We told you about Missoula County Commissioners’ invitation to the federal government and its contractor, the International Rescue Committee (IRC)here just the week before last. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Anne Richard is a former Vice President of the International Rescue Committee. The Washington contractor revolving door is on full display. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/188212.htm
My suggestion for citizens of Montana, who have concerns about the United Nations picking refugees to be seeded in the state, is to call for a public hearing on the matter. If the county commission is bent on going down this slippery slope they should bring together all of those who will be involved in a public hearing format and require them to tell Montana citizens exactly how the program works.
The funniest part of the letter is that these naive local elected officials think they will have any say about the number to be resettled. That decision will be made in Washington between the IRC and the US State Department—just ask mayors of Manchester, NH, Springfield, MA, and Amarillo, TX if they have any say in the numbers!
Additionally taxpayers should be demanding a plan from the IRC/US State Dept and the Office of Refugee Resettlement at HHS.
Demand a plan!
In 2014, the mayor of Athens, Georgia demanded that these same agencies (IRC in Georgia) present a plan to the city of Athens before refugees would be resettled. They refused to give her a plan. Last I heard the stalemate was continuing.
And, you must now read this! The IRC head honcho in Georgia tells the mayor to take a hike—US State Department will be making the decisions, not you!
Have a look at the letter the Missoula County Commissioners have sent to Anne Richard, click here.
Somehow their ignorance about what they are getting into is so much more striking when you actually see the letter they sent. Go here for more on Montana, one of two states that has not received refugees in recent years.
Forty eight states resettle refugees. Wyoming has no refugee program. However, over the years a trickle have gone to Montana. All that could soon change if a supposed ‘non-profit’ group hooks up with the refugee resettlement behemoth, the International Rescue Committee to open an office in Missoula. Stacy Rye, a new member of the county council signed off on the letter expressing support for a refugee resettlement office in Missoula. Photo: http://missoulian.com/news/local/stacy-rye-selected-as-next-missoula-county-commissioner/article_41659d02-f171-537f-8a3e-d53ca7b2f258.html
The local city council has already expressed interest in pursuing the idea of bringing 100 refugees a year to ‘Big Sky Country.’
And, as all of you living in refugee-overloaded communities know—you do not get to control how many refugees will come!
They might say 100 now, but I guarantee it will be 200, 300, more, as each year passes. And, the reason for that is that the “seed” families will be able to bring their relatives and it never ends! If your community complains later you will be vilified for wanting to stop “family reunification!”
I am here to tell you Montana, that once the seeds of resettlement are planted in the state there will be no stopping it!
MISSOULA, Mont. – Missoula residents could possibly see a refugee resettlement office in the future. Missoula County commissioners signed off on a letter of support on Thursday. The letter outlines supporting approximately 100 refugees per year.
A group of residents is working to bring the International Rescue Committee to Missoula. The IRC helps provide health care, learning and economic support for people in more than 40 countries. They resettle thousands of refugees each year in 26 U.S. cities.
“I can’t imagine families in the world not having another place to go, and they can’t go home, and the U.S. is the land of opportunity,” said Missoula County Commissioner Stacy Rye.
Rye signed a letter along with the other commissioners showing support for a group of volunteers in Missoula called Soft Landing, who are working to bring refugees to the area.
“Being on the positive side of things, where you can affect the positive change in lives is hugely important,” said Mary Poole, with Soft Landing.
Soft Landing is working through an application process with the IRC.
Continue reading here. Mary Poole, Soft Landing, is working with the IRC to bring the first 100 refugees to Montana. Her organization will receive payment on a per head basis from the IRC, a federal contractor (your tax dollars). Photo: http://missoulian.com/news/local/refugee-crisis-soft-landing-group-initiates-plans-for-missoula-resettlement/article_33c84357-8f46-50cb-b8bb-cea654dd047f.html
The International Rescue Committee, a half a billion dollar a year organization, headquartered in New York City and headed by David Miliband, the former British Foreign Secretary and bff Hillary Clinton and George Soros will be calling the shots for Montana! See our massive archive on the IRC by clicking here (find out who you are getting in bed with!).
Miliband is calling for the resettlement of 100,000 Syrian refugees to be admitted to the US in the next year. Do you really believe he will not bring any to Montana??? Montana readers must immediately contact all of your elected officials and tell them NO! The most important thing you need to make clear to them is that even if they say only 100 will come to Montana, they are lying!
Local county councils have NO authority to set the number!
If you live somewhere else in the country and are experiencing horrific refugee overload problems, please take a few minutes and write to the Missoula County Commissioners, and politely explain why they should not go down this road!
Maybe the Commissioners could call the mayor of Amarillo, TXand he could explain what happened to them and how they now can’t slow the flow.
Or, they might call the mayor of Manchester, NH, Springfield, MA, or Lewiston, ME. And, last I heard the mayor of Athens, Georgia kept the IRC out!
They are running out of ‘welcoming’ communities and unsuspecting communities like Missoula, Montana are in their crosshairs!
We have written about Montana previously, click herefor older posts. ***Update***Make sure Montanans know that the United Nations is choosing our refugees! Click here and here. Local government officials will have NO SAY!
We just mentioned a letter to the editor in Syracuse, NY that has stirred debate there about the mayor’s plea for the resettlement of more Syrian (mostly Muslim) refugees for that city.
Now, here (below) is a Letter to the editor from Montana in response to a cartoon featured at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle on September 22, 2015.
This is an excellent short letter that hits all the points you should be making where you live. People ask me all the time, what can I do? This is something you can do!
The issue is hot and this is your time to respond to any mention of the Syrian invasion about to arrive on American shores (and into your towns). In some ways, the outrageous demands (100,000, not properly screened, Syrians in one year) of the Hard Left (No Borders!) Resettlement Industry (quietly backed by RINO politicians looking for cheap immigrant labor for their big business donors), should be looked on as a blessing as Americans are waking up.
Please write letters to the editor in response to anything you see in your local papers on the issue. The media (even Fox News I’m sorry to say!) itself is not going to give us a fair report, so youneed to educate your fellow citizens. ***Update*** Be sure to check with your paper for the word count permitted!
From the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
It’s astonishing how much is wrong with the editorial cartoon concerning putative Syrian refugees that the Chronicle printed on Sept. 22. (The cartoon shows Uncle Sam idling in a motorboat labeled “USA” and telling “Syrian refugees” swimming nearby to tread water while we run background checks on them.)
First, refugees are officially defined as people who have a “well-founded fear of persecution,” but being caught in Syria’s civil war, while obviously hazardous, isn’t persecution. So such people aren’t actually refugees.
Second, most of them aren’t Syrians, either! As the Wall Street Journal reported (“Migrants Pose as Syrians to Open Door to Asylum in Europe,” Sept. 12), there’s a brisk trade in stolen and counterfeit Syrian passports. As few as 10 percent of this human tsunami may be Syrians; some come from as far afield as Afghanistan.
Further, if these were predominantly people fleeing a war zone, they wouldn’t be 69 percent men (primarily men in their 20s), as reported by the UN Refugee Agency. Instead, most of these people are simply illegal immigrants from all over the Mideast and Africa who are using the chaos in Syria as cover to exit their own dysfunctional countries and move to the gravy-train welfare states of Western civilization.
And what about those background checks? Well, the FBI admitted to Congress that it can’t confirm identities or investigate histories of most people arriving from the strife-torn Mideast. For an explosive example of what this means, recall Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen “refugees” who bombed the Boston Marathon.
So Europe should decline these faux refugees. The U.S. should too, especially considering that more than 90 percent of recent Mideast “refugees” here use food stamps and nearly 70 percent collect cash welfare.
Finally, your editors shouldn’t choose cartoons to publish based on uninformed sentimentality.
Brent Bledsoe
Bozeman
Incidentally Montana doesn’t have a refugee resettlement program at the moment, but efforts are underway there by the Lefties and their big business pals to get something started there. See our post here in June.
Last week we told you that a group in Montana was proposing that the state begin to resettle refugees in significant numbers. The only state that has no refugee program at all is Wyoming, but over the years Montana has resettled a handful (LOL! sort of like refugee advocate Joe Biden’s Delaware). However, that could all change as writer Stephen Maly suggested in an opinion piecein Helena’s Independent Record.
Now comes a response by Montana resident Paul Nachman*** which I’m posting here for several reasons. First, his excellent piece could be a model for others working in ‘pockets of resistance’ and it’s a reminder to use the local media as much as possible (not everyone is on the internet!). Secondly, he makes some very good points in a thoughtful way, and last but not least, he raises a specter of something more and more experts are beginning to notice—in the coming years we will have a glut of low-skilled workers and no jobs. So what then will happen to all of the third world immigrants we have imported ostensibly to do the jobs Americans won’t do? Nachman asks that question. After you read the whole essay, you might want to send a letter or comment to the paper yourself. Help Montanans decide if they should “change” the character of their state by “welcoming” refugees from places like Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Stephen Maly’s op-ed “Exploring the possibility of welcoming Syrian refugees to Helena” (June 25) is heartfelt. But it’s also a nonstarter because most of what Mr. Maly wrote has negligible overlap with the current realities of refugee resettlement in the United States.
These realities usually startle people new to the subject. One pictures carefully selected refugees shepherded to new lives in America by doting non-governmental organizations rooted in religion (e.g. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service) or civic concern (e.g. International Rescue Committee). Surely such groups assist their charges in finding housing and employment and in assimilating to American life, while also providing financial support until “their” refugees attain self-sufficiency? And surely they fund this support and the salaries of their professional resettlement workers using contributions gathered by “passing the plate” in their churches or by attracting private philanthropy?
Well, no. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees does the selecting, pressing their selectees on national bureaucracies such as the U.S. State Department. In turn, the State Department — working with LIRS, IRC and seven other NGOs — identifies American cities and towns for concentrated resettlement of the refugees, typically paying minimal attention to the capabilities and resources of these receiving communities. Indeed, the communities often learn about their new arrivals after the fact.
The sponsoring NGOs’ refugee work is funded almost entirely by the federal taxpayer, not from resources they’re raised themselves, so they’re best viewed as federal contractors. And the contractors’ obligations to any particular refugees end after a few months, no matter how inadequately their charges have assimilated during that brief span.
Now this is the part that I found alarming because I have been hearing this warning from several sources lately.
Mr. Maly’s worry about systemic worker shortages is probably misplaced, anyway. The cover story in the July/August Atlantic is “A World Without Work.” Author Derek Thompson argues that galloping computer-driven automation is en route to destroying, on net, tens of millions of American jobs. If so, the issue for our society will be the distribution of sustenance to those forced out of the workforce, without engendering the resentment of those still working. We certainly won’t need to import workers from abroad.
***Paul Nachman (PNBL48@hotmail.com) is a retired physicist and a founding member of Montanans for Immigration Law Enforcement (www.montanamile.org). He also volunteers in a research group at MSU in Bozeman.
Please send a comment to the Independent Recordespecially if you have information about how the refugee program is problematic where you live. ***Update***
Want to send a letter, click here. It is a 200 word limit and you can also go here to submit it: irstaff@helenair.com
Although, Montana is not like Wyoming which has never had a refugee program (only a smattering of refugees have been resettled in ‘Big Sky Country’ over the last several years), but that could soon change.
Based on the comments to an opinion piece at the Helena Independent Record, the citizens there have no clue what “welcoming” Syrians is all about. LOL! They even think that since they don’t have mosques they might get all Christian Syrians. NO THEY WON’T! Over 90% of the Syrians being admitted to the US right now are Sunni Muslims! Guess what! The mosques will follow! And, so will the unfunded mandates as the feds pass the cost of the resettlement and care of the refugees on to the state of Montana.
From the Independent Record (author Stephen Maly). Emphasis is mine: Stephen Maly of World Montana wants to bring Syrian refugees to Montana!
What if Montana had a program to take in a select few of these folks? What if a coalition of nonprofits and volunteers worked with federal and state agencies to establish an immigrant and refugee resettlement entity of our own? What if, over the course of the next few years, the residents of Helena and other communities in Montana were to encounter a Syrian-owned and operated restaurant, bakery, medical clinic or some other small business in their midst? I believe that would be a good thing.
[….]
Montana as a whole has perhaps the least diverse population in the United States, with fewer foreign born citizens per capita than any other state. At the same time, our state is one of the fastest aging. That’s going to be a problem in the decades ahead, as we are going to demand more health care services. New businesses are going to need educated and skilled workers. These demographic patterns are occurring just as we are entering a period of entrepreneurial dynamism and related prosperity in Montana. We are going to have to import relatively young workers. What if we brought some in from Syria?
[….]
I know there are people who will be skeptical about this proposition. They will worry about the risks of opening our doors to anyone from the Middle East. They might think it’s just fine to have a remarkably homogeneous population. They might figure that Montana would not be a good fit for Syrians, culturally or otherwise. Looking at the experience of other jurisdictions in the West, the risks and costs of ushering in carefully vetted refugees can be managed and mitigated. Foreign Service professionals have effective means of filtering out malcontents and miscreants. According to a State Department brief, ”refugees are subject to an intense security screening process involving federal intelligence, law enforcement, defense, and homeland security agencies.” [Perhaps Mr. Maly is completely in the dark and doesn’t know that the FBI has testified that they cannot screen the Syrians!—ed]
Our landscape is well suited to just about anyone from anywhere, really. People adapt. It might be impractical to start with Syrian Muslims. Unlike Detroit and San Diego, which both have sizeable Syrian expatriate communities, we don’t have mosques or halal markets.No matter, there are hundreds of thousands of Syrian Christians and others who will qualify as refugees.
There is a lot more, read on. If you have had negative experience with the refugee program where you live, please take time to comment at the Independent Record. And, there is contact information for Maly if you want to tell him politely why he is misguided. You should be grateful to him for so publicly asking how citizens feel about the idea.
I guess Mr. Maly didn’t get the message that you are supposed to keep refugee resettlement plans secret until the refugees have already begun to arrive. Remember this March 2014 story about Lutheran Social Service of Rocky Mountains being angry that their plans for Wyoming were leaked prematurely.
Folks in Montana better get organized starting with research on who exactly is behind WorldMontana! Lefties or big businesses looking for cheap labor? Are local government ‘leaders’ or Chamber of Commerce types involved? Gee, any meatpackers or yogurt-makers on the way to Montana?
