US Refugee program is a kind of Ponzi-scheme that is failing

02/18/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They want to blame it all of course on Donald Trump (and Stephen Miller!), but the refugee slowdown has exposed the weakness of a scheme set up in 1979-1980 by then Senator Ted Kennedy (with Joe Biden) and Jimmy Carter.

The whole program was sold as a public-private partnership implying that there would be an equal sharing of finances and responsibility, but over the years the public share (your tax ‘contributions’) has grown while the private share has withered.
So that now, with the per refugee head payment dropping as fewer refugee are admitted, the program is being exposed for what it has become….
It is a monopolistic conglomeration of supposed ‘religious’ and ‘humanitarian’ charities living almost exclusively on the federal dole. Their budgets are fully dependent on the next shipment of paying clients (aka refugees).

Come on Congress! It is time to dump it or fix it.

I notice that with all the talk about reforming LEGAL immigration there is no talk of reforming the obviously seriously flawed USRAP!

The program is “under siege” say the refugee agencies and their media lackeys!

Rarely do I post twice on one story, but I told you about this one yesterday (here) and it is full of revealing information. I see it is a ‘Religion News Service’ story that appears here in the National Catholic Reporter showcasing (again) that anti-Trump rally last month at the White House.
Do they really think the average American taxpayer will be moved by a photo of Muslims praying against the President as a publicity stunt?

Muslims praying at WH — The big banner on the right is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society protest march banner. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/01/28/church-world-service-and-hias-join-cair-to-protest-at-white-house/

Boo hoo! We Catholics are running out of your money!

National Catholic Reporter:

USCCB [US Conference of Catholic Bishops—ed] officials said they are still deciding how to move forward but already expect to close about 15 sites this year, shifting from 75 to as few as 60. Catholic Charities, the primary affiliate for the USCCB’s on-the-ground resettlement work, said that of the 700 full-time employees across its network who work on refugee resettlement, more than 300 are estimated to see a temporary layoff, permanent layoff or possible reassignment due to the refugee ban.

An April 2017 report from the Episcopal News Service said the Episcopal Church would cut its 31-member affiliate network by six in 2018.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service said it had not closed any sites, though before she resigned earlier this week as its president and CEO, Linda Hartke confirmed the agency has made staff reductions at its headquarters. [This is especially funny because we know that many staff at headquarters quit due to Hartke’s poor management!—Now it is all Donald’s fault!—How convenient!—ed]

Maybe if the top dogs took pay cuts, and raised PRIVATE money, the lower level staff could be retained?

Local organizations appear to bear the brunt of the cuts. [Sure they do, no one really expects the CEO’s to take pay cuts.—ed] Paula Torisk, deputy director of refugee resettlement for Catholic Charities San Antonio, which works with the USCCB’s program, said her office has laid off at least 23 people because of the various bans — around 30 percent to 35 percent of her staff.

Lower level staff are unemployed because the whole refugee program is built (wrongly) as a Ponzi scheme. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/02/16/trump-administration-wrongly-blamed-for-closure-of-refugee-offices/

She said many of those who lost their jobs are, like Giri [refugee star of the story—ed], themselves refugees or former refugees who have since become U.S. citizens. Her office previously relied on their cultural knowledge and language skills but has been forced to hire translators in their absence.

“You’ve got staff taking on cases where they don’t speak the language,” said Torisk, who has worked with refugees since 1996. “I’ve heard other resettlement programs say, ‘How can we pay for [interpreters] if our funding is cut?’”

She also said that due to uncertainty surrounding the program, funding for the longer-term refugee assistance — such as providing English classes — is now doled out on a quarterly basis instead of annually throughout Texas.

There is much more, but you get my drift.
The whole 1980 system is based on an ever-expanding refugee flow to America and over the ensuing decades the contractors (below) got fat and lazy because federal money flowed like a river to them and they built fiefdoms with it!

I repeat: Where is Congress?

The nine refugee contractors “fighting for their survival”….
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)! From most recent accounting, here.

Center for Immigration Studies: Feds have long ago usurped States' Rights when it comes to refugee resettlement

01/24/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Don Barnett writing at the Center for Immigration Studies today explained in detail how states are forced to accept and pay for third world refugees admitted through the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) to the US and sent to 49 states.
Read this (these are the opening points in the ‘backgrounder’) and then ask: Where is Congress?
(Emphasis below is mine):

The State of Tennessee filed a lawsuit against the federal government in March 2017 claiming that the refugee resettlement program was an imposition by Washington over which the state had no control.1 The lawsuit is pending, but it highlights a deep problem with how the refugee resettlement program has evolved since the passage of the Refugee Act in 1980.

tenth amendment — The Refugee Act of 1980 has been so modified by illegal federal regulations that the states have lost their ability to control their own budgets.

This Backgrounder traces the history of the federal-state relationship regarding refugees, identifies flaws, and proposes solutions. Among the findings:

~Repealing regulation 45 CFR 400.301 could have the immediate effect of allowing states to withdraw from the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) and end initial resettlement activities in the state.2

~Today, states that withdraw from the program find the program continues in the state with the potential to operate on a larger scale than before withdrawal and with no state participation.

~As implemented, states have a limited and ill-defined role in the federal USRAP.

~Congress has shirked its responsibility to fully fund the refugee resettlement program.

~The federal government has shifted much of the fiscal burden of refugee resettlement to states. Three years of reimbursement for the state portion of welfare programs used by refugees in the state, such as Medicaid, TANF and SSI, was authorized by the 1980 Refugee Act. This support was ended entirely.

~The Act authorized Refugee Medical Assistance (RMA) and Refugee Cash Assistance (RCA) for three years for refugees who do not qualify for cash welfare and Medicaid. This support was gradually scaled back; today RCA and RMA are available for only eight months.

~This cost shift to the states means the federal government is, in effect, using state funds to operate a federal program. In cases where a state asks to withdraw from the program, continuation of the program means the state has lost its ability to control its own budget and is deprived of its sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment.

~Consultation among “stakeholders” about where refugees are to be settled is ill-defined in the USRAP. At times there is no meaningful consultation with state authorities.

~The federal government uses a legally questionable regulation (45 CFR 400.301) rather than statutory law to allow private non-profits to operate in a state where the state has asked to withdraw from the program.

~By one reading of the law, prior to 45 CFR 400.301, there was no authority to resettle refugees in states that chose to withdraw from the program. In other words, prior to 1994 when 45 CFR 400.301 was introduced, the states were — knowingly or not — participating in and paying for a voluntary program from which they had every right to withdraw at any time with the expectation that no refugees would be resettled in the state.

Serious students of the USRAP, continue reading here.
And, I repeat! If there is no reform of the entire US Refugee Admissions Program in the next three years, simply reducing the numbers as the Trump Administration is doing is meaningless in the long run.
The President can and must, as part of any immigration reform, issue regulations in keeping with the original law wherever possible, and, or, tell Congress to rewrite the law if it is in our national interest to continue it at all.

If no permanent fix….

…..when President Trump’s term ends, refugee agencies and advocates will push for even larger numbers of refugees to make up for what they will dub the lost Trump years.

Looking for something to do? Get this information into the hands of your state governors and legislators!

After initial disappointment, Ohio resettlement agency getting excited for higher refugee influx

06/09/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Trump Administration is on target to blow past its own 50,000 admission determination number in 2 weeks!

As we reported here, just as the Memorial Day weekend was getting underway, the US State Department announced to its contractors that it was going to open the refugee spigot wide again for the remaining months of fiscal year 2017 (the year ends on September 30th).

A picture speaks a thousand words! Lavinia Limon is the CEO of federal resettlement contractor USCRI and on her left is the CEO of Chobani Yogurt which has been a leading ‘consumer’ of refugee labor in America. “Give me your tired, your poor…” willing to work for lower wages…”yearning to breathe free.”

That means some of the federal refugee contractors, like this one in Ohio, may need to hire back some employees they had earlier let go, but there is still a question about how quickly Trump’s State Department and Dept. of Homeland Security can get the processing ramped-up abroad.
I had been waiting for the Trump White House to correct the mistake about opening the spigot, but their silence now signals that the White House is in agreement with the ramp-up!
From WKSU. The International Institute of Akron is a subcontractor of one of nine major contractors (USCRI***in this case):

President Obama authorized 120,000 [No! It was 110,000!—ed] refugees for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

President Trump cut that in February to 50,000. But the State Department sent a memo in late May telling refugee groups they would no longer be restrained by weekly quotas.

Liz Walters of the International Institute of Akron says resettlement numbers have always ebbed and flowed, with the agency resettling as few as 25 and as many as 130 a month. She says how many will be coming now depends on what happens overseas.

“The big question mark is how many folks have been in process overseas and how quickly they can start to schedule those folks for travel or at what point they finish up their security clearances and can get them here before the end of the fiscal year.”

[….]

Walters notes that Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year [begins Oct. 1, 2017—ed] includes funding to resettle 50,000 refugees, the minimum under the law.

As far as I can tell, there is no legal minimum!
I’m not lawyer, and perhaps there has been some case law or regulations that I don’t know about, but as I read the Refugee Act of 1980, there is no requirement for any specific number after 1982. Here (below) is the Act on admissions. There is a lot of discussion about procedures if the President needs to ‘up’ the numbers, but I don’t see any prohibition about going below 50,000!

Be sure to read the law yourself and see that “consultation” is with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and as far as I can see only requires the President to supply them with information.
I repeat!
Do you see how clever the refugee industry propaganda machine is—we are only talking about admission levels, not reform of the whole program.
The only way to force Congress to scrap/reform the Refugee Act of 1980 is for Donald Trump to set the admissions number at zero for FY18 and tell Congress, no more until they get to work. Heck, make them work through the month of August!
He also has the power to stop the flow right now without any Executive Order.

Today the Trump admission level is at 47,434 (Wrapsnet) and, at the admissions rate announced on the eve of Memorial Day, he will thus blow past the 50,000 mark (set by him) in 2 weeks!

***By the way, USCRI is approximately 97% funded by you—taxpayers! See here.

Hawaii judge places restraining order on Trump EO involving refugee pause

03/16/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Unless I find a definitive article about what exactly the judge in Hawaii ruled on the Trump Executive Order in the next couple of hours (I have a doc appt.), here is one news story from the AP (thanks to reader Theodore).
Also, according to several news sources discussing other pending cases, including Fox News , one argument in the Maryland case is absolutely nuts. I worry that judges ruling on the cases have no idea about what the US Refugee Act of 1980 says or how the program has been administered for 37 years!

Judge Derrick Watson. Photo and story “One Unelected Leftist Judge in Hawaii Decided Security for the Entire Nation” http://www.independentsentinel.com/one-unelected-leftist-judge-hawaii-decided-security-entire-nation/

It makes me want to scream!
The line that I see while searching just now, that is being spread by many news sources, is this one:

“The Maryland lawsuit also argues that it’s against federal law for the Trump administration to reduce the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year by more than half, from 110,000 to 50,000. Attorneys argued that if that aspect of the ban takes effect, 60,000 people would be stranded in war-torn countries with nowhere else to go.”

We are assuming that comes from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society suit we reported here. The true gist of their argument is that they, the federal resettlement contractors, were expecting more paying “clients” and had built their budgets around the per head payment they were expecting with the unrealistic 110,000 refugees Obama said would come in the year he no longer was president!
For the umpteenth time, that 110,000 that Obama set last fall is a CEILING that the Administration says it will not surpass, it is not a goal!
And, that 110,000 was the highest Obama had ever set in his presidency. Trump has the absolute authority to reduce the ceiling, but more importantly he can bring in any number under whatever he set, or whatever Obama set!
Forget the EO!

President Trump has all the authority he needs to not import any more refugees this entire year (I’m not sure that his team even knows that he has no legal obligation to bring in even 50,000!).

As of this morning, we have admitted 38,106 refugees this fiscal year (2017) via Wrapsnet. 783 refugees arrived in the ten day period from the announcement of this EO and today when the “moratorium” was to go in to effect.
I repeat! The President does not have to call it a moratorium or include it in this EO. He can simply stop processing new refugees abroad with no further explanation!

President George W. Bush had 4 years under 50,000! His lowest year was 39,554. Even Obama had two years under 60,000 and well below the ceiling! See here.

Now look at this chart (below) very carefully. When I found it at Wrapsnet, the last year, 2016, was not complete. Know that we brought in just short of the 85,000 ceiling (a rare occurrence).
The federal refugee resettlement contractors have long wanted the president’s ‘determination’ each year to be a GOAL (a target) not a CEILING! But, the law says it is a ceiling. Look at the column for CEILING and the column for the number actually admitted!
What do you see? Rarely does the number admitted reach the CEILING.
In FY2006, they were 28,777 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2007, they were 21,718 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2008, they were 19,809 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2009, they were 5,346 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2010, they were 6,689 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue the President?
In FY2011, they were 23,576 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue President Obama?
In FY2012, they were 17,762 below the CEILING. Did anyone sue President Obama for leaving thousands “stranded in war-torn countries”?
Obama got closer to the lowered CEILING over the next few years.
You get my drift!

Be sure to note that Obama never set a ceiling as high as 110,000 in all his previous years as president. That 110,000 was set in the final months of his final year! The average admissions over the years shown here is around 65,000. I could not find the chart that includes the last month of FY16, but we admitted only a few refugees short of the 85,000 ceiling because the Administration was hell-bent to get in thousands of Syrians.

I’m begging ignorant and lazy reporters to get the facts!
And, I am sure you are scared as heck, as I am, to see judges making decisions based on sheer ignorance of the law.
See my post from last Friday about how Hawaii hypocrites! have “welcomed” only a tiny number of refugees over the years—none from Africa and only 5 (total) from two Muslim countries.
This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’

On refugee numbers permitted entry, Trump is on firm ground, he can stop resettlement now for this fiscal year

02/06/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..And, in September he can set the number for FY2018 at zero!

Just a reminder, the Refugee Act of 1980 gave the President great latitude in setting over all refugee numbers for a 12 month period.
In September, for Fiscal year 2017, Obama set the cap (ceiling) for this year at 110,000 (way higher than normal).

ted-and-joe — Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden were behind the bill that became the Refugee Act of 1980 signed in to law by Jimmy Carter. In over 3 decades Congress has never gone back to review it. It is time! And, nothing will get the chickens in Congress moving unless the number of refugee arrivals drop to zero.

In the 1980 law the ceiling was set at 50,000 (unless there was an emergency) and Congress must be consulted (which amounts to not very much) if the President wished to change (increase) the number during the year.
We showed you here in recent years that the ceiling proposed was often not met. (Not meeting the ceiling doesn’t require any consultation with Congress.)
In fact, George Bush had 4 years under 50,000. Two of those years followed the dramatic slowdown after 9/11 when the government feared Islamic terrorists could get in to the program.
In 2002 the number admitted was 45,896 and in 2003 it was 39,554 (from all the usual countries we took refugees from). Obama had a pretty relatively low year too in 2012 (58,238).

As I understand it, Trump’s new cap of 50,000 is not included in the Washington State court decision.

I’m arguing that 50,000 isn’t low enough and he could cap the level right now.

It would stop refugee admissions from all areas of the world, not just the seven terror hotspots identified in the so-called travel ban.
As of this morning Wrapsnet reports that (in a little over 4 months) we are at 32,968 admitted this fiscal year (not far off the level Bush admitted in 2003). The contractors are well-aware of the fact that they still have nearly 20,000 paying clients on the way, see here.
And here are the numbers of some of the groups of concern admitted in those 4 months:

Iraqis: 4,841

Somalis: 4,035

Syrians: 4,884