, estimates were made based upon studies conducted elsewhere. The assumed mix of industries for the refugee-owned businesses includes the following: restaurants, retail, health and beauty, transportation and automotive services, and child care.” (my emphasis)
In other words, over a period of 10 years just 141 refugees found employment in 38 refugee-started businesses – average size less than 4 employees. The job-creation miracle yielded 141 jobs for the 4,000 or so who were resettled in the area at that time. And we have no idea what the businesses are – foodcarts, in-home day care centers, one man and a lawn mower, consultants on how to work the system? It is more than amazing that having located and counted all the businesses opened by refugees they didn’t ask “oh, by the way, just what does your business do?”
The third category of economic vitality is household spending of refugee families.
Offering no real supporting evidence the study assumes Cleveland area refugees use welfare at less than the national average for refugees. (See above for an idea of welfare usage for refugees nationally.) It doesn’t matter anyway: a dollar provided by the federal taxpayer via a welfare program is a net plus in this study as it is assumed that this dollar will be spent in a Cleveland business.
The study is filled with findings such as “refugee services will purchase goods and services from other local businesses to support their organizations” and there are “benefits to local consumer-oriented businesses (such as retail and restaurants) that make sales to workers of the refugee services”.
Remember “refugee services” purchase goods and pay salaries with federal taxpayer dollars. But the dollars keep going round and round with positive ‘direct impacts’, ‘indirect impact’ and ‘induced impacts’. (No mention is made that some of these dollars are going directly back to the home country.)
The fog of ignorance and misinformation around this program is largely thanks to the inattention, if not active collusion of the media.
The facts are out there if the media would but investigate and report them. Until that happens we will ever be in the twilight zone when it comes to this topic.
If you have just dropped in here at RRW today for the first time, you should readour reportfrom my visit to St. Cloud, MN, a small city a little over an hour from Minneapolis where Lutheran Social Service is dropping off Somali refugees who are now causing tension in the school system.
Although the Left-leaning St. Cloud Times couldn’t control itself completely and put up one story as newsthat was really an opinion piece, we are pretty satisfied that for the first time ever the readers of that paper received a tutorial of sorts on how the refugee resettlement program works.
The contractors, such as Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, are often happy to promote the idea that refugees simply “find their way” to your towns, rather than to tell you that the UN is picking them and the US State Department is assigning them to 9 contractors and 350 subcontractors (some masquerading as ‘religious’ charities), and paying them with your tax dollars to distribute them!
The original article generated lots of discussion, see the comments, and here is a letter to the editor published yesterday from Tennessean Don Barnett who has had over two decades of experience following the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program.
I would like to draw your attention to the airfare loan issue. Shortly after refugees arrive in the US the contractor begins nagging the refugee to repay the airfare loan money (that you ‘loaned’ them through the federal treasury). The State Department to my knowledge has not reported how much is actually ever collected, but we know that the contractors keep a chunk of what they manage to wring out of the refugees for themselves!
Remember readers this is big business for the contractors and for the industries in Minnesota looking for cheap labor!
Stating that Lutheran Social Services “receives $850 per arrival” is misleading. Refugee resettlement is very profitable, and money is earned in many ways. If a volunteer spends time with an LSS refugee or donates, say, a used couch, LSS submits a bill to the feds for the volunteer’s time or the used couch and receives cash from the misnamed federal Match Grant program.
If LSS’s parent organization collects the airfare from the refugee — which was provided by the taxpayer to the refugee as a loan — the organization pockets a full 25 percent of the amount as a collection fee.This relatively small program alone means millions for the larger refugee contractors. [In its 2012 annual report, for example, the contractor US Conference of Catholic Bishops reported over $3 million in cash for the collection of airfare loans.—ed]
There are many grant programs providing an opaque stream of money from almost all departments of the U.S. government. As a state refugee coordinator notes in a 2012 GAO report, “local affiliate funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
It is hardly the case that “refugees receive a one-time federal grant of $1,125” and “after that, refugees are on their own.” Most refugees are placed into one or another federal assistance program by the refugee resettlement contractors.
Just in the past few weeks Congressional Research Services provided data about welfare usage among refugees. Among refugees who had arrived in a recent 5-year period, 56 percent were receiving Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance, 74.2 percent were on food stamps, 22.8 percent were in public housing, and 47.1 percent were on some form of cash assistance.
Unfortunately, it is the refugee resettlement contractor, such as LSS, which leaves the refugees “on their own” — abandoning them to the care of the taxpayer.
See our complete archive on St. Cloud going back many years byclicking here.
If you are interested in listening to my interview with Dan ‘OX’ Ochsner on KNSI radio in St. Cloud, click here and scroll down to podcasts part 1 and 2 on April 23, 2015.
As regular readers know, the Republican governor of Wyoming, Matt Mead, last year wrote to the federal government to begin exploring the possibility of setting up a refugee resettlement program in the only state in the nation wise enough to stay out of it completely for over 30 years.
A political firestorm is underway in the state now over whether or not the state should proceed with the US State Department, the US Department of Health and Human Services (Office of Refugee Resettlement), and a Lutheran contractor to begin bringing refugees to Gillette and/or Casper, Wyoming. See all of our previous posts on the controversy by clicking here.
The feds and the contractors need Wyoming because they are reaching a saturation point in many locations around the country. “Pockets of resistance” have developed.
Don Barnett
One of the leading critics of the program, Don Barnett, has penned this piece published in theCasper Star Tribuneyesterday so Wyomingites have more facts before they leap into a contract with the federal government and a federal contractor (emphasis is mine):
Refugee resettlement was once the calling of true sacrificial charity and the work of private sponsors who invested their own resources. Today, it is the work of federal contractors who have no responsibility a mere 3-4 months after the refugee has arrived.
Traditional sponsor duties have been replaced by access to all forms of welfare upon arrival for refugees and an opaque stream of grant money from seemingly every government agency except NASA.
In recent years up to 95 percent of the refugees coming to the U.S. were referred by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees or were the relatives of U.N.-picked refugees. Until the late 1990s, the U.S. picked the large majority of refugees for resettlement in the U.S.
Considering that the refugee influx causes increases in all legal and illegal immigration as family and social networks are established in the U.S., the U.N. is effectively dictating much of U.S. immigration policy.
A network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with the U.S. State Department “selects communities where refugees will live” according to a 2012 GAO report, “Refugee Resettlement — Greater Consultation With Community Stakeholders Could Strengthen Program.”
They don’t place refugees in D.C. where the NGOs have offices which lobby for more refugees and money. They don’t place refugees in Delaware, home of Joe Biden, co-sponsor of the 1980 Refugee Act which defines the program we have today.
The GAO report is critical of refugee contractors and how they place refugees in local communities across the U.S., noting of the resettlement contractors “few agencies we visited consulted relevant local stakeholders, which posed challenges for service providers.” The report found that “… most public entities such as public schools and health departments generally said that agencies notified them of the number of refugees expected to arrive in the coming year, but did not consult them regarding the number of refugees they could serve…”
Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, the affiliate proposed for Wyoming for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) the fourth largest refugee contractor in the nation, takes this penchant for operating in secret to the max. According to notes from a February 2014 board of directors meeting the process of selecting resettlement sites in Wyoming has been “complicated by both the state and a private citizen advocate providing media availability to a local paper. Media coverage at this stage is potentially damaging to the success of the overall process…”
There is a reason for the secrecy.
The program places significant unfunded costs on state and local taxpayers in the form of social services which must be provided.
According to the latest data available, a federal study of refugees who have been in the country 5 years or less, the unemployment rate for refugees was 21 percent compared with 9 percent for the U.S. population in 2010. Twenty-six percent were dependent on cash assistance, 63 percent were in the food stamp program and 48 percent were in Medicaid or short-term federal Refugee Medical Assistance. The federal welfare program SSI is a good indicator of long-term welfare dependency rates. It is generally a lifetime entitlement and usually includes Medicaid and other social services. The federal study of arrivals over the previous five years found an 11.6 percent rate of usage – about 2.5 times the national average.
Most of this cost is borne by the federal taxpayer, but programs such as Medicaid have state cost components as well.
There is even secrecy in the meaning of official language used in the program. For instance, it will be claimed – and the media will report – that refugees are “self-sufficient” in some amazingly short period of time. But as officially defined, refugees are considered “self-sufficient” even if they are living in public housing, receiving Medicaid and Food Stamps. They can receive cash assistance from local, state and federal sources, such as SSI. Only TANF disqualifies one from being “self-sufficient.”
Then there is the money racket.As a state refugee coordinator notes in the 2012 GAO report, “local affiliate funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
Refugee resettlement is very profitable for the non-profits.
At the point of his recent retirement the CEO of Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, another resettlement affiliate of LIRS, was making $441,767 a year in salary and benefits – almost all taxpayer-supplied.
It is time to bring this program out of the shadows.
Don Barnett is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
Editors note: If you’ve had experience with the refugee program where you live, please take a few minutes and comment to Mr. Barnett’s opinion piece so that the citizens of Wyoming have all of the facts before they get into something they will never be able to get out of!
Update January 26th: The Nashville Scenedoesn’t like Barnett’s commentary, attacks Barnett Alinsky-style. They are so predictable.
On the heels of my post yesterday about the US Conference of Catholic Bishops “National Migration Week” comes this zinger of an opinion piece from longtime observer of the federal government’s refugee resettlement program, Don Barnett, published in The Tennesseanalso yesterday (highlights are mine):
Refugee resettlement was once the work of self-supporting charities that invested their own resources and were directly responsible for outcomes. Today, it is the work of federal contractors who spend public resources and have no responsibility three months after the refugee has been “resettled.”
A July Government Accountability Office report, “Refugee Resettlement — Greater Consultation With Community Stakeholders Could Strengthen Program,” is critical of refugee contractors and how they place refugees in local communities across the U.S. In particular, the report cites lack of adequate consultation with local “stakeholders” before placing refugees in a community. The agencies that resettle refugees are compensated from 17 different federal programs tailored to refugee resettlement, as well as from numerous nonspecific grants and programs at the federal and state levels.
The largest resettlement contractor is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which resettles refugees through its affiliate, Catholic Charities.
As the GAO report notes, a network of contractors, known as “voluntary agencies,” “selects the communities where refugees will live. … Voluntary agencies consider various factors when determining where refugees will be placed, but few agencies we visited consulted relevant local stakeholders, which posed challenges for service providers.”
The report found that “… most public entities such as public schools and health departments generally said that agencies notified them of the number of refugees expected to arrive in the coming year, but did not consult them regarding the number of refugees they could serve before proposals were submitted to the (U.S. State Department).”
Since striking a deal in 2008 to manage the federal dollars for other, smaller refugee contractors in the state, Catholic Charities of Tennessee effectively runs refugee resettlement in Tennessee. Today, only 35 percent of its annual budget is dedicated to nonrefugee social services. As the GAO report notes, for organizations such as Catholic Charities, “funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
Sure enough, resettlement in Tennessee went up dramatically after 2008. In fact, since 2009, Tennessee has taken an average of about 1,450 refugees per year, a 62 percent increase over the average number resettled from 2004 to 2008. The total number of refugees resettled to the U.S. actually went down at the same time that Tennessee’s number of resettled refugees went up.
More refugees mean more government services, since the contractors assist the refugees for only three months or less in the vast majority of cases. Most refugees go into TennCare for varying periods of time. TennCare and other welfare programs such as Families First are used by refugees at much higher than average rates and are partially supported by state taxpayer dollars.
Refugee resettlement is very profitable for the nonprofits.There is a reason why refugee resettlement is Tennessee Catholic Charities’ biggest mission. All of its non-refugee social services are smaller, less lucrative and almost all are shrinking from year to year. Ironically, its national motto is: Working to Reduce Poverty in America.
USCCB took in an astonishing $72.1 million in revenue from refugee resettlement alone in 2011, 97 percent of which came from government contracts, grants and earnings from federal refugee programs. A significant portion of this money does not have to be shown as having been spent on refugees. In other words, millions flow to the contracting agency with no strings attached.(My personal favorite in this money racket: USCCB received $3.7 million in 2011 as a commission for collecting on the loans made by the U.S. government to refugees for airline tickets to the U.S. USCCB is under no obligation to spend any of this money on refugees.
Federal contractors will always act like federal contractors. But is it too much to ask refugee contractors to cover at least a portion of the costs borne by Tennessee taxpayers today? Is it too much to ask for more of a voice for the taxpayer who, after all, is the main stakeholder in this program?
