USCRI needs money now that President Trump has reduced the number of their paying clients

03/09/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just now I wrote about what happened in Rutland, VT this week where the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) lost their chief advocate for Syrian refugees, Mayor Christopher Louras, in a stunning mayoral election upset.
And, I have been meaning to update readers on USCRI’s financials for some time, so this gives me an excuse.
Also, earlier this week when the Trump Administration announced its upcoming 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement, USCRI immediately tweeted this plea for funding:

When I opened the link here, I was expecting to see a pitch for how to tell the Prez he is wrong, instead it opened directly to a donation form.

My first thought was, why didn’t they long ago try to raise more PRIVATE funds rather than become completely addicted to the easy flow of federal dollars to their bank account?

USCRI CEO Lavinia Limon with Chobani Yogurt CEO at Clinton Global Initiative. Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Go here for our Limon archive: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon

(See recent posts on four other of the nine major resettlement contractors: HIAS, LIRS, Church World Service and the USCCB financials.)
Because this is a rotten system that pays contractors by the head to resettle refugee ‘clients’ in to your towns, now that the federal spigot is closing (at least temporarily) the budgets of these quasi-government agencies will shrink commensurately. And, they are running multi-million dollar agencies paying out BIG salaries.
Before I give you the most recent information available from USCRI’s Form 990, check out this post I wrote in 2008 where we reported that in 2006 USCRI was operating on a budget of just over $18 million!

USCRI’s gross income was $18,352,000. $16,905,312 was from government grants (that’s you the taxpayer) while another $675,868 included government contracts.

Total compensation of officers was $358,587 and other salaries were $2,966,521.

By 2014 their budget had grown to $51,524,570, government grants were a whopping $46,560452. Total compensation to officers was $820,147 and other salaries were $7,293,845. That would be a very respectable growth for a small non-profit except that virtually all of its growth depends on more refugees admitted to the US with a very handsome increase in the per refugee resettlement payment.
We calculate that USCRI is 94% funded by taxpayer dollars. It could be higher, but we don’t know about some of their income categories.
Here are a couple of pages from the most recently available Form 990.
Page 9 is where you usually see how much in government grants they receive.

At the bottom of the total revenue column is where you will find the number $51,524,570. The IOM collection fee is your money too. We did our calculation of 94% funded by you (taxpayers) on just the federal grants and the IOM collection fee. Some of those other items may be taxpayer money too, but we aren’t sure.

Here is the salaries page:

Revolving door! Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of ORR, then Eskinder Negash, who had earlier been a Veep at USCRI, took a swing at the government job, but has now revolved back to USCRI. If Hillary had won, would Limon revolve back to a government job? I’m guessing not because that would involve a big pay cut.

Go here to see if USCRI has a sub-office in your town! USCRI does list a Rutland office, so while it lasts, those 2 Syrian families should get a lot of help and attention!

Bloomberg: Trump's refugee ceiling of 50,000 could hurt BIG MEAT

02/09/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, check out who admits that Meatpackers have been drivers behind the importation of cheap immigrant labor, specifically refugees!
Thanks to reader Deena for spotting this!

Big Meat Braces for a Refugee Shortage

Reporters Lauren Etter and Shruti Singh at Bloomberg (emphasis below is mine):

jbs-greeley — I took this photo of JBS headquarters in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns. JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!

Word of President Trump’s executive order barring the entry of international refugees shocked Fort Morgan, a town of 11,000 on the snowy plains of Colorado, some 80 miles northeast of Denver. Many of the workers at a Cargill Meat Solutions plant that’s the town’s largest employer emigrated from Somalia and Myanmar and had been waiting months, if not years, for relatives to join them. Now they’re afraid that reunion might never happen. As a result, the plant in Fort Morgan and other meatpacking plants in the U.S. that have dozens of openings may have to scramble to find a new labor pool.

[….]

Trump’s decision to sharply curtail the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. may lead Big Meat to recalibrate its recruitment practices.

While a federal court has temporarily suspended the administration’s four-month ban on new arrivals, not affected is Trump’s plan to slash refugee admissions from 110,000 to 50,000 in the current fiscal year.

lavinia-limon

Refugees have been a fixture within the meat processing workforce since 2006, when immigration officials under President George W. Bush raided plants in several states, leading to the arrest of about 1,300 undocumented workers. Companies “realized that their business model of hiring undocumented people was causing problems for them,” says Lavinia Limón, chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a resettlement organization. “So they moved to the refugee population.”

More here. I’m quoted saying that maybe it’s time BIG MEAT paid higher wages and hired American workers!
Ms. Limon must have forgotten that it was Bill Clinton in the mid-1990’s who first made Bosnian refugee labor available to his meatpacking pals (remember those cattle futures!) in Iowa, see here.
Ms. Limon was his Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the time! How could she have forgotten!

“And IBP’s good fortune didn’t end there,” Limbacher continues, “turns out the Clinton administration’s Bosnian refugee resettlement efforts also helped to keep labor costs down. Since 1995, for instance, the town of Waterloo, Iowa — population 65,000 – has been swamped with 6,000 Bosnian refugees, many of whom wound up working for the No. 1 local employer, IBP.”

(Iowa Beef was ultimately absorbed by Tyson Foods).

If you missed my post this morning where I argue that Trump could still stop most of the flow from terror hotspots by further reducing the refugee ceiling for this year from 50,000 to 35,000 (we are at over 33,000 now), be sure to have a look.

US Refugee law must be reformed and curtailing the program might serve as an incentive for Congress to get off the dime and do it! If threats of terrorism can’t move them, maybe threats in a decline in cheap immigrant labor for big global corporations and the Chamber of Commerce might.

NYT reports first hardship story as refugees entering the US last evening being detained

01/28/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, so it begins.

I told you here on January 7th exactly what the refugee contractors would do!
Rutland, Vermont a case study!
This is what I said eleven days ago:

The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) said in a press release in recent days that they were going ahead with their plans to open an office in Rutland, VT for the purpose of placing 100 Syrians (the first 100!) in the city where those plans have drawn heated controversy since last spring.

lavinia-limon-2 — Ms. Limon was irresponsible opening the Rutland, VT office only weeks ago when she knew this was coming. So, I’m saying she is cruel by giving false hope to refugees. The refugee contracting agency she heads is 97% funded by you! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/09/05/this-federal-refugee-contracting-agency-is-97-taxpayer-funded/

Setting up a showdown with Donald Trump…..

If Trump does what he said he would do and quickly pauses refugee resettlement at least from terror-producing regions of the world, USCRI will be in a position to scream bloody murder—how dare Trump stop these poor women and children who were headed to a ‘welcoming’ Vermont town.

And this:

Warning to Mr. Trump: These are not squishy do-gooder organizations and people who you can easily roll. They are sharp, experienced political fighters.

Well, the fight is on as Pres. Trump did what he said he would do and now the NYT (story here) and Lavinia Limon are crying foul!
Here (at Valley News) is Ms. Limon wailing*** about Vermont two days ago (when it became clear Trump was not backing down):

Montpelier — The mayor of Rutland — a city that had been expecting up to 100 refugees from Syria and Iraq — said he fears a policy being considered by President Donald Trump would halt refugee resettlement in the city.

Trump is proposing to reduce the maximum number of refugees by more than half, to 50,000, for the budget year ending in September. He’s expected to suspend the U.S. refugee program for four months and indefinitely bar those fleeing war-torn Syria.

“That could very well mean the end of refugee resettlement for the city of Rutland,” where two Syrian refugee families recently arrived, Mayor Christopher Louras said.

“The human tragedy is terrible,” said Lavinia Limon, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. “The cruelty of doing that to people is really, really bad.”

Continue reading here.

Who is, first and foremost, responsible for the “cruelty?”

The US State Department bureaucrats (see Bureaucrats gone wild!) and Ms. Limon because they were pushing the refugees (the poor political pawns!) in to the pipeline as fast as they could! It was irresponsible of them to not start slowing down the flow on the day after election day.
For new readers, Ms. Limon’s organization is paid by the head to place the refugees!
For more on Rutland, click here. For our large archive on Ms. Limon, go here.
This post is archived in our Trump Watch! category.

*** Don’t miss more stories about the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Open Borders movement. See Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily (here).

Refugee contractor may have exaggerated numbers in letter promoting Rutland, VT resettlement

01/12/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Every one of you working in your local communities and questioning plans for either expanding the number of refugees in your city or where new sites are planned, pay attention! Do what this housing authority member did—don’t take the contractors word on the economic benefits that refugees supposedly bring to your town or city.
I’ve been begging for years for someone with an economic/business background to thoroughly debunk (with a focused economic study) this illogical notion that bringing more poor people to a poor and struggling city benefits the city economically! I’ve suggested Utica, NY as the case study location.

This meme along with the propaganda that no refugees have been involved in Islamic terrorism are the two major talking points the refugee industry advocates peddle.
Here is Vermont Watchdog. You too can do this!

Gail Johnson, a Rutland resident and Board of Aldermen hopeful, likes to confirm her facts. This practice grew out of necessity when, as a U.S. Navy finance officer, she was in charge of payroll for an entire naval base in Charleston, S.C.

lavinia-limon-96 — In 1996 Lavinia Limon was Bill Clinton’s Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. After leaving government where she doled out grant money, she took the reins of one of nine major government refugee contractors receiving grant money, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. See Breitbart’s Michael Leahy’s dossier on Limon here last August: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/05/twin-falls-refugee-crisis-clinton-appointee/

Now, a member of the Rutland Housing Authority commission, Johnson continues to fact check. “Whatever I say or do, I have proof. I back it up. I expect others to do that as well,” she said.

Johnson never thought she would find discrepancies in a letter by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) to the Rutland Board of Aldermen, but she did.

[….]

In October, the Board of Aldermen sent a letter to USCRI, asking for justification of Rutland’s selection as a refugee relocation site. The agency still has not released the original grant application, which is supposed to spell out in detail Rutland’s suitability. Instead, USCRI CEO Lavinia Limon responded to the board in December, sending a letter that cited numbers of available jobs and housing.

Limon said that, as of Nov. 28, 2016, The Vermont Housing Data showed “284 housing units available for rent in Rutland City.”

Johnson noted that the 284 figure could be a result of expanded search parameters, to potentially place refugees in rent-to-buy situations, homes or condos. However, USCRI only places refugees in apartment rentals. [However, because the numbers coming in now are so astronomical, we are hearing refugees being placed (against federal regulations) in hotels!—ed]

However, when Watchdog checked the site on Jan. 11, only 23 housing locations are listed in Rutland City. Of those listed, none have availability.

[….]

“I’ve worked with people from many backgrounds. I’ve studied Arabic. Refugee settlement is a wonderful humanitarian effort,” she said.

But she said she becomes concerned when settlement agencies claim refugees will be beneficial to Rutland’s economy.

“They say that bringing in refugees is good for our economic recovery. I don’t know that that’s the solution. What I do know, in a bigger sense, is that the logic behind improving our economic recovery in Rutland by bringing in low-income people to generate business, it’s not a logical economic model,” she said.

Instead, Johnson contends, Rutland’s unemployment and lack of affordable housing makes bringing low-income refugee families into the city counterproductive from an economic standpoint.

Please read the whole story, Ms. Johnson found many more discrepancies in Lavinia Limon’s letter.
See my previous post on Rutland where I said Ms. Limon was setting this up (with the New York Times help) to use as a cudgel against Donald Trump should he stop the flow of Syrians after January 20th.
See our many posts on the Rutland controversy, here. And, learn more about Lavinia Limon and USCRI by clicking here.

First Syrians to Rutland, VT in direct challenge to Donald Trump

01/07/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

screenshot-14 — Lavinia Limon with Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya. Ms. Limon’s organization, USCRI, helps Chobani Yogurt by sending refugees to Twin Falls, Idaho. Limon headed Bill Clinton’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Warning to Mr. Trump: These are not squishy do-gooder organizations and people who you can easily roll. They are sharp, experienced political fighters.

Throwing all caution to the wind (shelling out money they don’t know they will have) and gambling that they can back Trump down, the federal resettlement contractor headed by longtime Clinton ally Lavinia Limon is hiring staff for a proposed opening in a couple of weeks—timed, I surmise, to happen just about the time Donald Trump is inaugurated.
Setting up a showdown with Donald Trump…..
If Trump does what he said he would do and quickly pauses refugee resettlement at least from terror-producing regions of the world, USCRI will be in a position to scream bloody murder—how dare Trump stop these poor women and children who were headed to a ‘welcoming’ Vermont town.
By the way, the NYT puff piece on Rutland recently was likely part of the propaganda set up to nail a heartless Trump.
These resettlement contractors have been around for over 30 years! Lots of big salaries depend on the continuation of the industry (yes, it is an industry), not to mention cheap labor for global corporations. Goals also include increasing Democrat voter rolls and generally driving all of us to accept a multicultural borderless world.
They are not going to give up easily or quietly!
From Valley News:

Rutland —

The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program’s Rutland office is expected to open and be fully staffed within a couple of weeks.

According to Stacie Blake, director of government and community relations with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the office will have three full-time employees. Primary guidance will come from the Colchester, Vt., office and will be based on the organization’s 35 years of experience working with refugees in Vermont.

“The program expects to welcome the first refugee families to Rutland in January,” Blake said in a news release.

[….]

“Sites across the country are continuing to welcome new arrivals as their travel from overseas is booked,” Blake said in an email. “We have no information regarding changes to the resettlement program.”

I’ll bet you those travel bookings at IOM are going through the roof!
The article goes on to say how excited the volunteers are who are anticipating their very own Syrians (how cool is that!), and these local refugee advocates can be counted on to wail if Trump pauses the program (and they will have no clue that USCRI used them).
See our extensive archive on Rutland, here. And for more on Lavinia Limon, go here.