Senate "oversight" hearing scheduled this week on the Refugee Admissions Program

09/28/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled that some Congressional committee is attempting to review the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program and as far as I can tell, it will be the first time Congress takes seriously its “consultation” responsibility since before 911. That said, as I review the list of those testifying, do the Senators really think they will get anything but a snow-job from two of those on the list of entrenched bureaucrats (Bartlett and Carey) who have every incentive to keep the monster going.

Bartlett with map — Do Senators really think that Asst. Sec. of State Anne Richard’s right hand man (Larry Bartlett pictured here) is going to tell the Senators anything negative about how refugees are resettled in America. By the way, see the newest version of that map behind him, here: http://www.wrapsnet.org/Portals/1/Affiliate%20Directory%20Posting/PRM%20Affilaite%20Map%20with%20details1.13.15.pdf

Just last week Lawrence Bartlett traveled to Twin Falls, Idaho to participate in a laughable demonstration of a stacked public “forum” to attempt to quell the citizen criticism of the program there in Magic Valley. Watch Bartlett in action here.
I do need to comb through that entire video and pull out some Bartlett gems for you. When I posted on the “forum” here I hadn’t watched the videotape, so to clarify: Bartlett didn’t say they don’t drop off refugees in unwelcoming towns, he actually (with a malevolent look) said “unsafe” towns implying that opponents of refugee resettlement might be violent people! It is an outrage!
Also, when asked why local citizens don’t have more say in who and how many will be resettled, he made it clear that this was designed as a federal program administered from Washington (so tough luck to local communities, we call the shots). He didn’t exactly say it that way, but that was the clear message he was sending.
***Update*** Jim sends this link for the segment of Bartlett’s remarks just mentioned. More great information on the Twin Falls “forum” from opponents, here.
The Refugee Act of 1980 (Kennedy, Biden, Carter) does require consultation with local elected officials, something that is done (if at all) in the most cursory fashion and with local ‘friendly’ officials first and foremost.
Anyway, back to the hearing for October 1 (the first day of the 2016 fiscal year where 10,000 or more Syrian, mostly Muslim, refugees will be on the way to these towns and more).
Will those testifying say anything more than all is well, every town is welcoming, Syrians will be screened, blah, blah, blah.
I would like to have seen a mayor*** with problems be among the witnesses.
I’m told if you go to the Judiciary Committee website at the time of the hearing you can watch it live.

Oversight of the Administration’s FY 2016 Refugee Resettlement Program: Fiscal and Security Implications

Immigration and the National Interest
Date: Thursday, October 1, 2015 Add to my Calendar
Time: 02:00 PM
Location: Dirksen Senate Office Building 226
Presiding: Chairman Sessions

Agenda
September 21, 2015

NOTICE OF COMMITTEE HEARING

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a hearing of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest entitled “Oversight of the Administration’s FY 2016 Refugee Resettlement Program: Fiscal and Security Implications” for Thursday October 1, 2015 at 2:00 p.m., in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

By order of the Chairman.

Witnesses

Mr. Larry Bartlett
Director Of Admissions
Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration | United States Department of State
Washington , D.C.

Ms. Barbara Strack
Chief, Refugee Affairs Division
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services | United States Department of Homeland Security
Washington , D.C.

Mr. Matthew Emrich
Associate Director, Fraud Detection And National Security Directorate
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services | United States Department of Homeland Security
Washington , D.C.

Mr. Robert Carey
Director, Office Of Refugee Resettlement
United States Department of Health and Human Services
Washington , D.C.

Incidentally, Carey is one of the many in federal government who rotated in from a contractor’s job. Think about it, now he is the dispenser of federal grants to the contractor he once worked for—the International Rescue Committee.
***In Twin Falls, Bartlett did mention some cities where they have problems with mayors, but implied they had been resolved. (He also whacked the citizens of Spartanburg). He said they had pushback from mayors in Manchester, NH, Amarillo, TX, and Springfield, Massachusetts—all three of which we have covered extensively on these pages.

Boise, Idaho: Much wailing and gnashing of teeth as refugees get evicted, will they send some to Twin Falls?

09/26/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know whether to take this story at its face value—new landlord wants to refurbish the apartments and put them back on the market at a higher price (landlords can do that right?). Or, whether there is more to this story and the new landlord needs to let’s just say, clean up.
(Once refugee resettlement contractors get a foothold in certain apartment complexes they tend to keep bringing them there often to the chagrin of the landlords.)
Before I get to the news, as Obama plans to welcome 85,000 new impoverished people to America, low income housing is increasingly unavailable—not just for refugees but for Americans with low incomes. So unless Obama gets his HUD projects moving quickly, there is going to be an extreme shortage of housing available for this next year’s delivery of 85,000 third worlders to America beginning this coming Thursday (October 1)!
One way to slow the flow to your town is to get involved in blocking the HUD housing Obama wants so badly, and I am hearing from some of you that HUD and its developer pals are already showing up in your nice middle class towns.
By the way, when you watch the IRC contractor almost in tears, note that these refugee tenants pay rent month by month which tells me that they are not becoming self-sustaining as Lawrence Bartlett and other biased presenters told the audience in Twin Falls this past week was the goal.
And hey, Twin Falls, they have 400 poor refugees to move to new apartments in just a few weeks, some might be coming your way as Boise has a housing shortage!
From KTVB-7 (hat tip: an ever watchful reader):

To learn more about the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the federal contractors operating in Boise, go here. Their CEO, David Miliband (bff Hillary Clinton and George Soros), makes close to a half a million dollars a year to run the IRC and was one of the first to demand that the Obama Administration admit 65,000 Syrian refugees (now he is up to 100,000). Maybe he could pitch in a little cash to help the refugees he (a Brit) has invited to colonize America!

Lobbying arm for refugee contractors holds press conference, wants 200,000 refugees and $2 billion in additional funding

09/19/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Before you read this article, please have a look at a recent post we wrote about the Refugee Council USA (RCUSA) which was only a few months ago stumping for 65,000 Syrians. It is a lobbying consortium of supposedly non-profit groups posing as simply charitable humanitarian groups when in fact they are almost exclusively funded by federal tax dollars.

Negash and Bartlett — Eskinder Negash (right) resigned abruptly as Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in December 2014, an unexpected resignation that has still not been explained. Here with Lawrence Bartlett of the US State Dept. Bartlett will be in Twin Falls, Idaho this coming week to try to calm down the local pocket of resistance to Syrian resettlement in Magic Valley.

Their request for 200,000 refugees and an additional $2 billion in funding (the program costs us over $1 billion right now just for the resettlement of 70,000, not including the cost of welfare) is, to say the least, self serving!
The gang is all here!
From CNS News:

(CNSNews.com) – The former head of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement said on Friday that concerns about the security risk of bringing Syrian refugees into the U.S. given the terrorist presence in that country are based on “fear-mongering” and that the millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally did not undergo security screening used to vet asylum seekers.

“I can tell you that we have about 11 million undocumented people in this country I was told,” Eskinder Negash said at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “I don’t believe they went through a security screening system.”

Huh? That is the most cockamamie logic I have ever heard. We have unscreened illegal aliens in here by the millions (drug dealers, murderers, rapists and other criminals) and somehow we are then supposed to not be worried about unscreened Syrians when the FBI has already told us they can’t screen them? We are fear-mongering?

Eric Schwartz — Schwartz: A few “bad actors” might get in, but we don’t worry about that when we are busy changing America by changing the people. LOL! He didn’t say the second part, but did dismiss concerns about “bad actors.”

By the way, Negash was a Vice President at the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants prior to running the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and we see he is now back at USCRI—the contractor/government revolving door on full display! (There really should be a law!)

[….]

Negash and others who are part of the coalition of faith-based groups and refugee advocates held the press conference to announce that the Refugee Council USA is asking the president and Congress to increase the current cap for U.S. refugees admitted each year from 70,000 to 200,000 for fiscal year 2016, with 100,000 of those refugees coming from Syria.

And, here they have dragged ol’ Soros protege, Eric Schwartz off his perch as the Dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the Univ. of Minnesota. See our archive on Schwartz here, and especially this post. For new readers, Schwartz preceded Anne Richard as Asst. Secretary of State (Richard also revolved into the State Dept. from a contractor job just as Negash did!)

Eric Schwartz, who was appointed the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration by Obama and served until 2011, said at the press conference that he and other former federal officials from several administrations signed onto a letter asking the Obama administration and Congress for that increase in the refugee cap and also $2 billion from Congress to pay for the more than double the number of refugees that would be admitted and resettled in the U.S.

There is more and I am out of time! Go here to continue reading.
By the way, the RCUSA is being run by Melanie Nezer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society these days. The refugee industry gang is all here!

Twin Falls, Idaho: Public meeting on refugees could be 'dog and pony show' if not managed properly

09/15/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Citizens critical of refugee resettlement on-going in Twin Falls, Idaho were hoping to get all of their many questions answered when a panel of “experts” come together at 6:30 p.m. on September 22nd. But, unless the meeting is fair and open to any and all questions, the opportunity to fully inform the community will be squandered by the Twin Falls Times-News.
I sure hope the organizers aren’t planning on using one of many manipulative techniques (Delphi comes to mind) that would steer the outcome to a predetermined conclusion and that is that everything is just fine and dandy, so let’s ‘welcome’ the Syrians to Idaho.

For new readers, this latest round of controversy started brewing when the resettlement contractor, affiliated with the College of Southern Idaho and the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, began bragging about Syrians being on the way to Twin Falls.
By the way, Syrians have already begun arriving in Boise according to State Department data.
Here is the make-up of the panel that will answer attendees questions on the 22nd:

The panelists are:

Larry Bartlett, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office on Refugee Admissions, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration

Ken Tota, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement

ZeZe Rwasama, director of the College of Southern Idaho Refugee Programs

Brian Pike, Twin Falls deputy city manager of public safety

Mike Mason, CSI’s vice president of finance

Dr. Steven Kohtz, with St. Luke’s Magic Valley Regional Medical Center

Wiley Dobbs, superintendent of the Twin Falls School District.

And, the discussion is being moderated by Times-News editor Matt Christensen who is hardly unbiased. Readers may remember that he actually editorialized calling me a “thief” here in June when he said I snipped too many paragraphs of a news story they had published.

Here then is how this meeting should be held to allow for the free and fair flow of information

~The moderator should not be affiliated with the newspaper. Christensen must be replaced. Perhaps find a respected former judge or someone not presumed to have a bias.

~The program must be videotaped for future use and available to those who can’t be there.

~Panelists are there to answer questions, not to give speeches or lectures (we are nation of immigrants, blah! blah!). There is no need to hear opening statements that will only serve to drag out the meeting. If the organizers wish, they could provide written short opening remarks by panelists to be distributed as audience members arrive.

~Everyone present who wishes to ask a question should be allowed to do so. No one should be sending in questions for pre-screening by the moderator (as the paper is presently urging people to do). Only those present should be allowed to ask a question (or more than one question). No advance screening of questions should be permitted even at the meeting itself.

~Questions should be permitted to be asked if the meeting goes half the night. Everyone there who has a question, should get an answer. Cutting it off prematurely will only appear to shortchange one side or the other.

~Perhaps to be fair and orderly everyone who wants to ask a question must put his or her name in a hat—a hat which can be added to as the evening progresses. Names would be drawn randomly to determine speaker order.

~Questioners should be permitted to ask more than one question if during the course of the evening something needs further clarification, or something said prompts a new question.

~If someone on the panel is unable to provide the needed information on that evening, they should agree to promptly supply it and the paper should agree to publish it expeditiously.

~Any attempts to name-call, or otherwise make personal attacks, should be promptly shut down by the moderator.

Those are just suggestions off the top of my head, but the point is that no one should come away from the meeting shortchanged in any way.
I feel sure that both Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Tota do not want to be associated with charges that they participated in a meeting that was somehow less than fair and open.
And, to all involved—be sure to invite your US Representatives and Senators as well as Idaho legislators to this very important opportunity to get answers about how the US State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement run the program in Idaho (along with a resettlement agency) and how they can assure you that refugees will not financially strap the community or risk its security.
By the way, Idaho legislators should be especially interested because at this time Idaho is a Wilson-Fish state which means the Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Tota and the primary contractor—the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (with another non-profit, Jannus Inc., which I forgot earlier)—call all the shots for Idaho and elected officials have virtually no say about who comes, how many and what state social services are used for refugees.
Click here for everything we have ever written on Twin Falls. Go here for more on Lawrence Bartlett, and here for Ken Tota.

Federal refugee contractors: Houston is "the perfect destination for refugees!"

09/01/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is your typical warm and fuzzy story about refugees ‘melting’ into America.
In fact it is one of those stories that drives me to tell you about the welfare moochers, murderers, rapists and terrorists in the refugee stream—you know to give balance to the news!
I’m skipping all the heartwarming information about one refugee’s successful resettlement in Houston, described as in the top four places in the world for refugee resettlement, to get to the bit of information I found revealing.
The US State Department does not choose which towns and cities will ‘welcome’ new resettlement seed communities—the nine federal non-governmental contractors*** do!

Lawrence Bartlett — Bartlett is Asst. Sec. of State Anne Richard’s right hand man. Are the contractors leading the State Department by the nose?

We knew they played a huge role, but who knew they were calling the shots. That means that no elected official at any level of government is deciding the future of your community—a bunch of left-leaning non-profit groups are in charge!
Here is what Larry Bartlett, director of refugee admissions at the US State Department, told the Houston Chronicle:

A trend stands out in Harris County refugee data. The vast majority of Houston’s refugees came from warm climates: Cuba, Iraq, Congo and Somalia. But the resettlement agencies don’t place people based on a preference for a hot, steamy climate.

“We don’t consider climate a major driver,” said Larry Bartlett, director of refugee admissions at the State Department, which oversees the resettlement process.

But assigning refugees to cities in the United States does not fall to the State Department. Those decisions are made by a consortium of nine national nongovernmental organizations.

There ought to be a law!

Then this: more than half of the refugee flow to your town or city is from family reunification!

I mentioned that here in a post about Twin Falls, Idaho. So that means once your town has become an established seed community there is virtually no stopping it as the contractors are immediately filing applications for the extended family to come on in!
The Houston Chronicle story continued:

In a 2012 press briefing, Bartlett said that the refugee resettlement process prioritizes family reunification. He explained in a recent telephone interview that refugees indicate on their application whether they have a relative or friend in the United States. It does not help their chances, but it can help decide their resettlement location.

“Over half of our refugees are joining family members or other U.S. ties,” Bartlett said. This statistic likely applies in Houston; many refugees are placed here to join family or friends already living in this cosmopolitan melting pot.

Ultimately, the nine national organizations propose a number for each city each year, he said. Houston welcomes more refugees than any other American city because its nonprofit sector has the capacity to assist them.

The organizations consult with local refugee services agencies and elected officials to decide that number. Houston has a significant resettlement infrastructure: six of the nine national organizations operate in Houston, where they partner with five local refugee services agencies. “It’s a very successful site,” Bartlett said.

From my own experience I know that “consultation” with local elected officials is often not much more than a few minutes of briefing where the contractor tells the local elected government that they have no choice in the matter.

If there were any Members of Congress (besides Texas Rep. Brian Babin) or Senators with a backbone willing to begin at least amending the Refugee Act of 1980, one important fix would be to strip the CONTRACTORS of their power to target towns and cities for colonization! It is outrageous—no one elected them!

Sign the petition, demand a local role in the process! It might not be a perfect solution, but at least you have a shot at choosing through the election process officials you can trust. There are 1,358 signatures on the petition to date representing all 50 states!
Texas is the number one resettlement state in the nation, please see our Texas archive, here.
*** For new readers, these are the nine federal refugee resettlement contractors which control all of the resettlement of third worlders to your towns and cities!