The ones they have are at the saturation point and so the hunt is on! (Get it Wyoming!)
It’s been on actually for some time, but last summer the State Department (PRM) and the Dept. of Health and Human Services (ORR) began to spell out what they are looking for in a “welcoming” community. They published their ‘guidance’ in a boring-sounding report entitled, ‘Key Indicators for Refugee Placement in FY 2014.’
I had the report, but had filed it away for a slow day, which didn’t come until last week.
Bottomline is that they want to find out where they can get the best goodies for refugees in a welcoming atmosphere! They have compiled state data for “stakeholders:”
…including state-by-state employment rates, health insurance access, average housing costs and state minimum wages.
They have had eleven meetings since 2011, some are conference calls, but others are site visits like one they described in Minnesota:
… ORR and PRM staff conducted a joint site visit to Minnesota and engaged with representatives of a resettlement agency, area service providers and the state and local government to discuss resettlement needsand gauge local support and capacity for new resettlement possibilities. [They love that word capacity!—-ed]
See the full report, we will have more to say about it in coming days.
See our ‘where to find information’ category for more on reports like this one, statistics etc. that you will need to educate your communities.
Savannah, GA: Hot new resettlement site when Atlanta suburbs went into overload? Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services benefited from federal grant for Savannah!
As I mentioned, I took some reading material with me when I was away last week and had a chance to make this list of “preferred communities” from the 2010 Annual Report to Congress from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to the feds, a”preferred community” is one in which newly arriving refugees have the best opportunity for “self-sufficiency and integration.” I look at the list and know that many of these cities are having big problems with refugees/immigrant joblessness and poverty, and lack of integration (assimilation!).
The grants for 2010 totaled nearly $6 million. And, take note Wyoming, the grants did not go to the city or state, the grants went to the contractors, so they decide what is needed to smooth the way for refugees in your “welcoming” city!
It strikes me that this is just one more excuse to funnel your tax dollars to a contractor.
Below are the cities that were “preferred” for both continuation grants and new grants in 2010 (from 2010 Annual Report). Since my return I see that the Annual Report for 2011 is out, so I’ve added those cities in red. Keep in mind that the ORR is always late in producing these reports, so by 2012 and 2013 surely they have added new cities to their “preferred communities.”
***Again, cities in red were added in 2011. This list gives you an idea of the cities being overloaded and that problems have developed.***
Bet you didn’t know your city was “preferred!”
Arizona: Tuscon, Phoenix
California: San Diego, Sacramento, Modesto, Walnut Creek
***Update*** Here you can see a list of new grantees. Note that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops gets nearly $2 million through 2016 for preferred communities, but no specific sites are listed (they probably don’t want you to know that your city is among the chosen!).
They are still breaking the law since the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was required in the original Refugee Act of 1980 to produce an annual report four months after the close of the previous fiscal year. So technically ORR should, by now, have submitted reports for 2012 and 2013.
Eskinder Negash (right) is the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Previously he was a VP for one of the contractors. Revolving door between contractor and government job is standard operating proceduere in this program.
As we reported here, they have been behind ever since the Clinton Administration.
I hadn’t been checking, so I don’t know when they submitted 2011 to Congress because as you see they have no date on the cover (another trick that began during the Clinton Administration!).
For those of you in Wyoming considering inviting refugees to your state, please read the annual report before you make that move!
Wouldn’t you think that the federal government and its contractor partners would have a good handle on employment and welfare usage by refugees. They really don’t.
Much of the information in the report is obtained through surveys where another contractor tries to track down refugees and expects them to answer truthfully about what they are receiving from welfare and if they are working. So when you read some of the stats in the report (which are really pretty awful as it is) consider this information on how the survey is done (emphasis is mine):
For the 2011 survey, 2,514 households were contacted and 1,534 households completed the interview. Refugees included in the 2010 survey—but had not resided in the U.S. for more than five years—were again contacted and interviewed along with a new sample of refugees, Amerasians, and entrants who had arrived during the period from May 1, 2010 through April 30, 2011. Of the 1,509 re-interview cases from the 2011 sample, 954 were contacted and interviewed, and 37 were contacted, but refused to be interviewed.The remaining 518 re-interview cases could not be traced in time to be interviewed.Of the 1,005 new sample cases, 580 were contacted and interviewed, another 22 were contacted but refused to cooperate, and the remaining 403 could not be traced in time to be interviewed. [So 403 fairly new arrivals couldn’t even be found?—ed] The resulting responses were then weighted to adjust for differential sampling rates and response rates across refugee cohorts and ethnic groups.
The overall response rate of the 2011 Survey was 61 percent.
Then get this from a footnote on welfare use:
Caution must be exercised when reviewing refugee declarations of public assistance utilization. These are self reported data and the questions asked are subject to wide variation in interpretation by the respondent.
The surveys are conducted in the refugee’s native language, and certain technical terms which distinguish types of income do not translate well into foreign languages.
Refugees readily admit to receiving “welfare” or “assistance”, but they are frequently confused about the correct category. Past surveys have found that refugee households are very accurate in reporting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) because their claims are handled by the Social Security Administration.
However, RCA, TANF,and GA cases are all handled by the local county welfare office and are not clearly distinguished from each other by the refugee family. [Note to Wyoming: you think this is all going to be taken care of by the feds with no cost to your counties—ed]
Over the years, we have noted that many refugees claim RCA many years after arrival even though the program is confined to the first eight months in the U.S., claim receipt of TANF even though they have no children, or claim receipt of general relief even though they reside in States that do not provide such assistance, such as Florida or Texas.
So, considering all of that above, here is the “Economic Adjustment” section of the Executive Summary (emphasis is mine). My suspicion is that the numbers are much worse than portrayed here due to the small sample size and the large number unwilling to participate or were not found.
• The 2011 Annual Survey of Refugees who have been in the U.S. less than five years indicated that 52 percent of refugees age 16 or over were employed as of December 2011, as compared with 59 percent for the U.S. population.
• The labor force participation rate was 63 percent for the sampled refugee population, as compared with 64 percent for the U.S. population. The refugee unemployment rate was 18 percent,*** compared with eight percent for the U.S. population.
• Approximately 58 percent of all sampled refugee households in the 2011 survey were entirely self-sufficient (subsisted on earnings alone). About 28 percent lived on a combination of public assistance and earned income; another nine percent received only public assistance. [This doesn’t equal 100%—ed]
• Approximately eight percent of refugees in the five-year sample population received medical coverage through an employer, while 48 percent received benefits from Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance. About 40 percent of the sample population had no medical coverage in any of the previous 12 months.
• Approximately 39 percent of respondents received some type of cash assistance in the twelve months prior to the survey. About 61 percent of refugee households received assistance through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and 24 percent received housing assistance.
• The overall hourly wage of employed refugees in the five-year population in the 2011 survey was $9.43. This represents a five percent drop from the 2010 survey, when respondents reported an overall hourly wage of $9.90 in current dollars (not adjusted for inflation).
***Think about it—18% unemployment rate for refugees and these same contractors are lobbying for amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, what will that do to refugee unemployment?
Of the nearly a half million refugees, asylees, Cuban-Haitians etc. we resettled in the last 5 years, this information was extracted from approximately 1,500 WILLING TO BE INTERVIEWED refugees.
While I was away, I was able to do a lot of reading, so this will be the first of many reports on documents I’ve been reviewing and this post and others will be filed in our ‘where to find information’category,here.
Sure enough, the whining has paid off for the resettlement contractors, Congress is going to send more of your money their way! The excuse this time is that the poor contractors now have 26,000 illegal alien kids to care for—the unaccompanied minorswe have been hearing about.
Make no mistake, this is not money going to the “refugees” this is money to keep the small and large contractor fiefdoms going—for staff, for offices, for travel, for lobbying even! There is one bright spot in this article—a Duke University professor, who works with refugees, is calling these numbers into question!
Duke professor Suzanne Shanahan: “…the math is extremely wrong.”
Despite budget increases, experts fear for the future of refugee services.
Congress has largely increased funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to $1.489 billion from last year’s $1.12 billion, said Jen Smyers, associate director for immigration and refugee policy at Church World Service—a group that works with refugees in Durham and across the country. ORR estimated it would need $1.6 billion to serve all the populations in its care this year—a half billion increase from last year’s budget—and is looking for ways to meet the more than $100 million shortfall, Smyers added.
“We never thought [the funding] was going to get cut from last year’s level,” Smyers said. “Our fear was that they would not get anywhere near [ORR’s] needs. Due to some really great advocacy and last minute phone calls, we were able to get the number to $1.489 billion, which is a substantial increase, but there still is a gap between that number and the number ORR projected.”
Projected costs for this fiscal year increased by nearly half a billion dollars to cover an estimated 26,000 unaccompanied alien children coming to the United States from Mexico and Central America this year, Smyers said. This is an increase of approximately 10,000 unaccompanied children from the number of children in the 2012 fiscal year.
Suzanne Shanahan, associate director of ethics at the Kenan Institute and associate research professor in sociology, was critical of the calculations used to reach the increase in ORR’s budget requirements. She said that taking care of 10,000 extra children should not require a 30 percent increase in funds.
“The U.S. resettles 60,000 refugees a year, and the 60,000 refugees cost $1.12 billion [last year],” Shanahan said. “To say that a half billion dollars is what it takes to increase that by 10,000, the math is extremely wrong.”
With regard to the $100 million shortfall, Shanahan said this is only between a 6 and 7 percent total shortfall, which is not “extraordinary.”
“Even if refugees had to bear the entire cost of this, it’s not clear that [the burden] would be that dramatic,” Shanahan said.
It is unclear how the shortfall will affect refugees. Smyers said Congress appropriates an agency to their funds, and the agency decides how those funds are used. Currently, the ORR provides refugees with eight months of assistance. If, however, the shortfall cannot be remedied, the ORR may reduce the duration of assistance they are able to provide. ORR will likely prioritize unaccompanied children over longer-term refugee assistance.
The article goes on to discuss how surprising it is that refugee allocations should be increased in light of the fact that refugees have little clout in Congress. Refugees may not, but you can be absolutely sure the contractors, including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, have a huge amount of clout on The Hill! Not to mention the hard Left open-borders lobby (which overlaps with the contractors).
By the way, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services have federal contracts to take care of the illegal alien kids (dreamers or schemers?).
See my previous post—if we can’t afford them why bring so many refugees?
I have two complaints about this story, ‘Would-be business owners move one step closer to dream.‘
First, the next time you hear some open borders advocates saying immigrants create more new businesses, please remember that the immigrants get special loan deals and government-funded training to become “entrepreneurs.” You can bet there is no program like this one for some poor American women living in a mobile home community who might like to set up a daycare for their kind of people.
Then secondly, if we expect refugees to become integrated (oops! assimilated) wouldn’t the kids be better off in daycare (if they needed daycare) where people speak English and do activities that most Americans do instead of in ethnically and culturally segregated daycare centers? Don’t get me wrong, if people want to stay segregated, I’m o.k. with that, it is a free country, I just don’t think federal taxpayer dollars should be used to facilitate segregation.
Refugees who have the dream of starting their own business are closer to making that a reality.
Muslim women review their daycare plans
The participants of the Refugee Childcare Microenterprise Development Project are working to start their own home-based daycare businesses.
The program designed to help refugees is a project of the Social Development Commission (SDC) in partnership with the Pan African Community Association and the Multicultural Entrepreneurial Institute (MEI).
The participants have been taking classes to gain the knowledge and certification needed to start and successfully operate their own home-based childcare business.
[….]
The program participants said that it has been very challenging to reach this point in their efforts, pointing specifically to cultural and language barriers that have presented problems. [So, what language will they speak in their daycare centers?—ed]
Federal grant program at ORR funds this (well, actually you do!). Grant program expanded!
Here is informationon the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement funding that was more than doubled in 2012 for Microenterprise/Home based child care:
In FY2012, ORR increased funding to the program, raising it from $2.225 million to $5,752 million, and offering grants to a total of 34 agencies.
And, get this! In order to qualify one cannot be a US citizen!
All low.income refugees who are not citizens are eligible for services under this program.
I’ll betcha there are some potential lawsuit angles in this taxpayer-funded program. I wonder if there are any American citizen women in Wisconsin who are struggling to set up daycare centers and having problems doing so, either with paperwork/permits or lack of start-up money?
