Actually Wausau is not a new site altogether. Way before my time of writing this blog, which I started in 2007, Wausau saw a huge influx of Hmong refugees in the wake of our disastrous war in Southeast Asia.
Some Hmong went on to do okay as ‘new Americans,’ others not so much, as I pointed out here in 2019 at my other blog ‘Frauds and Crooks.’
I suspect Wausau has seen refugees continue to arrive in recent years placed there by the nearest resettlement office, but we can no longer get the data as the US State Department has closed to the public most of the information they store at the Refugee Processing Center.
Apparently Wausau has run out of needy Americans for the Christians to love and care for!
However, now it appears Wausau is on the target list for a new resettlement agency there, this time with the Ethiopian Community Development Council as the lead government contractor. (There are nine major contractors!***)
Look people! ARE YOU LISTENING? (Yes, I am shouting.)
How many times in the last 13 to 14 years have I written about this—enough to make me feel insanity setting in!
WAKE THE H*** UP!
We are losing our country!
Do you know, the other day someone asked me about Wyoming and I wrote this post:
In the post is a link to the present refugee resettlement sites.
Those are the sites where the contractors have subcontractor offices. I wrote the post on Tuesday and since then ONLY 16 readers have even bothered to open the link to see if their location is already an established resettlement site.
Those are the sites where very large numbers of additional refugees will be placed in the coming months as the Biden Administration seeks to find housing and social services for up to 125,000 refugees from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. And, that does not include the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pouring in.
By the way, in my experience, once a refugee office is open in your town it will also ‘serve’ as a magnet for illegal aliens and asylum seekers who will be looking for guidance on where to get their free stuff.
It is increasingly difficult for me to continue to repeat things I have been writing about for over a decade and wondering if anyone is listening.
At the end of the Obama Administration, the contractors were looking for approximately 40 new sites because they had worn out their welcome in some long-standing resettlement cities.
They thought Hillary would follow Obama to the White House and the numbers that were high under Obama would expand even further. Trump created a hiatus for a few years, but we are now back to the big push to change America by changing the people.
As I said here about Winchester, Virginia in May, they are scrambling for new sites.
I said it again on Friday when I wrote about Asheville, North Carolina, see here.
In September, Biden will be setting the cap for FY22 and it is expected to be 125,000 beginning on October 1, 2021.
They are bidding for bodies!
That is what one longtime refugee watcher calls it because the contractors are paid by the federal government (by you, the taxpayer) on a per head basis!
To accomplish Biden’s goal, the nine contractors are competing with each other and madly scrambling to find new fresh territory and get sub-offices open.
In fact, they must get their plans in to the US State Department ideally in August or early September—the rush is on and that is why stories like the one from Wausau I’m about to mention are popping up.
The reader who alerted me about Wausau sounded desperate to know what they could do to stop the planned site.
Let me be clear! There is no lawsuit you can file, no national leader to help you (no Senators, no Congressmen), and no national immigration control group that will come and save you.
There is only one thing you can do and that is hard.
You must organize locally and make an enormous political noise against the plan (while being called a racist and xenophobe).
Back in February I began a series of posts about organizing locally.
I never did finish the series because so few people were bothering to read it (and when people don’t read, I get lazy!). I know that the mention of work sends people into hiding and I know it’s not being read even as it is linked on my homepage because I get data daily about what posts people are reading.
Local Religious Leaders Looking to Bring Refugees to Wausau
WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — A group of Religious leaders in Wausau is hoping to help settle dozens of vetted and screened refugees in the region in the next few years.
Pastor Rebecca Voss must believe it is so much cooler to welcome poverty from across the world than to help poor neighbors right here at home.
After meeting with the group led by First United Methodist Church Pastor Rebecca Voss, the Ethiopian Community Development Council has selected Wausau to receive around 75 approved refugees from Africa and the Middle East.Voss says it started as an idea in a Bible Study group that grew over time. [Just think about that, some non-profit group largely funded by the feds and located in Virginia has “selected Wausau!”—ed]
“We really were studying Christian hospitality, what it means to welcome the stranger and how we can be a place of refuge, safety, and healing for those who have been through some pretty traumatic experiences,” said Voss. “They have no place to call home, but we can create a community of love and respect for one another.”
The group is working with the ECDC, one of nine nationally recognized resettlement agencies. Voss says the group met them at “the right time and the right place,” to get the idea moving forward through a series of meetings with Voss’ group and some local businesses.
“They met with community leaders in both the non-profit sector and business sector, and really it led to a diversity of people being in solid agreement that we need refugees probably more than they need us,” she said. “They are resilient, many of them have been through a lot of trauma, so they will need a lot of compassion as they get resettled. But, we do know that they will strengthen our community.”
How Christian of them to find cheap foreign laborers for local businesses.
Do they have meatpackers in Wausau, I wonder!
She adds that’s especially true since many refugees are hard workers who can help fill some of the jobs that have been sitting vacant as the region comes out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This next bit makes me laugh! Yeh, yeh, volunteers will help, but guess what? Volunteers quickly burn out and the burden of the refugees falls on the community at large, or they simply fall through the cracks while they build ethnic enclaves where crime grows. I have seen it time and time again.
She went on to say that the group is not looking for any public money or support from the city. Each refugee would be paired up with a sponsorship group such as a Church, Bible Study group, book club, or anyone else with a desire to help out. They would provide some money upfront- around $2,000 or so- to get the refugees into a rental property with some light furnishings and furniture.
Then they would be expected to show them basics such as how to navigate the public transit system, use the library, get them set up with healthcare, get their children registered for school, and any other life skills they may need help with as they look to build a life in the region.
ECDC doesn’t pick Wausau’s refugees and neither does the city! They are chosen mostly by the United Nations! Those listed below are mostly Muslims. The Burmese coming in large numbers to the US right now are Rohingya Muslims.
Voss adds that despite the name “Ethiopia” being in the name of the group they are working with, there would be people from other African countries brought to the area along with some from Burma, Afghanistan, and Iraq. That could also include interpreters who worked with the US military during the recent wars in both nations.
Does Wausau have a satellite office forCAIRyet? If not, look for one getting established soon!
The first refugees could be settled by October of this year. Others will be placed throughout 2022.
Yup, that is what I said above—the drive is on to find ‘welcoming’ and naïve communities as fast as possible because they want to be ready by October first.
And, one more thing!
Once a site is chosen and the refugees begin to arrive it will be too late because the flow will never end as the contractors work to bring more members of the extended families of the first refugees they place in Wausau.
I hope you made it this far so that I won’t feel like I have wasted hours on a beautiful Sunday saying the same thing I have been saying for years!
*** Here for new readers are the nine government contractors that monopolize all refugee placement in the US. Some of the fake non-profits are almost completely funded by the federal government/you! ECDC is one of those as I pointed out here.
And, so does Vermont’s Republican Governor Phil Scott who has (according to the AP) asked Harris/Biden for more refugees!
It is surprising isn’t it that Vermont, the homeland of Bernie Socialist Sanders really hasn’t ‘welcomed’ very many refugees compared even to other states of a similar size, but all of that might change starting in October.
What is happening in October?
The Harris/Biden team says they will increase refugee admissions for FY2022 which begins October first to 125,000. That would be the highest annual refugee cap in decades—more than Obama ever dreamed of! And, now the hunt is on for their new homes.
This article from the Associated Presswould have you believe small cities were never the lucky recipients of third world diversity, but that just isn’t so.
And, by the way, know also that the AP reporter has transposed the words in the name of the organization. It should be the Ethiopian Community Development Council known widely in the refugee industry as ECDC, a long time member of the big nine contractors*** that monopolize all resettlement and have done so for decades.
Targeted Brattleboro, VT, population 11,000
Readers may remember that an effort to make Rutland, Vermont, another small city in the white state, a home for impoverished refugees exploded into a huge controversy in 2016 that ultimately saw the pro-refugee mayor ousted.
Know that this hunt for fresh territory is going on everywhere (except maybe Wyoming, but folks there need to be on the look-out) as the contractors must submit their plans to the US State Department by late summer so they can be competitive with other refugee contractors and get their allotment of paying clients (aka refugees) starting October first.
Wausau, Wisconsin is also on the target list according to this report.
Refugee Resettlement Nonprofit Plans New Programs in Vermont
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) — A refugee resettlement nonprofit has plans to start a new program in Vermont to relocate refugees in smaller, more rural communities across the United States.
The Ethiopian Development Community Council, a nonprofit agency that partners with the State Department to resettle refugees in the U.S., wants to launch its program in Brattleboro because of the city’s support. The first families should arrive in the city before the end of the year if the program is approved by the federal government, Vermont Public Radio reported Monday.
The nonprofit has also chosen Wausau [Wisconsin–ed] to test out the program, pending federal approval.
The nonprofit is preparing for an influx of refugees since the Biden Administration has promised to increase the number of refugees allowed in the country and reopen the refugee resettlement program that the previous Trump Administration imposed restrictions on, the radio station reported.
Tsehaye Teferra
“If we want to create integration of refugees, having them only in big cities where they would be congregating among themselves, only, is not going to help long-term integration,” said Tsehaye Tefera, the founder of the Ethiopian Development Community Council.
That may sound like a nice sentiment but in reality refugees resettled in smaller cities generally migrate after a few months to larger cities because they want to live in enclaves with their own kind of people!
The most visible of the ethnic groups, partaking of what the industry calls secondary migration, are the Somalis loading up Minnesota.
Back to AP at US News….
Social and economic organizations in Windham County have been supportive, but efforts to resettle refugees in Vermont have been controversial in the past, Vermont Public Radio reported.
Elwell was formerly the manager in Palm Beach County, Florida.
Brattleboro town manager Peter Elwell said he knows there could be opposition to the resettlement program, but regardless, the plan is in line with the town’s priority to improve equity in one of the whitest states in the country.
Earlier this year, Gov. Phil Scott asked the State Department to increase the refugee cap in Vermont.
Scott called refugee resettlement “an integral part of our efforts to grow Vermont’s economy.”
However, see this report from FAIR which examined the ten smallest immigrant population states and determined that increasing the percentage of migrants going to the state would have an outsized negative impact on the economy and on the social fabric of the state.
You might be interested to know that ECDC is likely the smallest of the big nine resettlement contractors and generally over the years has kept a low political profile as others of the contractors, most notably HIAS, LIRS and Church World Service, were out making political noise and suing the Trump Administration.
However, much to my surprise Teferra took a public swipe at Trump here in July of 2020.
You will see in that post that the ‘non-profit’ organization is effectively a government agency as almost the entirety of its $13 million budget comes from you, the US taxpayers.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris andlobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.
At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients. See Winchester, VA.
I haven’t seen anything official yet from the bigwigs in the refugee industry other than their campaign I told you about here to pressure Congress into pressuring Trump to make a determination this month that would increase refugee admissions to 95,000 for fiscal year 2021 which begins in three weeks.
But, I ran across a paperwritten by a student (published in May of this year) in which she interviews underlings at several of the nine major federal resettlement contractors. I’ve snipped just this section of an interview with Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) staff, but the whole paper has some informative nuggets for refugee policy wonks.
I was mostly interested in discussions of the upcoming Presidential Determination, so didn’t spend a lot of time on all of the gory details about what Trump is doing to them.
The staffers in the Chicago office (the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicagois a subcontractor of ECDC) say they fully expect zero refugees in FY2021 if Trump is reelected. They say they are financially strapped, but when I checked USA SpendingI found that they were still getting millions of your tax dollars. For what, I want to know?
“[Don’t] Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor…” a Study on the Trump Administration’s Unprecedented Reforms to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and their Implications
Rebecca Zellelew and Aklilu Adeye: ECDC – Chicago, IL
(Personal interview, 02/21/2020)
Rebecca Zellelew and Aklilu Adeye serve as a case manager and the executive director of the Ethiopian Community Development Council in Chicago, respectively.
This interview was conducted with both of them engaging in answering the questions simultaneously.
Zellelew and Adeye said for the FY 2020 PD, the administration is shifting its priorities and focusing mainly on religious minorities such as Ukrainians.
Aklilu Adeye
Because of this administration’s differing priorities and continuous cuts to the USRAP, the ECDC Chicago office has shrunk in staffing since 2017, they said.
They did not specify how many staffers had left or been laid off. Adeye said the office is having to shift to be a different kind of nonprofit offering different services, and also are not able to afford to refill positions of those who decide to leave or who are laid off. Adeye called this season a process of “soul searching” for his office, in order to rebuild from the damages the Trump administration’s cuts caused.
Adeye mentioned focusing on “revenue makers” several times as the office is shifting to focus on other programs that serve the already resettled communities in Chicago that can pay for ECDC extra services such as continued language classes, job training, after school and children’s programs, etc. Adeye said especially in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, he is going to give refugee resettlement “one more year” before they decide to make any big decisions regarding changing the office’s services.
Adeye and Zellelew explained together why they think the cuts are being made, and that it is largely due to “othering rhetoric becoming mainstream” and “identity politics.”
Looking for a picture of Zellelew I came across this one and assume it is the same person interviewed in this paper. It appears that Zellelew was arrested a few years back as a “diversity warrior” (arrested for disorderly conduct). I don’t see her on the staff roster now, so maybe she has gone back to street action. http://mu-warrior.blogspot.com/2015/06/self-righteous-marquette-diversity.html
Zellelew said President Trump is a “mouthpiece” to address the group that has made immigration an “ideological” issue and “easy target.”
She said President Trump will do “whatever will get him the most votes” and “momentum.” Zellelew said Trump is able to make politically uninformed groups go vote based on his energized nationalism.
Adeye called these cuts a “difficult wound,” and that the administration uses refugee resettlement as a “flashpoint” for conversation, “just like abortion and healthcare.”He backed this up by saying he’s observed this as new because the refugee program wasn’t demonized until recently, not “even after 9/11,” when American fear of outsiders was at an all-time high. [Where has he been, yes, it has been criticized long before Trump came along, to that I can attest.—ed]
Zellelew said the underlying factor of all of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, refugee resettlement cuts included, is “racially motivated.”
She said that his administration “shows a history of racist policies” and she takes this into account since refugees are often people of color, not Anglo-Saxon European like a stereotypical looking ‘American.’
Regarding the future, Adeye said it matters who wins the election in November, but that it will take at least two years to rebuild the capacity of the program since all of these cuts have occurred. If Trump wins, Zellelew said, a zeroing policy for FY 2021 is “inevitable,” and the program infrastructure will completely collapse.
On a positive note, Adeye said there has been a big “awakening in society” and that there will be “lots of future policy change” after we “get over this rut we’re in.”
More here if you are interested in what the refugee contractor staffers have to say about the President and his policies. One of the resettlement agency staffers in Arkansas says that Republican governors and other “conservatives” are supportive of refugee resettlement, but keep quiet about it.
“We are disheartened by the policies of the current administration.”
(Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the Ethiopian Community Development Council)
The legacy media is filled these days with stories about how refugees are having a tough time in America coping with the Chinese Virus—so commonsense would dictate that we don’t bring anymore until Americans are back on their feet. Right!
What interested me in this news from Arlington, VA isn’t so much about how refugees are coping, but that it features the Ethiopian Community Development Councilone of the nine major refugee contractors operating in America.
I’ve beenwriting this blog for 13 years,and they have hardly made a blip on my radar screen because they seem to have chosen to keep a low profile. I haven’t seen them out protesting Donald Trump, filing lawsuits against him or otherwise whining to the media about how they have to fire staff and close offices until now.
The ‘Our man in Arlington’column by Charlie Clark (whoever he is) at the Falls Church News Pressfeatured ECDCyesterday in a column about how (you guessed it) refugees are coping with the COVID lockdown.
The Supreme Court on June 25 okayed the Trump administration’s policy of limiting the number of asylum seekers in the country by denying them court appeal rights.
That decision came just days after the worldwide marking of the United Nations-sponsored World Refugee Day, June 20. And it comes after President Trump spent the past three years aiming to reduce total refugee levels to zero.
Most likely to feel the impact locally is the Arlington-based Ethiopian Community Development Council Inc., the refugee-support and State Department-authorized transition agency with offices just off Columbia Pike.
I was alerted that this sub-sector of Arlington’s diverse population is among those hit hardest by the coronavirus lockdown. So I logged on last week to several Zoom conversations with the nonprofit’s far-flung constituents.
Today’s immigration landscape is a far cry from the 1970s when Arlingtonians (mostly) opened our doors to refugees from the Vietnam War. And the current push to restrict America’s benefits to those born here distances us from our classic international role as a beacon for victims legitimately escaping violence and tyranny.
A rare public comment about our President by Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the “donation-supported council”:
“The current policy of the Trump administration with regard to refugees represents a departure from the foundational ideals that established this country as a place of refuge for those that are in need of protection and safety,” said the statement from Tsehaye Teferra, president and CEO of the donation-supported council. “We are disheartened by the policies of the current administration.”
Teferra founded the counsel in 1983, focusing at first on Ethiopians in the Washington area, but eventually expanding to all refugee groups for help in resettlement, languages, employment and education.
I take issue with the columnist’s characterization of ECDC being a donation-supported council unless you consider tax payer funding as a ‘donation.’
So, I did what I normally do under these circumstances and headed to Guidestarto have a look at their most recent Form 990. Gee, what a surprise! ECDC is almost completely federally funded and Dr. Teferra pulls down a comfy salary thanks to US taxpayers and Donald Trump.
$12 Million in Government Grants! Total income $13 Million!
Leave it to the refugee industry’s public relations apparatus to get a story planted in the Kansas City Starjust as Donald Trump arrived in the state next door for a rally for Kansas Republican candidates including gubernatorial candidate, a leading immigration control advocate, Kris Kobach. One story is here.
(This Somali family lives in Kansas City, Missouri)
Here is the headlinewith the usual story line (family happy to be in America, only wish Dad was with them).
As Trump cuts refugee numbers, outlook dim for father to join KC Muslim family of 9
But, why wasn’t Dad with them and caring for them in Kenya (a safe country btw)?
The family arrived from Kenya in 2017 to cheers from local advocates for more refugee admissions. https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/fox-24/somali-family-of-nine-touches-down-in-kansas-city-mo/653945636
Somali refugee Sahra Hassan Absuge and her eight children today enjoy what they could only dream of two years ago.
A two-story house. A couple of jobs. Schools. Donated appliances. [Food stamps and Medicaid fills the gap says the story.—-ed]
“I am so lucky,” Absuge said. “It’s by the grace of God that we are here.”
All that’s missing is her husband.
Also a refugee from Somalia, he seeks to one day join his Kansas City family after four years of being separated, trapped in another war zone. But chances for a reunion anytime soon appear slim, given ever-deepening cuts in the number of refugees allowed into the U.S.
Absuge and her children barely got in themselves.
Twenty months ago, dozens of cheering supporters at Kansas City International Airport greeted the family after they had squeezed through a tightening slipknot on refugee travel.
Continue here for all the happy talk and mention of their resettlement agency—Della Lamb—a Methodist group, a subcontractor of the Ethiopian Community Development Council (one of nine federal resettlement contractors that work for the US State Department).
Then a lament about a slowdown in family reunification:
At Della Lamb, Hyde and director of refugee resettlement Abdul Bakar could think of resettling only one Muslim on the Missouri side in the past year.
Absuge’s husband, the father of all eight of the children, is Muslim.
“There used to a good pipeline for family reunification,” said Judy Akers, Della Lamb’s executive director. “But there hasn’t been much spoken of that recently.”
Family reunification suspended in 2008 for Somalia….
Longtime readers may remember that the US State Department had to suspend the whole family reunification program for Somalis beginning in 2008 due to massive fraud in the P-3 (family reunification) program, see here. The suspension lasted several years.
I sure hope Homeland Security is doing some robust vetting of Dad. He left their Nairobi village in 2014? (Someone check the age of the youngest child!). But other news reports say they were living in a UN camp.
He went to Sudan looking for work in the middle of civil unrest there? And, then instead of returning to his family in a safe Kenya he ‘flees’ to Uganda. WTH!
Dad then ‘finds his family’ on YouTube videos?
He could have found them if he had returned to safe Kenya from his sojourn in Sudan instead of hotfooting it to Uganda!
KC Star continues….
….father left their Nairobi refugee village in 2014 to seek work in Sudan. He instead encountered homelessness, civil war and hunger before fleeing to Uganda. When his family resettled in America, his wife didn’t know if Abdullahi was alive or dead. [Really! Or did this family have a better shot of getting in to the US as women and children only?—ed]
Wow! Dad found after the family got to KC!
The father, through friends in Nairobi, learned of the family’s whereaboutswith the help of the internet and those YouTube videos. “Search ‘refugees’…and our family of nine pops up,” Absuge said through the interpreter.
For those who want to read the whole long (anti-Trump propaganda) story,click here.
It is surprising isn’t it that Vermont, the homeland of Bernie Socialist Sanders really hasn’t ‘welcomed’ very many refugees compared even to other states of a similar size, but all of that might change starting in October.
Most likely to feel the impact locally is the Arlington-based Ethiopian Community Development Council Inc., the refugee-support and State Department-authorized transition agency with offices just off Columbia Pike.
