Sheesh! Just like the60 Minutes ‘story’ I couldn’t bring myself to watch, I can’t listen to this B.S. from race- baiting NPR reporter SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI. See her bio. Shereen Marisol Meraji, NPR resident expert on Islam and self-described “caffeine addicted 90s hip-hop head.”
I traveled to Montana and met the truly wonderful people (the same ones she is disparaging) in the Flathead this past summer who have legitimate concerns about how the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program could bring unwanted change (dumped on them from Washington) to their beautiful rural community in far Northwest Montana.
(Do our tax dollars help fund biased NPR? If so, let’s make it our aim in January (when Trump is elected) to cut any funds they still get from us, the taxpayers, for next year.And stop listening to NPR!)
Ms. Meraji reportsthat everything she heard in Montana that was critical of Islam is “fiction.” So what makes her an Islamic scholar? Here is how she describes herself at her twitter page:
Exploring race and identity with @nprcodeswitch and reporting on everything in between. Persia-Rican Zumba dancing caffeine addicted 90s hip-hop head.
Alrighty then…sounds like an expert.
By the way, her disparagement of Act for America should make anyone who is not already a member, run over to their website and join right now!
To all of you who have attempted (unsuccessfully) to get a copy of the important planning document the federal government uses to justify the number and ethnicity of refugees to be seeded in your towns, this should vindicate your frustration and anger (even if it doesn’t help you acquire yours!) Here they come. Is there a mosque in Missoula? Just wondering. Editor:This is the third post this morning in my ‘secret Saturday’ series. See the previous posts here, and here.
So many of you have reported, for months, that you have called your state refugee coordinator or the local resettlement agency only to be stonewalled, denied the document and in some cases made to feel like an idiot when the contractor pretended that you didn’t know what you were talking about (what R & P Abstract?). Some of you ultimately obtained the document using your state freedom of information law.
Bait and switch!
Yes, the R & P Abstract (Reception and Placement Abstract) exists and now the Missoulianwrites about it here, like it was no big deal. How many of you in Montana knew until recently that they weren’t planning for 50 or 100 refugees but more than that, year after year? And, as they told you, with a straight face, that they would be benign Christians from the DR Congo you were expected to believe that too.
Now we learn you are getting Somalis, Afghanis and Syrians, three of the most difficult to security-screen groups of Muslim refugees. In addition to more than a dozen other ethnic groups (btw, this makes the resettlement extremely costly to your school system that must cope with children speaking many languages). Hereis the Missoulian (I don’t know if one of the concerned citizens out there obtained an R & P Abstractand gave it to the paper, or the contractor decided it was best to release it, so as to get their own spin on the story first):
Missoula could resettle up to 150 refugees of as many as 15 nationalities in the next 12 months, but the biggest numbers will reflect the world’s most troubled spots. (Troubled spots is code for Muslim countries!—ed)
A Reception and Placement Abstract filed in May with the U.S. State Department proposed up to 65 people from sub-Saharan Africa and 70 from the Middle Eastern countries of Syria, Iran and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, during fiscal year 2017.
The first group includes those who’ve fled war or persecution from Burundi, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan and South Sudan.
Five families from the Democratic Republic of Congo – 27 people in all – arrived in town in August and September, according to wrapsnet.org, an interactive website of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
They won’t count toward the 150 total for FY17, according to Molly Short Carr, executive director of the International Rescue Committee’s Missoula office.
[….]
An abstract also was filed for the remainder of fiscal year 2016, which ended on Sept. 30. It proposed a capacity of 100 refugees, though Missoula was clearly not in a position to receive that many.
For all of you, think about this! Every week these tax-payer funded contractors sit down with the Department of State (in Washington) and divvy up the refugees to be seeded in to your town. Each contractor is ‘bidding for bodies’ as each refugee comes with a bucket of money attached per person.
The federal bureau uses information provided on R&P abstracts when it sits down each week with representatives of the IRC and the eight other resettlement agencies in the United States, a State Department spokeswoman told the Missoulian.
[….]
The IRC’s abstract touched lightly [does the DOS in DC try to verify the information contractors submit in their bids?—ed] on housing and employment in Missoula. Basing its figures on the latest Missoula Housing Report, it said the average monthly rent for homes or apartments with one, two and three bedrooms is $750, $950 and $1,200, respectively. Availability was listed as “always” for the two smaller homes and “sometimes” for three bedrooms.
I visited Missoula on my RRW fact-finding trip this summer and learned that the contractor office was being kept secret. This is my photo of where I was told it was located.
Listed as available jobs for refugees in Missoula were construction, customer service, food service, health care, hospitality and retail. [Really! Customer service! Hospitality! they don’t speak ENGLISH!—ed] The average starting wage is $9.50 for full-time positions, while the starting wage of part-time positions and the percentage of positions offered benefits are “to be determined.”
On this issue of housing and jobs. It has been reported to me that the contractor may have lied in the R & P Abstractabout the availability of housing and jobs for very poor, non-English speaking refugees from places like the Congo. Also, it is pretty obvious that if (big if!) even one member of the family gets a job at $9.50 an hour they will need lots of welfare benefits just to survive.
As Isaid here, if you see any neglect of the refugees and/or abuse of contractual agreements with the DOS. Please report what you see. Come to think of it, maybe you could make a hotline phone number available in your community where citizens could anonymously report any refugee problems they see.
We have written a lot on Montana, click hereto learn more.
Once a federal contractor gets an office established, your town will have NO CONTROL over how many will come and where they will come from. Activist Mary Poole got the ball rolling and invited the International Rescue Committee to set up an office in Missoula. The rumor is that Mary is taking one, maybe two, families to live at her house to save taxpayers having to care for them (joking of course!)
And, LOL!, for all of you getting a run-around from your contractor office about the Abstract (what abstract? we don’t know what you are talking about?), well now we learn they sure did know what you were asking, but they wanted to make you feel dumb and uninformed. The arrogance of these federal contractors is stunning! Here is the latest from Missoula where the commissioners said they would “welcome” one hundred, well, oopsy now they will get 150—including Syrian and Iraqi Muslims among many ethnic groups.
(When your community gets a smattering of everything, it may sound cool to get all the “international flavor,” but be ready for a lot of extra taxpayer-funded costs in the local school system to accommodate myriad languages and levels of learning .)
Before you continue reading, be sure to see this postwhere we reported that the first Congolese families arriving in Missoula were homeless.
From The Missoulian:
Four families of Congolese have arrived in Missoula in the past month, but resettlement here will soon take on a more international flavor.
[…..]
Carr, executive director of the Missoula International Rescue Committee (IRC) office, said some of the millions who have fled civil war in Syria will land in Missoula after going through an international screening process and orientation.
“There will maybe be Iraqi refugees who will come. There may be refugees who come from Central African Republic, Chad, Sudan, Burma, Bhutan, Latin America,” she told about 30 people Tuesday night at a meeting of the Missoula County Democratic Central Committee in City Council chambers.
Obama is keeping the number of Syrians in the 2017 flow a secret! Mayor John Engen: So how many refugees will he take to live at his house?
While a target for Syrian resettlements in fiscal year 2017 hasn’t been announced, Obama’s refugee plan is expected to welcome even more.
That’s been a topic of debate among presidential candidates and in Montana, where Missoula opened the lone resettlement office in the state just two months ago.
Carr said the abstract proposal for Missoula now calls for 150 refugees in the next year. That’s up from “approximately 100 per year” that Missoula County Commissioners said they would welcome in a January letter to Anne Richard, assistant secretary of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration.
The bureau cited the support of the commissioners, Mayor John Engen and most of the Missoula City Council in agreeing to reopen an IRC resettlement office in Missoula. Soft Landing Missoula, which formed a year ago in response to the refugee crisis in Syria, has marshaled local support and continues to provide resources and manpower as the Congolese arrive.
~The new year begins in 2 weeks (not in January), so Syrians could be there in October!
~They can distribute them within a hundred miles of Missoula especially if they are looking for cheap housing!
~The REPUBLICAN Congress could stop the whole thing from happening before October 1 by defunding the program in the Continuing Resolution (if they wanted to!).
See our complete archive on Montana by clicking here. Colonizing Wyoming should be next!
They aren’t on the street, but live in temporary housing (what! some motel?).
I can’t believe this! After all the hoopla and excitement about shoving refugees down the throats of Montanans who don’t want the poverty and cultural disruption third worlders bring to communities, the mightyInternational Rescue Committee (IRC) headquartered in New York City doesn’t have homes and apartments lined up for the former camp-dwelling Congolese whose arrival has been predicted for months! That is David Miliband in the middle giving George Soros and his son the IRC’s top award in 2013. LOL! It is called the Freedom Award. Miliband, a British citizen, runs the major US resettlement contractor with a salary of almost $600,000 a year. Maybe he, or Soros, could co-sign leases for the poor Africans being brought to Montana.
Where is Missoula’s R & P Abstract, did the IRC lie to the US State Department about the availability of reasonably priced housing for large families?
Didn’t the IRC sign a contract with the US State Department that said the refugees must have a home (with a requirement for a certain number of bedrooms for family members) to go to from the airport with the refrigerator stocked with culturally appropriate food?
When do-gooders don’t do good!
I’m going to rage a bit before I give you some snips from The Missoulian(Missoula Refugees face housing issues).
The International Rescue Committee is a behemoth in the Refugee Industry. It is the richest of the nine federal contractors with an annual income in 2014 of $688,920,920 and $454 million of that comes from YOU, the taxpayer. Its CEO, Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband*** is making $591,846 annually and probably lives in some swanky digs in Manhattan! (See recent Form 990 here) But, the IRC refuses to co-sign the housing rental agreements with the refugees they are dropping off in Missoula!
It is an outrage! They expect local landlords to waive their rules for the refugeesthat obviously have no credit and no background checks and no job prospects and take a gamble on them that they can pay the rent for months and years to come! Not to mention the fact that over the last nine years I’ve heard many stories, especially about refugees who have lived in camps, that they do not know how to use modern appliances and often trash them in the process of learning how to operate dish washers, stoves, etc. Here is the storythat got my blood boiling this morning!
Congolese refugees and the people trying to help them get settled in Missoula are facing a housing crisis.
Five families from refugee camps in East Africa will be in town by the end of September, none of them with a source of steady income or credit history.
It’s the job of the local resettlement agency, the International Rescue Committee, to help them secure both as quickly as possible, said IRC director Molly Short Carr.
But record home sales prices in Missoula have placed rentals at a premium. And in a town that swells this time of year with university students – many with no credit ratings themselves – property managers and landlords can afford to be picky about who they rent to.
“We’re kind of hitting a bit of a brick wall,” Carr admitted.
[….]
Missoula has been approved [Why were they approved by the Dept. of State if housing was not available?—ed] as the destination for families of five, four and three people – 25 refugees in all – in the next few weeks, so the hunt for housing is becoming critical.
What a bunch of B.S. this is! We are expected to believe that local landlords should carry the burden of helping teach refugees how to be self-sufficient! Continue reading:
The IRC doesn’t allow its offices to co-sign for refugees.
“Our focus is really on getting them self-sufficient,” said Carr. “Co-signing is kind of a contradiction to self-sufficiency and being able to guide their own lives.”
Hey, here is an idea! maybe Mary Poole and other members of her group could take on the responsibility of co-signing rental agreements with landlords for the families they have ‘welcomed’ to Montana! Maybe put a little of their own skin in the game!
Readers!
If your town is contemplating ‘welcoming’ refugees, please pay attention. The uber-wealthy resettlement contractor will be out of the refugees’ lives in only a few months and the burden of these third world families will be on you—the taxpayers, the landlords, the social services, the school system and the health services of your town!
***David Miliband is a pal of the Clintons,click here for many posts we have written about him in recent years. BTW, Miliband was the first of the resettlement contractors to call for 65,000 Syrians for America before Obama leaves office and he subsequently joined the chorus for an even larger number. Addendum: After I posted this I thought you might be interested to know that Anne Richard (Asst. Secretary of State for PRM) and Robert Carey (Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement) were both former Vice Presidents at the IRC pulling down 6-figure salaries and are now the two top officials responsible for the entire US Refugee Admissions Program (the revolving door between government and contractor on full display). Update:Soros spent $600,000 on a pro-refugee PR campaign in Europe (see here). How many refugees might he have helped personally with that kind of money? Or maybe Miliband would forego that huge salary and help needy refugees with it! Nah, he needs it to maintain the jet-setting lifestyle!
Update: Be sure to see the mayor of Missoula’s op-ed of a few days ago. Not so much for what he says, but for the large numbers of comments on both sides of the issue. Makes you realize that there is a huge divide in Montana about whether it is wise to bring in the third world.
A family of 6 “Congolese” refugees have arrived in Missoula, MT as the first “east African” refugees we are told. (The Congo and the DR Congo are not in east Africa. The countries producing refugees in east Africa are Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. Just saying!) Stephen Maly of World Montana has been advocating for refugees to be placed in Helena, but says he is backing off until after the November elections. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/06/26/montana-alert-group-wants-to-bring-in-syrian-refugees-to-replace-your-aging-population/
Here is the story (Montana Public Radio) on the family that will be very costly for Montana and US taxpayers to support:
MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) — An exhausted Congelese family of six experiencing culture shock has arrived in Missoula, the first of an anticipated 100 east African refugees expected to be resettled in Montana over the next year, a resettlement agency official said.
The family arrived last Thursday and International Rescue Committee Missoula director Molly Short Carr declined to identify them because of privacy concerns, but said three of the family’s four children spent their entire lives in a Tanzanian refugee camp.
Temporary housing? The US State Department normally requires that they be placed in permanent housing upon arrival, and heck this contractor in Missoula has had months to get housing organized.
The family has been placed in temporary housing. The IRC will help them apply for social services, Social Security cards, register the children for school and help the parents enroll in English classes. The parents speak Swahili and French.
A total of 25 refugees are expected to arrive in Missoula by the end of September. Missoula County commissioners previously invited 100 refugees a year to resettle in the county, and the IRC re-opened its Missoula office earlier this year.
Meanwhile advocates for diversifying Montana in Helena say they will wait until after the November election to renew their call for Africans/Middle Easterners for their city.
HELENA – The head of an effort to relocate Syrian refugees to Helena said Monday the group is delaying efforts until after the Nov. 8 election, saying the current political climate has stifled progress.
Stephen Maly, vice president of World Montana, said a grass-roots effort to bring Syrian refugees has been in “arrested development because of political turmoil surrounding the issue.”
“We’re trying to make progress without getting involved in politics,” he said.
Maly said there is draft legislation for the 2017 session to change refugee policy. But that is a federal issue and “not in the state bailiwick.”
He said the timing is horrible for his group of volunteers “to push something forward in political climate. People are misinformed and angry.”
“It’s not in the cards until the election is settled,” he said.
Continue readingand see how the subject of refugees has become a big issue in the gubernatorial contest there. This is the sort of effort you should make where you live—inject the refugee controversy in to any race you can in your state!
But, it also confirms what we have been saying—November is it! If Hillary is elected the flood gates to the third world will be flung wide open!
See our extensive archive on Montana, here. And, why are we getting so many refugees from the DR Congo? Because in 2013 the Obama Administration saidwe would take 50,000 because the UN told us to!
