Tag: Donald Trump

Church World Service announced yesterday that it is launching anti-Trump campaign (to raise $$$)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Is your denomination one of 37 that will be holding demonstrations and lobbying Congress?

It is called the #GreaterAs1 campaign.  (Just my personal opinion, but I sure wouldn’t run my whole campaign around a hashtag, see what happened at #ThisIsARefugee!)

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Get your T-shirt and help pay some big salaries at Church World Service as Donald Trump turns off their flow of your money (your tax dollars!). https://greateras1.org/ACT/

Here is the news at WFYI (Indianapolis):

Religious groups around the country Friday announced a coordinated effort to fight immigration policies being pushed by the Trump administration. The campaign includes 37 Christian denominations representing 30 million Americans.

President Donald Trump’s hardline stance on immigration was made manifest in January through an executive order blocking citizens from seven countries – said to protect Americans from foreign-born terrorists. A federal judge blocked the order, but a revised version is expected soon.

The order has been divisive among faith groups. But on Friday a number of Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches announced a grassroots effort to fight any version of the ban.

[….]

The campaign also hopes to raise $1 million over the next six months to help refugees. [They have salaries to pay!—ed]

It was announced through the National Council of Churches and Church World Service, a group that helps settle refugees. [Paid by the head by American taxpayers to resettle refugees!—ed]

You can go here and see what the campaign will do.

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CWS CEO Rev. John McCullough being arrested in Washington, DC protesting in SUPPORT of Obama’s executive AMNESTY. Photo and story here: http://njfon.org/2015/04/08/faith-groups-challenge-fifth-circuit-court-on-presidents-immigration-actions/

And, I had a hard time finding a link to the 37 denominations they are bragging about, but it must be their usual list of congregations that are affiliated with Church World Service, see here (there are 37 listed).
Is one of these your church? If so, and you disagree with the anti-Trump campaign, speak up!

Member Communions

 

So those churches above will be fundraising, demonstrating and lobbying Congress against President Trump’s immigration policy.

Now, let’s look at Church World Service’s financials….
According to Charity Review, Church World Service has 241 paid staff.  Head honcho, the Rev John McCullough, CWS’s CEO, makes a shamefully high annual salary of $316,714!
 
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Here is a breakdown of their income. Besides the $50 million from the US Treasury in one year, that service fee is likely your money too!
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And holy moly!
Just for the heck of it, I checked USA Spending.gov to see how much of your money this supposed ‘religious’ charity got from you since 2008.
I am shocked! In the bidding-for-bodies racket, they have got the Lutherans beat!

They are approaching a half a billion dollars in federal money between 2008 and 2016!

 

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Here are just 5 transactions of 351! And, aren’t you wondering why the Dept. of Homeland Security is giving them payola!

 

There  should be a law! Any non-profit sucking this kind of money out of the US Treasury should be prohibited from running anti-Trump (or anti-any President) campaigns!

Where is Congress?
Go here to see if politically Leftwing Church World Service operates a refugee office in your city.  And, click here, for all of our previous posts on CWS.

Magic March 3rd was yesterday, refugee flow should now be shutting down

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I checked the numbers at Wrapsnet this morning and see that since I reported last on Wednesday (March 1) we had admitted 296 additional refugees.
 

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The UN asked the US to help clear out their camps for the DR Congolese and as of today we admitted 37,913 in just over 3 years. 50 arrived since Wednesday.

 
Readers will recall that the US State Department notified its refugee resettlement contractors to expect the flow to stop on about March 3rd.  Clearly it hasn’t stopped yet.
Of the 296 admitted since Wednesday, 105 were from four of the seven countries identified in the so-called “travel ban.”
None came in the last few days from Libya, Syria or Yemen (but readers should know that in the last few years only tiny numbers, if any, came from Libya or Yemen).  But, it was a surprise to see that Syria was down to zero in the last couple of days.

The big winner in the gang of seven countries was Somalia which sent us a whopping 77 refugees since Wednesday.

Other big winners, among the usual sending countries, were Burma (97, 12 of those were Muslims) and 50 came from the DR Congo. 

DR Congo! The UN said take 50,000 and we said yes, master!

Long time readers will remember that we promised the United Nations, here in 2013, to admit 50,000 from the DR Congo over 5 years. Only a small number of those are Muslims, but they represent some very traumatized women (with lots of children) who will require expensive mental health treatment, here. Their contribution to the US economy will surely be a negative one as we are clearly importing extreme poverty in this case.

I see that as of this morning we have admitted 37,913 from DR Congo since FY2013!

This is a prime example of a key reform we expect the Trump Administration to make. If we are going to admit some refugees….

We should decide which ‘refugees’ we take, not simply jump when the United Nations tells us to!

Did your state get Congolese?  Here is a map from Wrapsnet showing where the DR Congolese were distributed since FY13:
 
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If you can’t read Florida, it is 1,329. Alaska is 72 and Hawaii 0. A reminder: Wyoming is the only state that never started a refugee resettlement program.

 
The top three receiving states are Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina.

Tell President Trump to stop jumping when the UN tells us to help them clean out their refugee camps!

Endnote:  I suspect the delay in the new travel ban announcement is that the State Department is waiting to clear the last refugees through airports world wide.
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’
My DR Congo archive is here.

Why are we permanently resettling refugees who say their real wish is to go HOME?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

unhcr-firas
Is this Muslim family really in any danger? “Syrian refugee Firas al Ahmad, 30, looks out of the window at his father’s house in Irbid, Jordan, the day before he left for the United States.” © UNHCR/Houssam Hariri http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2017/2/58aeff094/move-offers-bittersweet-hope-struggling-syrian-family.html

That is one of the key questions you should all be asking the Trump Administration as they sort through the millions of refugees to find those they will admit to America. (Trump says his Admin. will admit a whopping 50,000 this year!)
Nayla Rush, writing at the Center for Immigration Studies asks, how is the UNHCR picking the “lucky few?”

98.6% of the Syrians entering the US now are Muslims

In the case of the Syrians, in FY15, FY16, and 5 months in to FY17 we admitted a total of 19,826 Syrians to the US. 19,562 are Muslims, mostly Sunnis.  That means that 98.6% were Syrian Muslims (via Wrapsnet). Why so few Christians?
Here is Rush at CIS:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently shared on its website the story of a Syrian refugee family who was resettled from Jordan to Dallas. The 30-year-old mechanic, Firas al Ahmad, his wife Samira and their three children fled to Jordan at the end of 2013 when the fighting intensified near their home. The family struggled there for over three years due to the “lack of legal work opportunities” and welcomed UNHCR’s offer to resettle in the United States. Once their application approved, they sold their furniture and moved out from their apartment to stay with Firas’ dad in the Jordanian city of Irbid.

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The family is filmed there the day before departure. Firas explained on camera: “I’m leaving because of my kids, for their future. I hope they can get a good education, and have a better life than the one we had … The hardest thing is leaving family members behind. All of them but especially my father.” (Firas’s brothers, aunt, and father left Syria with them.)

Samira too was emotional: “Syria is everything. They say, a nation is like a mother. What’s our worth without our mother?” She then burst in tears. Firas reiterated: “Syria is everything, it is everything to me. The minute the war is over I will go back. Even now I wish it would end today, before we leave, so that we could go home.”

In the text, UNHCR underlined the following: “Resettlement programmes in the United States and other developed countries are designed to offer a lifeline to the most vulnerable refugees, including children at risk, survivors of torture and those with medical needs.”(Emphasis added)

How does this apply to Al-Ahmad’s family? As far as we can tell they do not seem to suffer from any specific vulnerability. By their own admission, they fled Syria because the fighting was getting closer; and they accepted the resettlement offer to give a better life to their children, not because they could not stay in Jordan.

As a reminder, the refugee resettlement program was set up to provide “resettlement to a third country in situations where it is impossible for a person to go back home or remain in the host country.” (Emphasis added.) Also, resettlement is one of UNHCR’s “durable solutions” – resettled refugees in the U.S. are required by law to apply for a green card (permanent residence) in the United States one year after arrival. They can apply for U.S. citizenship five years from entry.

But does the Al-Ahmad family want to stay in the U.S.? Do they wish to become American citizens, or is their loyalty first and foremost to Syria? If their true will is to go back home “the minute the war is over,” why resettle them in the U.S. to begin with?

Rush provides more cases, continue reading here.

It is not about humanitarianism!

I can answer the question about why we are permanently placing Syrian refugees (who would prefer to go home) in to your towns and cities—three reasons (have sympathy for these Syrians being used as pawns!):

~The resettlement contractors are paid by the head to drop off refugees who are essentially paying clients and they want to keep their little federally-funded fiefdoms going.

~The Libs want reliable Democrat voters (especially in red states!).

~The UNHCR is working day and night to erase borders and dilute Christian nations with Muslim migrants.

I don’t think the Syrians are going to make good meatpacking workers (cheap laborers), so I won’t list that as a reason in this case (for Somalis, Burmese yes, for Syrians probably not).
If the Trump Administration is at all serious about reforming the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program they would get the UN out of our immigration decisions and stop funding the so-called ‘religious’  (politically liberal) charities doing the resettling.
Of course, this story makes the argument for the Trump “safe zones” concept!

Numbers update: end of first 5 months of fiscal year, highest number of refugees admitted in over 10 years

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, February 28th, was the end of the first 5 months of fiscal year 2017.
I checked the refugee admission numbers this morning (at Wrapsnet) and see that we admitted 37,026 refugees from all over the world since October 1, 2016.

tillerson-and-trump
How low will they go for Fiscal Year 2018? In 6 months that determination will be made.

Two days ago we reported that 36,822 had arrived.
By two days from now (March 3), the flow should almost come to an end for now, although remember that President Trump has said 50,000 will be admitted by September 30th—a number that is too high in my opinion.
It is obviously too late, but I had argued for 35,000.
I knew that for the time I’ve been writing this blog (since 2007), that 37,026 was much more than we had ever admitted in the first 5 months of a fiscal year, so I was able to go to this chart and confirm it.
If you live in one of over 100 resettlement sites in the US, and felt that you were being swamped recently, you probably were!
37,026 is 7,834 more than the highest year below, and a whopping 24,782 more than the lowest year!
Here are the admission numbers for the first 5 months of the fiscal year going back to 2006:

2006: 16,287

2007:  12,244

2008:  14,224

2009:  22,809

2010:  29,192

2011:  25,680

2012:  18,581

2013:  28,078

2014:  26,925

2015:  26,717

2016:  22,827

Next big test for the Trump Administration!

In September, President Trump will make his ‘determination’ for the number (and regions of the world from which they will come) of refugees to be seeded in to your towns and cities in FY2018.
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’

Numbers update from Wrapsnet as refugee arrivals slow to US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In advance of a new EO supposedly coming out on Wednesday, checking the numbers this morning here are a few things I learned.

tillerson-and-trump
Sec. of State Tillerson and Pres. Trump can still set the ceiling lower than 50,000!

Total arrivals this fiscal year (which began on October 1, 2016) are at 36,822.  Last time we checked on 2/23 we were at 36,637.
President Trump has set the ceiling for this fiscal year which ends on September 30th at 50,000 (a number we argue is not that low when one examines all of the post 9/11 years, see here. Bush’s lowest year was 39,554).
47% of the 36,822 are Muslim refugees of some stripe.
Here is how they break down:

Ahmadiyya: 130

Shiite: 2,152

Sunni: 8,659

Muslim (who apparently don’t designate a sect): 6,547

A couple of things that interested me in the numbers.  First we are bringing in large numbers of Burmese Muslims now (Rohingya, I presume).  817 are recorded as from Burma.  In reality we don’t know exactly where they came from.  They could be from the Muslim country of Bangladesh.  These are not our responsibility!
Then for Iraqis we admitted both sides of the warring factions:  1,472 are Shiites and 2,506 are Sunnis.
So, let me get this straight! From Iraq we must have Sunnis saying they are persecuted by Shiites and Shittes saying they are persecuted by Sunnis, and we bring them both to be resettled in your cities.  How long before they go after each other on American soil?
So here (from Wrapsnet) is a map of where the 36,822 were placed one day short of 5 months in to FY2017.
Wyoming remains the only state in the nation with no refugee program.  Of course Washington, DC only gets a tiny number.
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Florida is 1,197. Alaska is 41 and Hawaii is 3.

 
Here are the top ten receiving states. 
I repeat! Governor Abbott’s withdrawal of the state of Texas from the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program did not slow the flow to the state! If you want to help President Trump succeed, Texans need to focus their political activism on Senator John Cornyn as we explained here.
 
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This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’