This is no surprise, since resettlement contractors like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are given millions of your dollars every year (more than 90% of their funding comes from you!) to bring refugees to your towns, they spend a lot of time pressuring Washington for more moola! Editor’s update/clarification! Read carefully! This is a post about the the funding we object to, it is not a post in support of their desire for more of your tax dollars!
Below is what their head-honcho (Linda Hartke) is saying on their website. Thanks to a reader ‘domstudent11’ for sending it.
Linda Hartke: Waaahhhh! We need money for the 100,000 (mostly Muslim) refugees Obama promised for next year.
The days left on the Congressional calendar are numbered, and yet, funding provisions to respond to the greatest humanitarian crisis of our lifetime have not been allocated. Congress has from now until September to pass funding bills for Fiscal Year 2017 that ensure critical funding for refugee resettlement. However, the draft text cripples the U.S. Refugee Admissions program and reduces resources for refugees at a time when our commitment to serving uprooted men, women, and children is needed most. With more displaced people today than ever before, funding for refugees programs cannot afford a spending cut. The United States has signaled commitment to resettle 100,000 refugees in Fiscal Year 2017, a mere fraction of the global need, yet the proposed funds would cap refugee admissions at no more than 75,000. At least 25,000 vulnerable refugees will spend another long year without the life-saving protection they deserve.
Furthermore, the funding cut fails to reflect the outpouring of support and welcome for refugees you all have demonstrated across the country. With over 75 years of experience resettling and providing integration support to refugees, we know there is ample community support to help 100,000 refugees rebuild their lives in the United States in FY17.
We need your help to call on appropriators to echo our commitment through robust funding. During the Congressional recess from now until Labor Day, you can take the following actions:
Meet with your Members of Congress in your district (Here’s the how-to toolkit.)
Tweet at your Senator and Representatives:
“.@SENATOR/REPRESENTATIVE, show that #AmericaWelcomes by supporting increased funds to resettle #refugees! #RefugeesWelcome”
Call your Members of Congress using this script:
“As Congress considers Fiscal Year 2017 funding, I urge Congress to increase funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Department of State’s Migration and Refugee Assistance account to support refugee assistance that appropriately responds to the global need. As a person of faith, my community welcomes refugees. I urge your office to reflect my commitment to welcome refugees by increase funding for refugee protection and resettlement.”
Don’t allow Congress to let time slip away before they enact sufficient funding for refugees and other vulnerable populations. Call on Congress to be Good Samaritans who support those in need of life-saving protection.
Editor: Our reader suggests you change the words in the appeal to Congress in #3 above and ask your Member of Congress to “decrease” funding instead!
See LIRS most recent available Form 990 here. In 2014, LIRS had a total revenue of $59 million and $55 million came from government grants (from you!). Hartke pulled down a comfortable $235,000 salary and five other employees were in 6 digits.
If you want to know if LIRS is resettling refugees where you live, click here, find your state and see the abbreviations in the left hand corner of the entry. Look for LIRS.
One more thing, although Hartke is whining about being short on funds to resettle 100,000 refugees, remember that the Refugee Council USA (the lobbying consortium for the contractors) is calling for 200,000 next year (which begins Oct. 1, 2016).
And remember that September is crunch month as Obama does his UN gig and sends his final determination (for how many refugees we will take) to Congress.
…..Feds expect Texas to take 25% more refugees in FY2017—a whopping 11,020—and Texas is saying NO!
Texas is the number one state in the nation for refugee resettlement (the goal is to turn red states blue!) and frankly I believe it got that way because previous governors weren’t paying attention, but that is water under the bridge so they say. The Texas Commissioner is corresponding with BARBARA DAY, the Domestic Resettlement Section Chief at the DOS Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration. She is the person in charge of resettling refugees into your towns and cities. Day is also an example of the revolving door between federal contractors and the agencies from which they get their federal funds. Day came originally from Lutheran Social Services of SD and then to a perch at headquarters—Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) —before getting her present position at the US State Department in 2005. There really should be a law against this contractor/federal agency revolving door! LIRS gets over 90% of its funds from the federal government. http://2001-2009.state.gov/documents/organization/77949.pdf
You probably saw the news that Governor Abbott’s recent lawsuit was dismissed.But, what the Abbott administration is doing now bears watching.
We’ve told you before (here) that states must submit a plan to the federal government each year about how the program will be run in the state. They can get away with not renewing the plan if nothing has changed.
Most plans are just rough bureaucratic blue prints (that they probably don’t follow anyway). But, back in April of last year, I wanted you to get yours mostly to send a signal that you were watching.
Now we see that Texas is taking this plan seriously and is attempting to use it to keep the US State Department from increasing the numbers to be sent there.
(BTW, a reminder! When hundreds or thousands (like in TX) of refugees have been resettled and the State Dept. is working to bring in their extended family members you can see how the numbers will mushroom exponentially. The DOS wants to get the relatives into the same towns (or at least nearby) where their family members have been placed (seeded!). This is why I say in ‘Ten things your town needs to know’that once they open an office and bring in the first refugees, your town is cooked!)
From the Houston Chronicle(emphasis below is mine):
AUSTIN – The federal government wants Texas to accept more than 2,000 additional refugees this year. Texas’ response: No thank you.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission is putting the federal government on notice that the state will refuse to take in more refugees than it did last year and will accept only those who do not pose a security risk.
Texas on Friday submitted to the U.S. Department of State a 2017 state plan for refugee resettlement, rejecting the federal government’s proposal to increase the number of refugees moving to the Lone Star State by 25 percent.
“Texas continues to have concerns about the safety of its citizens and the integrity of the overseas security and background vetting process of the federal resettlement program,” Executive Commissioner Charles Smith wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of State. “Americans face an undeniable terrorist threat that is imported through new manipulations of our national security protocols each day.”
According to Smith’s letter, the federal government is proposing to place 11,020 refugees in Texas during fiscal 2017, an increase of 25 percent over the projected fiscal 2016 figure. Smith wrote that the proposed funding is insufficient, as well, and concludes the state could accept a maximum of 8,605 refugees. It is unclear how many refugees have been placed this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. [One could easily find out how many refugees have been resettled in Texas this year until just a few days ago. It appears that the Dept. of State has removed its data basethat reporters have been using for months from public view.—ed]
Rewriting their plan to add security requirements for the feds!
Smith sent his letter and the state’s 2017 plan for handling refugee settlements in response to an email from Barbara Day, chief of domestic resettlement for refugee admissions at the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration in the state department.According to Smith, the letter to Day outlined the agency’s plan to boost the number of refugees settling here, although the Texas commission could not produce the letter late Friday.
Texas will accept only refugees who can be certified to Congress that they do not present a security threat, according to Texas’ 31-page version of a resettlement plan that would take effect in the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. According to the proposal, the FBI must certify to the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence that potential refugees have received a background check sufficient enough to determine whether the individual is a security threat, and may only be admitted to the U.S. after all three agencies certify to Congress the individual is not a threat.
Very interesting! Continue reading here.
See our complete archive on Texas here. More on Barbara Day….Here she is working with National Immigration Forum (Soros!) honcho and Muslim rights activist Ali Nooraniwhere they are teaching Wilson-Fish grantees how to craft a positive message about refugees to make them more accepted in reluctant communities. And, you can watch her here explain how wonderful the refugee program is.
Two years before I started writing RRW, Utica, NY was dubbed the ‘town that loves refugees’ by the United Nations. They even had some propaganda show they took on the road to embarrass other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees just as Utica had! Read the 2005 UN propaganda report used to entice (embarrass) other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/publications/refugeemag/426f4c772/refugees-magazine-issue-138-town-loves-refugees.html Now (11 years later) Utica has all sorts of problems. Here in January 2015 we reported on the school system there suing the state of New York for more money. Why? Refugee overload!
The school system can’t handle the numbers of refugees who speak over 40 languages in their schools.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Utica officials are grappling with high poverty rates, rising enrollment and big deficits.
Now, just a week or so ago, the school system lost a lawsuit filed by six refugee teenagers who claim they weren’t permitted to attend high school there.
Here is what the NY Times said about the case (by the way, typical of mainstream media reports on refugees, the NYT implies that the refugees simply made their way to Utica from the third world without explaining that the city was targeted as a resettlement site by the federal government and its contractors***!):
The Utica City School District settled a lawsuit on Thursday over its treatment of young refugees, who, the suit charged, were being excluded from the city’s lone high school because of their age and because they did not speak English.
The lawsuit, filed last year on behalf of six refugees by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services of Central New York, claimed that Utica shunted refugees who were older than 16 into lesser alternatives to high school, like a G.E.D. program only for English-language learners. New York law provides the right to a free public education until age 21.
Similar allegations, that refugee children are being excluded from public schools, have been leveled at districts elsewhere around the state and across the country.
Utica, in central New York, has become a magnet in recent years for those escaping persecution in their home countries. Today, nearly one out of six city residents is a refugee, according to the Civil Liberties Union.
Message to towns considering welcoming refugees—They do not bring economic boom times! Refugees bring poverty and social and cultural strife!
Utica Methodist church becomes a mosque. Special treatment for special people!
Further confirming that Utica has a problem with refugee overload, the White House has singled out Utica’s refugee teen population for $2 million worth of summer jobs! What about American kids who need summer jobs?
From Syracuse.com:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Utica is among 11 communities nationwide that will share $21 million in grants for summer jobs programs aimed at helping disadvantaged youth, the White House and U.S. Department of Labor said Monday.
Utica will receive almost $2 million to help 400 students in the city’s refugee population receive summer work experience and part-time jobs the rest of the year, White House officials said.
Again, think about the BIG LIE that refugees will help your struggling city. They won’t!The only money they will bring in to your town is the money Washington throws the city through myriad welfare programs—food stamps, medicaid, section 8 housing, and now funding for summer jobs. Washington doesn’t grow money on trees! The taxpayers of America are propping up refugee saturated cities!
If you live in newly targeted refugee placement cities—Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Missoula, MT and Ithaca, NY (and more!)—think long and hard if you want to be like Utica, NY some day!
Click herefor our Utica archive.
*** The resettlement contractor in Utica is the Mohawk Valley Resource Center and that is a subcontractorof Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (one of the US State Department’s top nine refugee contractors).
Watch for it! The contractors will all now be begging Congress for more of your money because frankly they can’t privately raise the millions upon millions of dollars resettling tens of thousands of refugees each year costs America. As highly touted “public-private” partnerships the PUBLIC funds are now far outweighing the supposed Lutheran Christian charity. LIRS communications director, Miji Bell, says they plan to get approval from Washington for another agency to take over so the flow of Syrians to Allentown will not be slowed.
Readers may recognize this agency going under as the one we discussed a few times back in October. It is really worth your while to read that post before this latest news.
So, hummm!, Lutheran Liberty is tired of losing money! (Just like the taxpayers!). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is more to this story—did regular church-going Lutherans get fed up with bringing in the Syrian Muslims (99% of those entering right now are Muslims***).
From The Morning Call(hat tip: Joanne):
ALLENTOWN — The state’s largest refugee resettlement program is slated to shut down next month, forcing federal officials to approve a replacement before services in the Lehigh Valley and across Pennsylvania are interrupted.
Lutheran Children and Family Services, which has headquarters in Philadelphia and helps settle about 100 refugees a year in the Lehigh Valley, cited accumulating debt as a reason for ending most of its social services by June 30.
Officials said the nonprofit was not receiving enough money to cover immigrant and child welfare programs and has had to borrow $4.5 million from its parent company, Liberty Lutheran, to stay afloat.
If you are considering “welcoming” refugees to your town, read this next line carefully. This will cost your state and local taxpayers no matter how much the contractors say the feds pay for it all. The “reimbursement” mentioned is the payments the federal taxpayer shell out to the contractor.
“Unpredictable state and local funding, coupled with reimbursement that didn’t cover the true cost of service contributed to mounting deficit, leaving Liberty to resource millions of dollars to cover the shortfalls. The generosity of donors has not met the shortfall,” says a statement on the LCFS home page.
Don’t get too excited, they plan to be back with a new subcontractor:
Efforts are underway to find an agency to take over the refugee program. The LCFS Refugee Resettlement Program is a local affiliate of the National Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which is hoping to partner with Baltimore-based Bethany Christian Services to continue administering refugee relocation services in Pennsylvania.
There is more, continue reading here.
The article goes on to say that there are many Syrians already in this part of PA, BUT there is no mention that they are mostly Christians who are not too excited by the large number of Muslim Syrians being admitted.
By the way, Pennsylvania is important to them. This is a state teetering on the line between red state and blue state. These resettlement contractors and the open borders agitators are working to turn it reliably blue.
***Just checking “government figures” as of May 10th. We admitted 1,943 Syrian refugees (of the 10,000 Obama wants) and 1,922 were some flavor of Muslim. That keeps the percentage at 99% Muslim for the Syrians resettled in your states so far this fiscal year.
Oh, they will say they are just promoting the discussion about opening Wyoming for the placement of third world refugees, but it is just this sort of thing that the Open Borders Left uses to keep the pressure on a recalcitrant population which has made it very clear over recent years that they do not want Wyoming to become a new resettlement site. Republican Governor Matthew Mead of Wyoming wants third world refugees resettled in the state.
This is what the Leftists and complicit media do all the time to wear down their opposition. For new readers, Wyoming is the only state in the nation that has never had a UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program. Montana, the only other state not ‘welcoming’ refugees at the moment, did have a small program a few years ago.
With the big push from the Obama Administration to expand resettlement from around the world to 85,000 this year (10,000 from Syria), the US State Department and its contractorsare out scouting new territory and the Republican governor of Wyoming has invited the feds to come on in!
We have been following the controversy in Wyoming ever since Governor Matt Mead wrotea 2013 letter to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in Health and Human Services saying they were setting up an office in Wyoming. A huge political brouhaha ensued and the governor and those pushing the plan ran for cover (for awhile!). This March 24 event,being put on by Wyoming Public Radio and the Wyoming Humanities Council, signals that the Open borders (diversity is beautiful) gang is beginning a new propaganda salvo against citizens who object to the expense and cultural disruption that impoverished refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East would place on rural Wyoming.
This is a summary of the upcoming event: One of the panelists will be former Congolese refugee Bertine Bahige. It was Bahige’s story about how he wanted a refugee program in WY so he could bring his family from the Congo to Wyoming that spooked citizens there before the Lutheran resettlement agency could get its structure in place in Casper. From my own experience and vast evidence over the years, these agents for the US State Dept. must get set up and start operations before the word leaks to regular folks in the town. Secrecy is the watchword for federal agencies/contractors.
Wyoming PBS and the Wyoming Humanities Council are partnering to explore immigration and refugee policy in Wyoming in a special March 24th Wyoming Perspectives. What is the federal government’s refugee program? Why doesn’t Wyoming participate? What are the numbers of immigrants and refugees in Wyoming? What is Wyoming’s history with immigration? Should Wyoming help in the world’s refugee crisis? Why or why not? These questions and more will be discussed. Brian Liesinger, Executive Director of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, will provide a historical perspective.
Wyomingites need to find out more about those on the board of the Wyoming Humanities Council, here. And, use the election season to question Liz Cheney about the refugee program. You should be guaranteed to get publicity by doing so.
Concerned citizens of Wyoming should weigh in here:
We invite your questions about immigration and refugee policy in Wyoming. Call in your questions during the broadcast to: 800-495-9788 or submit questions now via email to immigration@wyomingpbs.org.
If you live somewhere else in the US and have witnessed problems with the refugee program where you live, please send in questions and comments as well! (Even if your questions/comments never make it on the air, you will be educating Wyoming PBS).
Also, please send ‘educational’ information to the legislator,see here, who will be on the program.
For all of you who have not followed the controversy in Wyoming, see our archive here.
Two years ago this week, we had a good laugh when we learned that the wannabe refugee contractor, Lutherans!, admitted that the reason they got politically shot down was that the news was out about their plans before they had all the skids greased. They had hoped to keep the plan secret longer! Jumping the gun! Go here and see that the ORR already had Casper, WY on their map of resettlement sites. The latest map shows no office in Casper.
See especially, Governor Mead suggests RRW is racist, here (a usual line of attack by the Left!).
