This is big and it is buried many column inches into a story at Business Insider entitled:
Biden said the US was committed to accepting more refugees. So where are they?
As longtime readers know, the US Refugee Admissions Program has traditionally paid its nine contractors*** on a per refugee client basis.
I am speculating Biden said: Here is the deal! You shut up about the low number of admissions for FY21 and we will send you millions $$$ IN ADVANCE for FY22.
So, naturally during the Trump years, when refugee arrivals were low, the contractors were not raking in the federal bucks (your tax dollars) at the rate they did when Obama, for instance, was President.
They whined and complained about having to cut staff and close offices and now they want to get up and running before the promised 125,000 begin arriving in October.
They are getting ready in Idaho! where a controversial resettlement agency there had its budget (waaahh!) halved by Trump.
Although a good bit of the Business Insider article is a rehash of the recent Biden flip, flop, flipping on the refugee ceiling for this fiscal year, the article is nevertheless chockfull of useful information.
For the sake of time, which I am running out of this morning, here are just a few snips:
A spokesperson for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an arm of the Health and Human Services Department, said the Trump administration’s cuts to refugee admissions had hit the country’s humanitarian infrastructure hard.
“[H]umanitarian infrastructure” is code for government contractors’ budgets.
“The steady decrease in arrivals during the previous four years has resulted in decreased resettlement capacity at the local level,” they said. Between 2017 and 2021, “approximately one-third of the network had to close.”
[….]
That has raised the question: Can the US actually resettle as many refugees as Biden would like?
[….]
Officials at US refugee agencies said they would be able to meet the needs of any refugees sent their way. Rebuilding their capacity to do so is a hassle, but it has already begun. New staff are being hired, and new offices will soon be opened — the when and where hinging on support from local communities. [They are out scouting for fresh territory!—ed]
Okay, here it is for all of you refugee policy wonks! As I said, this is big!
Alicia Wrenn of HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)
Wrenn, of the resettlement agency HIAS, said her group would soon be receiving from the State Department “capacity building funds so that we can actually start to hire up and train people for arrivals.”
LOL! “agency partners!” They try so hard to avoid using the word contractors!
For the first time, the government will also be paying its agency partners and their partners on the local level ahead of time and more consistently.
“It has historically always been a per capita system,” she said. Before, “as arrivals fell, staff volume fell, because that’s the way it worked.” Now the plan is to provide a separate budget for the staff — social workers, language and cultural experts, educators — that will not be based, after the fact, on the exact number of refugees that agency ended up serving.
And, a shout-out to a refugee policy wonk I know who predicted that this was what they are doing during this time when refugee arrivals are still low.
Can you imagine the competition going on among the nine as they scramble for the Biden bucks no longer tethered to the number of refugees each contractor can manage.
***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 locationsfor 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.
“It is absolutely unacceptable if the Biden Administration is facilitating a mass migration without any input or oversight from Tennesseans and the affected communities.”
(Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn)
***Update***Governor Lee comments and incredibly a media outlet reminds its audience that Lee had welcomed more refugees when President Trump was trying to get immigration under control a couple of years ago. Is it any wonder that the Biden gang figured Tennessee was a soft target?
For years, readers would contact me to say that planes with “refugees” or migrants of some sort were being flown into small airports in small cities and rural areas. I would tell them to go film the arrivals because I couldn’t just post something without proof.
Well, finally some citizens are being proactive and doing just that.
The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (in Health and Human Services) is reportedly behind such flights arriving after dark in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
You may recall that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee was one of twenty governors who earlier this month wrote to Biden to say: NOT in my state!
But, shamefully, he was one of many Republican governors who did not support President Trump when Trump attempted to give governors a greater say in whether their states would receive refugees the federal government had chosen for the state.
FIRST ON 3: Late-night flights carrying migrant children arrive in Chattanooga
Chattanooga’s Wilson Air Center is receiving planes carrying migrant children who are being bused to multiple southeastern cities during overnight hours.
Channel 3 obtained video of one of those planes arriving Friday, May 14 shortly before 1:30 a.m.
A second video, shared with Channel 3, shows more children arriving late Saturday night. According to the source who provided the video, a third plane carrying children arrived Friday afternoon. Flight records confirm that a fourth plane arrived early Wednesday morning, May 19.
[….]
A source with direct knowledge of the operation asked to remain anonymous but tells Channel 3 that approximately 30 to 50 minors are transported at a time, some to reunite with family members and others to go to group homes. He says the operation started in Dallas, Texas, but moved to small airports recently to avoid attention.
In April, HHS confirmed a group of unaccompanied minors is being housed at a former Tennessee Temple dormitory in Highland Park. It is not clear how many of the children who have arrived in Chattanooga in recent days have been transported to that facility, but multiple sources say at least ten boys from the group were taken to the facility.
Quotes from US Senators, but what does Governor Lee say?
U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty said he was not aware of the flights into Chattanooga, but said, “It is time for President Biden to be transparent with Tennesseans and the American people regarding where the hundreds of thousands of migrants being resettled in the United States are being sent because they deserve to know.”
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn shared a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying she was unaware of the operation in Tennessee.
“Our office has received no information from the Biden Administration informing us of a mass transportation of migrants to Tennessee,” said Blackburn. “It is absolutely unacceptable if the Biden Administration is facilitating a mass migration without any input or oversight from Tennesseans and the affected communities.”
By the way, for all of you contemplating a move to Tennessee because you might be thinking you can escape to a conservative nirvana, check it out carefully in advance. They have a lot of problems with refugees there as especially Nashville is a longtime target resettlement site.
Note that I have an entire category titled Nashville which includes over 100 posts on refugees there and in Tennessee generally.
…..they expect Biden to be ready to roll with 125,000 impoverished third worlders moving to America permanently beginning on October first.
“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew.”
(Having figured out their messaging on the mess they have made angering their friends, Sec. of State Blinken blames it on President Trump)
The Associated Pressmakes every effort to gloss over the recent controversy about the refugee ceiling that put Biden and his administration in the dog house with refugee resettlement industry “advocates.”
Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken were at odds according to White House leakers. Blinken wanted to bring ’em in faster than Biden did.
They complain that the mean orange guy really screwed up the refugee program with demands for more robust vetting of refugees to weed out those with terror connections, or those lying about family members—a rampant form of fraud in refugee resettlement. How dare he!
And, adding insult to injury, the nine contractors*** had to shrink their staffs during the Trump years because your tax dollars flowing into their coffers were cut by a few million bucks.
But all of that is going away thanks to Biden who recently dropped Trump’s plan for additional information to be required of ‘new Americans’ arriving as refugees and is going full-bore open borders—125,000 beginning October first.
Refugees arriving in US unlikely to exceed cap set by Trump
SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Joe Biden, under political pressure, agreed to admit four times as many refugees this budget year as his predecessor did, but resettlement agencies concede the number actually allowed into the U.S. will be closer to the record-low cap of 15,000 set by former President Donald Trump.
Refugee advocates say they are grateful for the increase because it’s symbolically important to show the world the United States is back as a humanitarian leader at a time when the number of refugees worldwide is the highest since World War II. But they’re frustrated, too, because more refugees could have been admitted if Biden hadn’t dragged his feet.
“About 10,000 to 15,000 is what we’re expecting,” said Jenny Yang of World Relief, adding that Biden’s inaction for months after taking office in January was “definitely problematic.”
“That delay meant not being able to process refugee applications for four months. We weren’t able to rebuild for four months, so it really was unfortunate,” Yang said.
As he looked to the midterm elections, supposedly Biden (rightly) feared that the public wouldn’t tolerate a huge refugee flow while the border was in crisis.
“To be clear: The asylum process at the southern border and the refugee process are completely separate immigration systems. Conflating the two constitutes caving to the politics of fear,” said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This is important, Blumenthal is right, do not conflate the US Refugee Admissions Program with the illegal aliens invading the southern border.
The 125,000 refugees proposed for FY2022 are in addition to the hundreds of thousands of supposed asylum seekers flooding into the country.
The AP continues…..
Weeks later, on May 3, Biden raised the cap.
So far this year only about 2,500 refugees have arrived, with less than five months left before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
More than 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved to come to the United States, but thousands were disqualified under the narrow eligibility criteria Trump established in October when he set the low cap.
Before the Trump administration’s drastic cuts, the United States had admitted more refugees each year than all other countries combined under a program now 41 years old.
It is Trump’s fault!
But a senior official familiar with Blinken’s thinking said it quickly became clear that the State Department offices responsible for refugee resettlement had been so gutted that they wouldn’t be able to process and absorb that number of refugees.
Biden’s got leakers….
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, described the situation as “aspiration meeting reality” and said Blinken reluctantly concluded that 62,500 wouldn’t be possible in the short term.
“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew,” Blinken told reporters this month.
The Trump bashers give short shrift to the China Virus as one explanation for the slowdown in their goals to change America as refugee travel was slowed worldwide.
Due to travel restrictions in and out of refugee processing sites worldwide, the U.S. suspended refugee arrivals from March 19 to July 29 of last year except for emergency cases. Only 11,800 refugees were admitted in the 2020 fiscal year, the lowest number in the history of the program.
[….]
The “sad truth” Biden warned when he finally set the target at 62,500 is that goal won’t be achieved.
Instead, the administration and advocates are working to fix the program by 2022 when Biden has promised to raise the ceiling to 125,000.
LOL! He dares not do otherwise now that he has experienced the wrath of the “advocates”—refugee placement contractors.
I don’t even want to be writing about it, but it’s why I continue posting at RRW at all. I write to continue building a historical record of how those seeking to create a borderless world think and act.
The most important lesson you can take from this is that the Socialist Left, the No Borders pushers, never give up.
Year in, year out, they push out their propaganda to move you and to move elected officials and governments to accept their goals.
So, as boring as I find this, this is an update of where they are on this excuse to erase borders altogether.
Climate Migration Poses Thorny Questions for White House
The White House has taken the first steps to grapple with the massive issue of climate migration, as drought, storms, and rising seas displace millions of people worldwide.
The Biden administration plans to release a report in August on the impacts of climate change on forced migration, mandated by an executive order. Migration advocates, who have long called for safeguards that address displacement from global warming impacts, have welcomed the progress.
But there’s a lack of U.S. policy to protect climate-displaced people, one of a host of challenges in developing safeguards for people migrating from disasters abroad.
One of its most difficult tasks, experts say, is defining the problem. No legal safeguards exist specifically for people who claim they were forced to leave their country because of climate change.
[….]
And without a solid legal definition for what a ‘climate migrant’ is—the precursor to protections under refugee law—changing U.S. immigration policy could a tough sell.
They haven’t fully captured the international communities attention, but they are working on it as they dream the Biden bunch will lead the way.
While climate change is driving migration, the world isn’t at yet at a crisis point that would spur widespread political action, Kamal Amakrane, veteran senior UN official who led efforts behind the UN Global Compact for Migration, told Bloomberg Law.
“This human dimension of the climate crisis has yet to fully capture the international community’s attention,” said Amakrane, who is an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University.
This opens the door for the U.S. to take up a position of leadership on the issue—which Amakrane believes should be treated as one way to adapt to a changing climate.
Here is the rub, climate refugees do not fit the international definition of refugee.
Pay attention to this because those “asylum seekers” (wannabe refugees) flooding the US border do not either.
Notice (below) nothing in the definition says refugee status is possible due to lack of jobs or violence in one’s home country. Or, because storms are more frequent (if that is even true!).
Bloomberg continues….
Current U.S. refugee law stems from the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which mandates that refugees must prove they’re fleeing persecution on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion affiliation, or membership in a particular social group. This remains the definition under U.S. refugee law.
[….]
Climate as crowbar?
Conservatives oppose using climate change rationale as qualified grounds for refugees or asylum seekers, citing the strict legal definition under U.S. law to bar admitting more people into the country.
“To create this new category of climate refugees is a transparent attempt to use the climate issue as a crowbar to pry open the borders of the U.S,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the low-immigration think tank, Center for Immigration Studies.
Krikorian also disputed the argument that the U.S. owes a moral responsibility to citizens of countries overwhelmed by climate change because of its history of high carbon emissions.
“That’s not a basis for immigration policy. And even if that were a legitimate argument, that might be an argument for helping people adapt to climate change—not for having them move to Cincinnati.”
“We have neither the resources nor the obligation to solve the federal government’s problem and foot the bill for the consequences of this Administration’s misguided actions.”
Maybe you have already seen reports where you live that the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement(within HHS) is out scouting locations to shelter Unaccompanied Alien Children(mostly teens and mostly males!) in unused facilitiessuch as old schools.
Well, twenty Republican governors are saying Not in My State!
Presumably this demand by the governors applies only to shelters for UACs.***
Here is the opening salvo in their letteryesterday:
Here are those who signed:
Although it didn’t involve illegal alien ‘children’, I am reminded that many of the governors above did not supportPresident Trump’s efforts to strengthen their states rightswhen Trump proposed a plan to give them a greater say in refugee placement in their states.
There are twenty-seven Republican governors, seven did not sign the letter.
Missing are the REPUBLICAN governors of Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Vermont and West Virginiasignaling that it is hunky dory to send illegal aliens to shelters in their states.
***UACs are being placed with sponsors in most states.
You can see, by clicking here, where some of the mostly teenagers have been placed with sponsorsthrough the end of March.
Conservatives oppose using climate change rationale as qualified grounds for refugees or asylum seekers, citing the strict legal definition under U.S. law to bar admitting more people into the country.
