“It’s a really smart place for China to put in investment and to partner with Montana to have a really good packing industry and processing plant here.”
(Fred Wacker, rancher)
You know the phrase often used during Obama’s tenure in the Oval—changing America by changing the people. Well, that’s what is happening because greedy global corporations, especially food processing like BIG MEAT, BIG CHICKEN and BIG YOGURT, say they can’t find enough Americans to work low wage jobs so they need compliant immigrant laborers.
To hell with what flooding unsuspecting towns with third world workers does to rural America!
Trump with Republican Senator Daines giving Chinese investors a foothold in Montana?
Most egregious are the cases where the company (changing your town by changing the people) is foreign-owned.
We know this because we have been writing about the subject for ten years. In the early days the refugee resettlement contractors hid their relationship with global companies, but recently we reportedon one—Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service—signing a contract with Brazilian-owned JBS Swift in Greeley to help them “train” refugees as good employees for the meat giant. They signed another pact with Tyson Foods.
Now comes news that President Donald Trump made a deal with China to purchase Montana beef!
And, here is the catch: (To save money!) Montana needs a big new Chinese-owned meatpacking plant! What could go wrong?
US Senator Steve Daines and ranchers from the northwestern state of Montana on Wednesday applauded a 300-million-US dollar beef deal between Chinese commerce giant JD.com and the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSGA).
“This landmark agreement has the potential to substantially increase Montana opportunity and agricultural exports to the fastest growing overseas market for beef,” Daines said in a statement.
JD signed the agreement with Errol Rice, executive vice president of MSGA, on Wednesday in Beijing as U.S. President Donald Trump began his three-day state visit to China.
[….]
JD also intends to invest up to another 100 million dollars to build a brand-new slaughter house and feedlot infrastructure in Montana to help set up its supply chain there, with construction beginning as early as the spring of 2018.
Win-win deal! Not!
Wacker says it’s cheaper to build a BIG MEAT plant in Montana than to ship to existing plants in other states. To hell with the disruption to Montana towns which will be flooded with migrant laborers, not to mention the impact on the environment!
The agreement follows an agricultural roundtable meeting in early September between a Chinese delegation and Montana farmers and ranchers, hosted by Daines at the Morgan Ranch House, near downtown Bozeman, Montana.
Fred Wacker, owner of Cross Four Ranch in Miles City, Montana, said at the meeting that it would cost him about 80 dollars a head to send cattle to feedlots and processing plants in the Midwest, so as to ship beef products to China and other overseas markets. He would like to seek partnership with Chinese companies to build a world-class processing plant in Montana.
“It’s a really smart place for China to put in investment and to partner with Montana to have a really good packing industry and processing plant here,” Wacker said, arguing that would help bring down logistic costs and guarantee stable supply of high quality beef to China, a win-win deal for both sides. [Losers are the citizens of Montana!—ed]
I suppose there is one bright side–unlike Chobani Yogurt in nearby Idaho, I doubt the Chinese owners will approve of Muslim workers in light of their clear historical animosity to the ‘religion of peace.’ I can just see the mess when the Chinese company gets hit with some discrimination lawsuits when they say “NO” to Somali workers.
Heck, maybe they will insist on bringing in Chinese workers!
In the summer of 2016 I traveled around the country to visit mostly meatpacking towns and haven’t eaten store-bought meat since. I raised beef cattle on a small scale for 20 years, but when I saw those mile-after-mile feedlots, cattle standing in the hot Colorado sun (and the migrant labor disrupted towns), I lost all interest in supermarket beef.
Montanans you don’t want massive feedlots in your lovely state!
Readers should know that the US State Department opened a controversial refugee resettlement office in Montana two years ago. Paving the way for the arrival of cheap refugee labor?
More on Montana wannabe meatpackers next! Here it is!
They apparently want to make it clear to the Muslim world that they are the good people.
From The Jewish News of Northern California https://www.jweekly.com/2017/11/13/jewish-family-services-silicon-valley-files-suit-halt-refugee-ban/
Here is what Mark Hetfield CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (aka HIAS) said in an e-mail yesterday. (Emphasis is mine)
The Trump Administration shows no signs of backing off their policies against refugees, so we’re taking the Administration to court. Again.
HIAS could lose more than half of its funding if the US Refugee program was dismantled. See below. Don’t miss Hetfield’s salary! Doing well by doing good!
From the moment the first executive order banning refugees and travelers from Muslim countries was issued on January 27th, HIAS and our partners in the American Jewish community have opposed every attempt by President Trump to close America’s doors to those in need of protection.
Our outrage has only grown stronger with every new executive order that prevents thousands of refugees from finding safety in the U.S.
Enough is enough. Together with our longstanding local resettlement partners Jewish Family Service of Seattle and Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley, HIAS yesterday filed a suit to again challenge restrictive policies that seek to prevent vulnerable refugees from finding freedom and safety. As we have for the last 136 years, we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that America remains a country that welcomes refugees instead of turning them away.
Lawsuit: ‘It’s the dismantling of the U.S. refugee program’
Rabbi Berkovitz says Trump is dismantling the whole refugee program which would mean HIAS will lose millions of taxpayer dollars for its advocacy work. (LOL! he didn’t say the last part!)
“People are dying who were given permission to come into this country. It’s tragic,” said Rabbi Will Berkovitz, CEO of Jewish Family Service of Seattle, one of the refugee agencies that’s filed the lawsuit.
“The agenda that’s really thinly veiled here is the dismantlement of the refugee resettlement program as a whole,” Berkovitz said. “Not for now, but forever.”
The lawsuit claims the order is unconstitutional, discriminates against Muslims and gives preference to Christian refugees. [The US might actually give preference to Christians, what is the world coming to!—ed]
You have to give them credit for chutzpah!
HIAS has been a long-time supporter of the Lautenberg Amendmentwhich gave preference for resettlement to Soviet Jews among others, see here.
So are they now saying that the Lautenberg Amendment must go? Look for HIAS to reverse itself and ask Congress to abolish Lautenberg (Ha! Ha!).
Hereis what we learned from the Jewish agency in California:
Plaintiffs are being represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center; the National Immigration Law Center; attorneys Lauren Aguiar, Mollie M. Kornreich and Abigail Sheehan Davis; Perkins Coie; and HIAS.
Learn more about the directorof the National Immigration Law Center when she was bragging and disparaging then candidate Donald Trump by clicking here. Jim Simpson and I attended the spectacle.
Since all of the refugee contractors receive funding by the head for the refugees they place in your towns, and if the Trump Administration continues to lower the incoming numbers it blows a hole (a crater!) in the budgets of the big nine. HIAS could lose about $23 million if the program was dismantled as they (supposedly) fear.
Good Countryis promoting a one world government as you can see here on their website:
Most of the world’s problems are really just symptoms of a bigger, underlying problem: that we haven’t yet worked out how to organise ourselves as a single species inhabiting a single planet. This can change.
[….]
We need to co-operate and collaborate much more closely if we’re going to make the world work.
But, most of the time, we don’t. Why not?
Because the seven billion people who created all these problems are organised in two hundred tribes called nations. Each one is run by a government that’s totally focused on the national interest: what will make us richer, happier, safer, stronger? They don’t worry too much if that makes others poorer, unhappier, more vulnerable, weaker because, well, they’re foreigners. And foreigners can’t vote.
Can this ever change? Yes it can. It will change when we, the people who keep those governments in power, wake them up and tell them the world has changed, and their jobs have changed with it.
I know this is getting in to the weeds, but I want readers to understand that for instance, the Somali refugees arriving in the US are picked up all over the world, and so if there is a ‘travel ban’ for say Somalia it doesn’t mean that no Somalis are coming.
Most Somalis coming to the US come from Kenya because the big UN camps are there and the UN makes the first cut on who comes to America.
From time to time, I show you processing country maps which are posted at Wrapsnet(the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center) for the previous months of the fiscal year (by the 5th of the present month).
For background, visit this post from December 2016 where you can see the top PROCESSING country is Kenya followed by Turkey and Tanzania as numbers two and three.
I’m always annoyed to see Malta as a processing country because as a European country it is responsible for the illegal boat migrants who land on its shores (not America!), but ever since the Bush Administration we have been turning illegal aliens on Malta into refugees destined for Your Town, USA. See my huge archive on the disgraceful Malta deal,here.
And, tell me, how can they seriously assure us that some boat migrant from Libya who washed ashore on the island nation of Malta has been thoroughly security screened! Was he carrying his documents and criminal record in a ziploc bag?
Here is Wrapsnet’s processing countries map for the first month of President Trump’s first full fiscal year—October FY18. FY17 began when Obama was still in office.
In the first month of fiscal year 2018 the US admitted 1,247 refugees
Here below is a list of the countries from which we are processing refugees so far this fiscal year.
Malta to America Express!
See that Trump’s State Department has continued the Malta to America express! By the way there is no way I’ve ever figured out how to identify what nationalities are arriving from Malta. In the past we did learn that many are Somalis. The numbers are small but significant because we again are taking illegal migrants that are really Europe’s problem!
The Trump Administration could stop the Malta arrangement with a phone call if they wanted to.
And, I sure would like to know why we take any refugees from Israel! They should be taking care of whichever ‘refugees’ seek asylum there. What is that all about.
Kenya is still in the top three but dropped from first to third place. First place goes to Nepal (for the so-called Bhutanese refugees) with Malaysia as number two. Note that Ethiopia is not far behind the top 3. Malaysia is the likely jumping off location for Rohingya to America. Turkey and Tanzania are now way down the list.
Since one of the top three sending countries is Kenya I checked Wrapsnet for the number of Somalis who entered the US in the month of October. The total number was 113.
Then, for fun! I wanted to see how many and where they went in Minnesota. The total was 23 in October. Minnesota got the highest number in the 113. The other 90 were scattered around America. None to St. Cloud right now.
Here are some of the top ethnic groups resettled in the US in October: Bhutanese (273), DR Congolese (181), Burmese (147), Somalis (113), Ukrainians (77) and Syrians (33).
Because knowledge is power, here is what you can do…
With long cold winter days ahead, you too might want to have fun with numbers at Wrapsnet, the US State Department’s data collection site. You never know what you might find out about your own state or even your own town!
Endnote: While we are looking at maps, you might want to revisit a map showing the countries that have been warned about the deadly Plague spreading out from Madagascar.
This was posted a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t seen it until today when the IRC (a resettlement contractor) was crowing about it on twitter.
Friends lobbyist Yasmine Taeb came to her job for the Quakers from the Center for American Progress (Podesta!). No surprise. https://www.fcnl.org/people/yasmine-taeb
If you didn’t know, the Friends (aka Quakers) are very pro-more-immigration. They are involved in defending the Palestinians in the Middle East as well (story for another day).
Newsfrom the Friends Committee on National Legislation. I’m sure you might have guessed if your member of Congress was on the letter, but we are grateful to the ‘Friends’ for listing them for us.
In response to the Trump administration’s announcement of a historically low refugee admissions goal for 2018, over 100 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to the White House calling on the administration to increase the refugee admissions goal from 45,000 to 110,000. Additionally, this letter expresses concern over a proposed “assimilation standard” for refugees.
FCNL Legislative Director for Human Rights and Civil Liberties Yasmine Taeb made the following statement….
The letter to the president can be found below. [I did not count the signatures, they said 100.—ed]
Dear President Trump,
We write to express our deep disappointment in your decision to set the Presidential Determination (PD) for Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2018 at 45,000. We strongly urge you to reconsider this decision and increase the refugee admission level to 110,000 for Fiscal Year 2018. Further, we are alarmed by proposed changes to the resettlement process to require refugees to meet an assimilation standard and ask you brief us at least 30 days before any such changes are made.
As you know, the world is in the midst of the largest refugee crisis in history. An unprecedented 65.6 million people across the globe have been forcibly displaced from their homes because of violence, persecution, and war. Approximately 22.5 million of those individuals are refugees, and more than half are children. The U.S. has a moral imperative to welcome refugees, who are the most thoroughly vetted people who enter our country. America taking a leadership role during this crisis bolsters our credibility as a nation of immigrants founded on the promise to welcome those seeking a better life.
As both Republican and Democratic administrations have confirmed, the United States screens refugees more stringently than any other traveler allowed to enter the United States. The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) has safely and successfully resettled more than three million refugees from around the world to American communities across the country since 1975. Refugee applicants must undergo a robust and thorough screening process that takes roughly two years and involves our nation’s top security and counter-terror experts. The exhaustive vetting process includes checking fingerprints and other biometric data against terrorist and criminal databases and multiple interviews through multiple Federal agencies.
Since the enactment of the 1980 Refugee Act, the average annual goal for refugee admissions has been 95,000. In Fiscal Year 2016, the U.S. resettled approximately 85,000 refugees, and the Presidential Determination for Fiscal Year 2017 was 110,000. During the worst refugee crisis in the world, these resettlement numbers pale in comparison to the support our allies are providing and our moral leadership commands. Since Executive Order 13769 was signed, the number of refugees coming to the United States each month has dropped precipitously. Australia, Norway, Canada, Sweden, and Finland all accept more refugees per capita than the United States, with Canada pledging to accept 300,000 refugees in 2017. Failing to do our part to alleviate this global crisis undermines our leadership, diplomacy, and national security.
In addition to the U.S.’s moral responsibility, supporting our allies and partners, whose resources are being strained by hosting large numbers of refugees, promotes security and stability at home and abroad. Twenty national security leaders, including Henry Kissinger, Michael Chertoff, Madeleine Albright, and Leon Panetta wrote a letter in 2015 noting that “resettlement initiatives help advance U.S. national security interests by supporting the stability of our allies and partners that are struggling to host large numbers of refugees.”[1] By doing more to host and assist refugees, the United States would help safeguard the stability of nations like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, which are hosting the vast majority of Syrian refugees. This can help reduce regional instability and potential for conflict and terrorism. Additionally, severely limiting the number of refugees the U.S. admits perpetuates extremist organizations’ false narrative of a war between Islam and the West.
In order to make clear that the United States rejects this worldview, we must bolster our refugee program by supporting the world’s most vulnerable people, without discriminating based on religion or nationality. As a nation of immigrants, our country has a long history of welcoming newcomers of all different backgrounds. Any efforts to require refugees meet an assimilation standard misunderstands the purpose of our resettlement program which is to assist the most vulnerable. This is especially true if no additional assistance is provided to ensure refugees are successfully integrated into the fabric of our nation.
The 45,000 PD for Fiscal Year 2018 is woefully insufficient when compared to the millions of people who have been forced to flee their home countries. Establishing a PD of 45,000 is the lowest refugee admissions goal in our nation’s history. This would prevent tens of thousands of people from enriching American communities while seeking safety, protection, and an opportunity to provide a better future for themselves and their families in the United States.
The current global humanitarian crisis requires strong American leadership. To reflect that, we request that you reconsider and increase the PD for refugee admissions level to 110,000 for Fiscal Year 2018. Thank you for your attention to this matter. We look forward to working together with you and your Administration on this critical issue.
Sincerely,
Eddie Bernice Johnson
Donald S. Beyer, Jr.
Earl Blumenauer
Lisa Blunt Rochester
Suzanne Bonamici
Robert A. Brady
Anthony Brown
Michael Capuano
Salud Carbajal
Tony Cárdenas
André Carson
Judy Chu
David N. Cicilline
Katherine Clark
Yvette D. Clarke
Steve Cohen
John Conyers, Jr.
J. Luis Correa
Joe Courtney
Joe Crowley
Elijah E. Cummings
Danny K. Davis
Peter DeFazio
Diana DeGette
John K. Delaney (My rep who has announced he is running for Prez in 2020!)
Mark DeSaulnier
Ted Deutch
Debbie Dingell
Lloyd Doggett
Michael Doyle
Keith Ellison
Eliot L. Engel
Anna G. Eshoo
Adriano Espaillat
Elizabeth H. Esty
Dwight Evans
Bill Foster
Lois Frankel
Ruben Gallego
John Garamendi
Jimmy Gomez
Josh Gottheimer
Gene Green
Raúl Grijalva
Luis V. Gutiérrez
Colleen Hanabusa
Alcee L. Hastings
Brian Higgins
James Himes
Eleanor Holmes Norton
Pramila Jayapal
Hakeem Jeffries
Marcy Kaptur
William R. Keating
Robin L. Kelly
Joseph P. Kennedy
Ro Khanna
Daniel T. Kildee
James Langevin
Rick Larsen
John B. Larson
Brenda L. Lawrence
Barbara Lee
Sander Levin
Ted W. Lieu
Zoe Lofgren
Alan Lowenthal
Stephen Lynch
Carolyn B. Maloney
Doris Matsui
Betty McCollum
James P. McGovern
Gwen Moore
Seth Moulton
Jerrold Nadler
Grace Napolitano
Donald Norcross
Beto O’Rourke
Frank Pallone, Jr.
Jimmy Panetta
Bill Pascrell, Jr.
Donald Payne, Jr.
Ed Perlmutter
Scott Peters
Chellie Pingree
Mark Pocan
Jared Polis
David Price
Mike Quigley
Jamie Raskin
Ben Ray Lujan
Lucille Roybal-Allard
Bobby Rush
Tim Ryan
John Sarbanes
Jan Schakowsky
Adam Schiff
Bradley S. Schneider
Robert C. “Bobby” Scott
José E. Serrano
Carol Shea-Porter
Albio Sires
Louise Slaughter
Adam Smith
Darren Soto
Eric Swalwell
Mark Takano
Dina Titus
Paul Tonko
Norma J. Torres
Niki Tsongas
Juan Vargas
Marc Veasey
Filemon Vela
Nydia Velázquez
Peter J. Visclosky
Timothy Walz
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Bonnie Watson Coleman
Peter Welch
John Yarmuth
Looking for something to do today? If your representative is on the list, tell him or her what you think of the 110,000 refugee wish list.
It doesn’t matter if they don’t listen to you, do it anyway. They need to know that signing a letter like this is not a political freebie!
If you have no rep. on the list, call or write to Delaney!
![rpcLogoSmall [Converted]](https://refugeeresettlementwatch.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/rpclogosmaller.jpg)
