They Never Give Up! Asheville, NC has Agreed to Refugee Subcontractor Office, 150 Refugees Annually!

07/23/2021 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

At the end of the Obama Administration (anticipating Hillary in the White House!), the federal refugee contractors were working their butts off to get more offices open in more American towns and cities so that more of you could pay for refugee care while industries (like the hotel industry or BIG Meat) could hire some cheap labor.

Your reward: experiencing the the joys of diversity!

One such target site was Asheville, NC.

The plan for Asheville fizzled due to citizen blow-back (partially led by former Republican Rep. Mark Meadows) and then Donald Trump won the White House resulting in a hiatus in the big push for new resettlement sites.

Here is one post I wrote in 2016:

Asheville, North Carolina! You are next! Federal refugee contractor has come to town

And, the news a year later:

IRC gives up plans for new resettlement site in Asheville, NC; write to Congress!

Well, they are back and Asheville will now become a resettlement site with an anticipated 150 annual refugee arrival rate.

From the Citizen Times:

I had to laugh because they are so clever to use an appealing and grateful couple—Eastern Europeans—as the face of their refugee propaganda media push. It is a bait and switch! Wait until they get some Africans and Middle Easterners!

In case you are wondering, a town does not get to choose its refugees!

Asheville area refugee program expanding; Eastern Europeans fleeing religious persecution

On May 18, the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to have County Manager, Avril Pinder, write a letter of support for the opening of a local Refugee Resettlement Reception and Placement sub-office. The office has no cost to the county, though some social services are offered to refugees.

That could mean an increase from an average of about 75 refugees a year to 150. And Buncombe has about 1,775 Ukrainians, according to the census, or 0.7% of the population.

The move follows a decision by President Joe Biden to increase the refugee goal, something set annually by the president. [Biden has said he wants 125,000 refugees admitted in FY22 which begins in less than 3 months—ed]

Bidding war?

Looks like the US Conference of Catholic Bishops snagged this one.

The IRC was after Asheville back in 2016. The contractors are furiously searching for ‘welcoming’ sites now because they want to get their proposals in to the US State Department before September.

More refugee clients=more federal money in their coffers.

Nine voluntary agencies operating in the U.S.*** take portions of that target number and divide it among their affiliate offices throughout the country. Catholic Charities is an affiliate of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which resettles about 30% of the refugees arriving yearly.

[….]

…. each refugee participates in an extensive interview and screening process before arriving in the U.S., said Susan Phillips, former interim director of refugee resettlement for the Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte.

“The refugees coming from Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine are eligible for resettlement through the Lautenberg Program, which was created in 1990 and later expanded to provide for the resettlement of persecuted religious minorities living in a specific list of countries, to include these three,” Phillips said.

The Lautenberg Amendment was “first enacted in 1990 to facilitate resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union.”

Continue reading. You will see that although the idea of a subcontractor office in Asheville was killed five years ago, refugees have nevertheless been placed there! Refugees are permitted to be placed within 100 miles of a resettlement office.

New resettlement site shopping is happening throughout America as I predicted here when I saw this story about Winchester, VA in May.

It Begins: Federal Contractors Out Scouring America for New Target Towns for Biden Refugees

***For new readers these are the nine major resettlement contractors who decide (with oversight by the US State Department) where refugees are to be placed in America. Your state has no say in the matter!

North Carolina: Refugees out of Work and Struggling

03/30/2020 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

This story is no surprise and I expect there will be many more like it in the coming days and weeks.

Refugees work at menial labor—cleaning hotel and dorm rooms, working in restaurant kitchens, etc. all no longer essential services—and they are increasingly unemployed (however $$$ is on the way from the feds).

I guess we can say it sure is a good thing that the Trump administration cut the flow of refugees to America starting last October or we would have even more unhappy, struggling people as those described here.

From The Daily Tar Heel:

Refugees in Orange County struggle to make ends meet amid COVID-19 economic hardships

All those North Carolinians who have been ‘welcoming’ refugees to the state for the last decade need to get out there now and pay the rent, tutor the kids and feed/clothe the impoverished people they invited to their towns and cities.

Coronavirus has forced many families to alter their ways of life. Although COVID-19 has impacted almost every Orange County resident, a group that has been especially devastated is the local refugee community.

Refugees can already be a vulnerable population without something like the coronavirus, said Flicka Bateman, director of the Refugee Support Center, a volunteer-based organization that helps transition refugees in Orange County to their new lives.

“I know people who’ve been here less than three weeks, I can’t imagine what in the world for them it must be like,” she said. “They’re totally uprooted, they’ve left situations that were full of violence and uncertainty, and then they come here and instead of being able to learn English and get all these services, suddenly they’re told to stay where they are and people will do the best they can remotely. It’s just very tough.”

Orange County has about 1,200 refugees, primarily from Burma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria. [It would be many more if Trump had not cut the flow this year—ed]. Bateman said a lot of refugees in the area have lost their jobs or seen reduced hours, especially those who work in restaurants or hotels, or in food service and housekeeping at UNC, where dorms have been closed and dining services have been severely reduced.

[….]

Adam Clark https://worldreliefdurham.org/staff

Adam Clark, office director of World Relief Durham, a refugee resettlement agency based in Durham that serves refugees across the Triangle area, said programs that help refugees with employment have seen a spike in applications due to a greater amount of people needing sudden job assistance.

He said they’ve seen about 20-30 unemployment applications among refugees just in the last week, and a long list of people are already waiting.

“There are a lot of refugees worried about their rent, obviously the same things that are affecting everyone,” he said. “But I think it just affects them even more because of the sectors they work in.”

Hannah Olmstead, a junior at UNC who is a part-time caseworker at World Relief Durham, said as local school districts transition to online instruction, many refugee parents don’t have the English ability or understanding of American education to homeschool their children.

More here.

A public relations graphic from 2015 (Obama) refugee boom times:

I know it is hard to read. The original is here: **https://charlotteawake.com/refugeeinfographics/**

Unhappy refugee contractors not getting insider information out of Trump Administration

08/17/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The story at The Intercept by reporter Sara Aziza is a rehash of much of the same old stuff the Open Borders Refugee industry has been spreading far and wide as the time approaches for the Trump Administration to announce its “Determination” for how many refugees the US will ‘welcome’ in FY19 under the US Refugee Admissions Program.

SarahAziza1-1506099758 — The Intercept reporter Sara Aziza https://theintercept.com/staff/sarah-aziza/

The title (below) is overstating the case. In my view, the Trump team could be doing a lot more to really “dismantle” the program.

As I have said repeatedly, the Administration can “slash” the numbers for a few years, but without real reform of the seriously flawed program from the UN picking most of our refugees to the US State Department and its contractors*** secretly sending them to unsuspecting towns and cities (often to satisfy the needs of globalist industries), the US Refugee Admissions Program will simply pick right up where it left off in 2020 or 2024 if the present system isn’t completely scrapped.

You can read most of The Intercept story (hat tip: Joanne) for yourself, but I have picked out a few nuggets that made me chuckle in a story about “Trump’s race to the bottom.”

Continue reading “Unhappy refugee contractors not getting insider information out of Trump Administration” →

The dark underbelly of refugee resettlement in the US—churches neglecting refugees, working with questionable landlords

06/14/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When I first began writing this blog in July 2007, one of the issues that attracted my attention was the puzzling decision by the Virginia Council of Churches, working for major resettlement contractor Church World Service, to place refugees in one of the worst buildings in the worst section of Hagerstown, MD.

But, here we are 11 years later and Church World Service has placed Congolese refugees in Greensboro, NC in housing that is managed by a company that has a record of many years of troubling business practices.

I’m sure CWS rejoinder is—well give us more taxpayer money and we will get them nicer apartments.

And, I say, this was supposed to be a public-private partnership, so how about you, CWS, raising private money from your churches to help these Africans you placed (so that North Carolina meatpackers could have cheap compliant labor)!
Continue reading “The dark underbelly of refugee resettlement in the US—churches neglecting refugees, working with questionable landlords” →

Greensboro, NC fire that killed 5 children exposes more concerns with US refugee program

05/21/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is a “breakdown at many levels” said Church World Service employee Adamou Mohamed.
Did you hear the news about the five children from the DR Congo who died in an apartment fire in Greensboro, North Carolina just over a week ago?
Probably not because stories showing the unhappy side of refugee resettlement are rarely seen outside the immediate locale.

Greensboro apartment fire — Photo: http://www.greensboro.com/news/local_news/questions-follow-deaths-of-children-in-greensboro/article_cf6be3e2-c459-55f2-9778-1273782ad157.html

In a tense community meeting last week, the blame for the children’s deaths was placed on the city and on the landlord, all assuming the fire was from landlord and city inspector neglect.
Here are a few snips from the story on that meeting from the local News & Record:

GREENSBORO — As Greensboro officials, refugee advocates and immigrants gathered days after the deaths of five children in an apartment fire, many people voiced concerns that the city’s deadliest fire in nearly two decades could have been prevented.

“We shouldn’t have had to come to this point,” said community activist Sandra Isley, as others wiped away tears and some trembled in anger during a meeting of the Greensboro International Advisory Committee, which works with the city’s Human Relations Department.

City officials did announce during the meeting that housing inspectors would go door-to-door early next week at the 3100 Summit Ave. complex to conduct inspections on every unit. Beth Benton, the city’s Code Compliance manager, said that action was possible after five residents — the minimum necessary to take action — had signed a petition.

Fire investigators have yet to determine a cause of the Saturday morning fire, but say it started in the kitchen and they are analyzing the unit’s stove. The apartment had no working smoke or carbon monoxide detectors.

The city’s action comes amid claims that the children’s father reported several small fires near the apartment’s stove to management in the days before the tragedy. It is unclear who the father might have notified about the problems with the stove, but the building’s owners said they had no repair request on file.

“There’s a breakdown at many levels for this to happen,” said Adamou Mohamed*, a grassroots organizer for Church World Service, an immigration and refugee program.**

Others around him questioned why it has taken so long for the city to get involved.

Resettlement agencies place refugees in cheap apartments and help to build ethnic enclaves….

The North Carolina African Services Coalition placed the family there 18 months ago, when they arrived from the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a resettlement program. But the agency has since stopped setting up homes there because of complaints about living conditions. Officials with the resettlement agencies say the complex remained attractive to refugees because of the low rent and because it allowed them to live with others who speak their language or understand their customs. Several units there are rented by members of this same family.

Officials have yet to identify the family other than to say the children who died were three boys and two girls between the ages of 18 months and 9 years old. The husband, who works at a local factory, was home with the children but could not get them out.

And here we have the final informative bit of news—Mom was working the night shift for BIG CHICKEN!
If you are new to RRW, you may not know that refugee contractors, including Church World Service, act as headhunters for the meat industry in places like North Carolina.

The wife was working the overnight shift at a chicken plant several counties away. She commutes there with a group of others who share the cost of the drive.

You can read more here.

UPDATE!

No stove malfunction. Parents admitted food was left cooking on the stove, story here:

Unattended cooking led to fire that killed 5 children in Greensboro, fire department says

Read it all.

***You really need to see the bio for Church World Service’s community organizer who was clearly leading the charge and attempting to stoke anger with claims of government neglect before all the facts were in.
Why does a taxpayer-funded resettlement agency need a political community organizer (aka community trouble-maker) in the first place?
Adamou Mohamed’s bio at Welcoming America is informative….

Greensboro community organizer — Mohamed was addressing a session entitled, Anti-Muslim Backlash, which seems to be no longer available at Welcoming America’s website. http://www.welcominginteractive.org/staff/adamou-mohamed/