Update September 23rd: 30,000 may not be final number, here.
Update September 19th: One more reason the Trump Administration could have gone with a ZERO cap this year—320,000 migrants already in US looking to get refugee status, here.
Update September 18th:See why I think a cap of 30,000 was a bad decision, here.
So, I guess Church World Service can get off its “pins and needles!”
The President with Secretary of State Pompeo
It was only this morning that we reportedthat a Church World Service employee announced that there would be no CEILING (aka CAP) announced until December. They sure seem to have gotten their facts wrong, or did they?
There will be much wailing from the usual contractor gang (they wanted the number to be 75,000!), but remember readers that we are under 30,000 this year—we should come in at less than 25,000. (Update: as of today we have admitted 20,919 refugees with only 2 weeks to go in the fiscal year.)
Here is the brief news posted a little over an hour ago at Politico:
Trump administration intends to slash refugee cap
The Trump administration will admit no more than 30,000 refugees to the U.S. in the coming year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, down from the current cap of 45,000.
Pompeo announced the lowered ceiling during a press conference Monday at the Department of State headquarters in Foggy Bottom.
Pompeo said the 30,000 cap “must be considered in the context of the many other forms of protection and assistance offered by the United States” and should not be “sole barometer” to measure the country’s humanitarian efforts.
The hawkish turn demonstrates President Donald Trump’s willingness to push hard-line immigration policies in the run-up to the November midterm elections ….
When Trump took office, the refugee cap stood at 110,000. He lowered that to 50,000, and subsequently to 45,000.
It is my opinion that the program won’t be reformed as it should be until the number is ZERO with the understanding that Congress and the Administration must reform the entire program during a moratorium.
Without real reform, as the Lancaster, PA Church World Service employee said: they will just wait out this president and claim they need huge numbers in 2021 or 2025 to make up for Trump’s lost years.
Will the Administration and Congress follow the law in the next few weeks?
The Refugee Act of 1980 requires the US State Department, in conjunction with the President, to present a detailed Report to Congress explaining how many refugees they would like to admit and from where they will come.
The report should arrive in Congress weeks before the end of the fiscal year (September 30th) and BEFORE refugees begin arriving in the new year. The House and Senate Judiciary Committees are supposed to hold PUBLIC hearings and “consult” with the Administration on that report.
Where is the report? Has it been made public? How can they go forward with resettlement on October first with no guide as to which refugees will get priority?
After consultation with Congress about The Report, the President then is supposed to make his final determination.
Of course they haven’t been following the law for years, so it remains to be seen if they will this year or not.
We will be waiting with great anticipation to see if the first of the new batch of 30,000 begins arriving on October first (2 weeks from today!).
Update: CWS didn’t have to wait for long. Secretary of State Pompeo has announced a ceiling of 30,000 refugees for FY19. But, will the administration be ready to welcome those ‘new Americans’ in two weeks from today? See the news here.
In what I thought was going to be another ho-hum whinny story about Church World Service, a Lancaster, PA refugee agency director dropped this bomb:
Sheila Mastropietro
Mastropietro [Sheila Mastropietro, director of the CWS Lancaster office] said the CWS national office is being kept in the dark.They just found out this week that the fiscal year will be extended to Dec. 31, delaying the decision of who will be fundedand leaving CWS “on pins and needles for an additional three months,” she said.
If you have been a regular student of Refugee Resettlement Watch, you know that the fiscal year ends on September 30th, and for decades September is the month when we learn how many refugees will be admitted in the following year and from where they will come.
And, surely you haven’t missed my many posts on the PR campaign the federal contractors*** have been promoting as they demand that Trump admit 75,000 refugees beginning on October 1.
I can only guess that if true, that there will be no announcement this month, it means there is an internal battle of ginormous proportions going on, or it could be a complex funding issue involving the whole federal government.
The story, thanks to Joanne for sending it!, is at LancsterOnline:
With funding at risk, Church World Service ‘on pins and needles’ about future of refugee program
As President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the 30th year of Church World Service resettling refugees in the county, Lancaster city was deemed “America’s refugee capital” by BBC News for resettling 20 times the number of refugees per capita than the country as a whole.
The distinction led to a visit from Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who went on to promote Lancaster’s efforts on a national stage.
Now, in the 20 months since Trump’s travel ban, Church World Service has resettled about half as many refugees here as it did in the previous 20 months, according to data provided by CWS.
Mastropietro says, if Trump cuts the refugee funding, they will continue their advocacy (like this?) with other private and PUBLIC money!
The reporter continues with many paragraphs featuring personal refugee stories and about what President Trump is doing to the refugee program. Then this:
Church World Service, headquartered in Elkhart, Indiana, is one of nine national organizations funded by the Department of State for refugee resettlement. Each of them is a large operation with multiple local offices spread throughout the country.
Indiana?
Actually, CWS still has it original headquarters at the famous 475 Riverside Dr. building in New York City, home to dozens of hard Left ‘religious’ groups, like the National Council of Churches, and other similar socialist organizations. I’m guessing the lower level staffers work in Indiana to keep costs down.
But with fewer refugees making it to America’s doorstep, the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration “expects to fund a smaller number of recipient agencies” in the next fiscal year, according to a notice provided by a State Department spokesperson.
How many fewer agencies — and what factors might lead to the decision — is unclear. Mastropietro said the CWS national office is being kept in the dark. They just found out this week that the fiscal year will be extended to Dec. 31, delaying the decision of who will be funded and leaving CWS “on pins and needles for an additional three months,” she said.
While stripping refugee resettlement funding may be a fatal blow for some of the nine agencies, Mastropietro said CWS in Lancaster will carry on even if resettlement — its largest program — goes away.
Carrying-on will be tough!
Church World Service is in column one at James Simpson’s incredible table of how many taxpayer dollars each resettlement contractor consumes. CWS is 71% government funded and received nearly a half a billion dollars since 2008 from taxpayers! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/09/16/capital-research-center-publishes-an-overview-of-the-us-refugee-admissions-program/
Lancaster Onlinecontinues….
With other public [public of course means taxpayer dollars!–ed] and private funding avenues, CWS would continue operating programs such as legal immigration counseling, employment services and advocacy.And if it does lose the resettlement money, Mastropietro is convinced it will be a temporary, if difficult, setback.
And, she confirms what I have been saying!
“We’re just going to wait it out,” she said. “If anything happens, we’ll wait it out until the next president.”
Ambitious readers might like to learn more about refugees in Amish country. See my complete archive on Lancaster by clicking here.
Do not become complacent!
If the Trump Administration only reduces numbers of refugees and funding for a few years nothing will change!
A few of the smaller contractors may go belly-up, but it only will mean a greater monopoly for the surviving contractors like Church World Service.
Those contractors will be working to elect the next president, they will continue to lobby for more federal dollars and more refugees, and they will resume placing refugees quietly in to your unsuspecting towns and cities!
***Here below are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors.
You might be sick of seeing this list almost every day, but a friend once told me that people need to see something seven times before it completely sinks in, so it seems to me that 70, or even 700 isn’t too much!
And, besides I have new readers every day.
The present US Refugee Admissions Program will never be reformed if the system of paying the contractors by the head stays in place and the contractors are permitted to act as Leftwing political agitation groups, community organizers and lobbyists paid on our dime!
And, to add insult to injury they pretend it is all about ‘humanitarianism.’
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees into your towns and cities and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)! And, get them registered to vote eventually!
James Simpson has done an outstanding job of pulling together facts about the history of how the US came to be the top refugee resettlement country in the world. Hint: It all began with the UN!
And, then in this three-part seriesgives readers the facts about who we are bringing to America and how much it costs us—the US taxpayer.
Summary: A vast network of foundations, non-profits, government entities and political organizations have a vested interest in the continued growth of the resettlement of refugees in America. Because they receive billions of dollars in federal grant money, publicly-financed, tax-exempt organizations have significant incentives to support political candidates and parties that will keep these programs alive. These organizations need to be thoroughly audited and the current network of public/private immigrant advocacy and resettlement organizations needs to be completely overhauled. Resettling refugees should be a voluntary, genuinely charitable activity, removing all the perverse incentives government funding creates.
The refugee resettlement program is popular with many policymakers. It enjoys bipartisan support in Congress and state houses because it supplies low-wage, low skill labor that many big businesses crave, while enabling supporters to embrace “diversity” and thus avoid the Left’s favorite attacks and mischaracterizations: “bigot,” “racist,” “xenophobe,” “Islamophobe,” etc. This faux-moralizing on the Left stifles a necessary conversation our nation sorely needs. Meanwhile, the Left’s true motive is to import ever more people from third-world nations that are likely to become reliable Democrat voters once they achieve citizenship.
Under the Trump presidency, the United States’ refugee resettlement has been temporarily reduced, but by no means curtailed. A change in administration could resuscitate it overnight. There are many objectionable aspects of this program, not the least of which is finding resources to fund this enormous undertaking. The difficulty associated with assessing the true costs of the programs key to resettling refugees presents another obstacle to policymakers at every level of government.
It is important for readers to know that although we most often talk about the actual Refugee admissions numbers, there are tens of thousands more considered ‘refugees’ by the US government for the purpose of providing federal dollars for their care as they become ‘New Americans.’
Resettling Refugees: Who’s Coming to America?
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), refugees are:
[P]eople who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.
This mirrors the U.N. definition established at the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. It is important to note here, however, that under these definitions, “individuals who have crossed an international border fleeing generalized violence are not considered refugees.” This includes large numbers of people who are regularly resettled anyway, for example some of the Syrians fleeing that country’s conflict, and most—if not all Somalis.
Those who meet the definition include:
~refugees (those seeking protection in the United States who are not already in the country),
~asylum seekers or asylees (those who apply for asylum after coming to the U.S.),
~Cuban/Haitian Entrants,
~Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) and
~trafficking Victims.
The Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program is also administered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, although UACs do not meet the definition of “refugee.”
Table I below provides up-to-date estimates for each category.
Get a load of these numbers!
The table shows that this category of legal entry to the US is a much bigger problem than the one we usually discuss on these pages which is the Refugee column.
Don’t miss the total admitted in the last full year of the Obama presidency—269,491!
But, see that the Trump Administration is presiding over the arrival of a huge number (higher than Obama’s welcome!) of Special Immigrant Visa holders from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, last but not least! You really need to read the whole thing yourself, but prepare to be sick when you see how many millions of dollars are flowing out of the US Treasury to hundreds of non-profits who are in one way or another in the business of bringing in and then spreading refugees and other migrants around the US while lobbying for ever higher admissions numbers (aka paying clients!).
Simpson begins with the usual nine federal contractors, but that is only the tip of the iceberg!
Federal Refugee Resettlement Grants
Think about this! Earlier this year Church World Service and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society helped organize this protest against the President. Combined, those two refugee contractors consumed $620 million taxpayer dollars in the last ten years. Why are we paying for this? https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/01/28/church-world-service-and-hias-join-cair-to-protest-at-white-house/
The nine VOLAGs, their many affiliates, and unaccompanied alien children contractors all receive funding from the federal government to resettle the various refugee categories. As mentioned earlier, unaccompanied alien children do not meet the definition of “refugee,” however their resettlement is managed through the Office of Refugee Resettlement and they are included when calculating the total cost of the overall program.
Most funding comes in the form of grants. Prime awards are grants directly from the federal government to the state or the contractor. Sub-awards are those given to contractors by other contractors or state governments that received the prime grant. They are left out to avoid double counting. Table III below enumerates prime grants to VOLAGs and unaccompanied alien children contractors for refugee resettlement and related programs. Some of the VOLAGs, for example the Ethiopian Community Development Council, focus almost entirely on refugee resettlement. Others, like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, International Rescue Committee, and World Relief Corporation of the National Association of Evangelicals, have a broader mission.
Of the latter, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is the largest. As Table III shows, in FY 2018 USCCB received $47.7 million for resettlement purposes. However, USCCB participates in other federal grant programs and that year received a total of $363.9 million from the federal government.
Here is a chart you need to keep handy. Prepare to be sick!
Billions of dollars have flowed to the refugee contractors in the last ten years alone!
The nine major contractors (VOLAGS) that monopolize the US Refugee Admissions Program are these:
Church World Service (CWS)
Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) (secular)
Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) (DFMS is its other name)
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
International Rescue Committee (IRC) (secular)
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS)
US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular)
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
World Relief Corporation (WR)
Thanks to Jim Simpson for letting us know just how much each is being paid from the US Treasury!
Please, please take time to read the rest of Part III, it is stunning the amount of your money being distributed to non-profits who then act as political agitation groups!
And, these dollars do not include the cost of welfare, education, medical care, housing, etc. that you pay for!
Tell the White House to reform the whole program and begin by getting rid of middlemen federal contractors!
Religion News Service posted this article yesterday and a tweet from refugee contractor Church World Service (one of nine)*** about the rally at the White House.
The truth is, as much as they want you to believe it, there is no major up-swelling of demand for more refugees to be distributed around the country right now.
The big rally at the White House!
This is it?
Twenty two hours after tweeting this, CWS has 3 retweets and 7 likes!
Here is a bit of the story:
People of faith urge Trump to admit more refugees
(RNS) — With a decision looming on how many refugees to admit into the country, and rumors swirling that the number could drop dramatically from this year’s historic low, people of faith are coming together to ask the Trump administration to instead allow tens of thousands more to enter the United States.
My question for pastor Vaughn is: If the church has abundant resources, why are the taxpayers on the hook for more than a billion dollars a year for a refugee program?
Representatives of some of the largest Protestant denominations in the country — including the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Episcopal Church — were planning to gather outside the White House on Wednesday (Sept. 12) to press President Trump to raise the number of refugees admitted in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 to 75,000 people.
If you belong to one of those Protestant denominations, it is time to speak up! Ask what they are doing in your name!
RNS continues…..
“I just believe the church has abundant resources….said Patrick Vaughn, assistant pastor of Christ Church East Bay in Oakland, Calif.
Next we hear about the BIG letter to the President. I told you about it here. Please go to my post and see if your local religious leaders signed on.
And more than 750 faith-based organizations and national and local leaders signed on to another letter, dated Aug. 21, decrying the low number of refugees admitted this year and urging an increase for the next.
“Our collective scriptural mandate and our nation’s history and capabilities as a world leader demand no less,” according to the letter.
Your “scriptural mandate” is not the government’s responsibility. Your mandate was to help the poor with your own money, not by stealing from some (outside of your collective!) and giving it to your favored people!
***These below are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors.
You might be sick of seeing this list almost every day (it’s been 3 whole days since I last posted the list!), but a friend once told me that people need to see something seven times before it completely sinks in, so it seems to me that 70, or even 700 isn’t too much!
And, besides I have new readers every day.
The present US Refugee Admissions Program will never be reformed if the system of paying the contractors by the head stays in place and the contractors are permitted to act as Leftwing political agitation groups, community organizers and lobbyists paid on our dime!
And, to add insult to injury they pretend it is all about ‘humanitarianism.’
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees into your towns and cities and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)! And, get them registered to vote eventually!
From my most recent accounting, here. However, please see that Nayla Rush at the Center for Immigration Studieshas done an update of their income!
The hypocrisy of the Left has been on full display with perhaps the ultimate example of that surrounding the McCain funeralathon we witnessed (or tried to escape from viewing!) recently. They talk a good game about civility, but make no mistake, Leftists are mean people.
Forget vigorous debates about policy directions! It is personal destruction that is the primary weapon for the people who claim they are on the side of all that is right and good.
I wasn’t planning to write about how the Hard Leftists in the Open Borders movement have been showcasing Leftwing family members of key players in the Trump sphere, most notably White House adviser Stephen Miller’s uncle (and his childhood rabbi is also out demeaning Miller), but did you see they have now dragged out Laura Ingraham’s estranged Leftwing brother to attack her in social media? It is shameful.
I wasn’t going to write about all this, that is, until I saw this storyat Jewish Exponent where we see that federal refugee contractor, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is showcasing Miller’s uncle at their media events! What a ‘get’, as they likely high-five each other!
I repeat, Leftists are very mean people.
Agencies Address Refugee Program Concerns
A graph set up against the wall in the Nationalities Services Center (NSC) had towers of blue bars, varying in heights.
No mention of how many people were in the audience. And, no caption for the photo. That must be Miller’s mean Leftist uncle on the right.
The bars represent U.S. refugee resettlement arrivals from fiscal year 1980 — where the ceiling was set to 200,000 — to today with the fiscal year 2019 projection. The annual ceiling is now set at 45,000. Projections indicate that number could change to just 25,000.
In response, NSC, HIAS Pennsylvania and Bethany Christian Services of Greater Delaware Valley joined together to hold a panel discussion and conference on Sept. 6 about the dangers a drop that low could present for these agencies and the refugees they serve.
The danger that the biased media rarely mentions is that refugee contractors, like HIAS (one of nine contractors that monopolize refugee resettlement in the US), which got nearly $25 million from US taxpayers in a recent year and whose CEO makes a cool $300,000+ annual salary, are in danger of losing their sugar daddy—Uncle Sam!
The Jewish Exponentcontinues….
The U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program is on “life support,” NSC executive director Margaret O’Sullivan said.
“We are here to call attention to the potential evisceration of a program that has served as a point of pride for this nation for 40 years,” she said. “The current administration has been dismantling the program with stealth and with precision.”
As is usual, HIAS paraded out the most deserving refugees they could find, but clearly their star attraction was Stephen Miller’s uncle.
David S. Glosser, a neuropsychologist who volunteers with HIAS and gained name recognition for penning an essay condemning his nephew, Stephen Miller — senior adviser to Trump — and his anti-refugee remarks, shared the story of ancestors facing anti-Semitism and seeking refuge.
[….]
When he mentioned his family receiving help from Hebrew Immigrant and Aid Society as it was called then, HIAS PA Executive Director Cathryn Miller-Wilson smiled.
Longtime readers know that a few years back the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Societydropped the ‘Hebrew’ from its name and became simply HIAS. There was never any coherent explanation about why they dropped the ‘Hebrew.’ Were they ashamed of the word?
I suspected that it had something to do with the fact that they place Muslim refugees and perhaps some of those refugees were squeamish about the word ‘Hebrew.’ Just a guess!
What follows next at the Jewish Exponent is a naive discussion about how today’s refugees (like those from the Middle East and Africa) are just like the Jewish refugees of yesteryear. Of course they aren’t for a couple of reasons.
When Miller’s ancestors came, they were mostly culturally Europeans and there was no massive welfare system to support them. They worked hard and made it on their own with the help of their family. If they didn’t make it, they went back to the old country.
There was no taxpayer-funded NGO to take care of their every need!
Then here is the wrap of course!
….he and Miller-Wilson stressed, reach out to elected officials and vote.
