This is big and it is buried many column inches into a story at Business Insider entitled:
Biden said the US was committed to accepting more refugees. So where are they?
As longtime readers know, the US Refugee Admissions Program has traditionally paid its nine contractors*** on a per refugee client basis.
I am speculating Biden said: Here is the deal! You shut up about the low number of admissions for FY21 and we will send you millions $$$ IN ADVANCE for FY22.
So, naturally during the Trump years, when refugee arrivals were low, the contractors were not raking in the federal bucks (your tax dollars) at the rate they did when Obama, for instance, was President.
They whined and complained about having to cut staff and close offices and now they want to get up and running before the promised 125,000 begin arriving in October.
They are getting ready in Idaho! where a controversial resettlement agency there had its budget (waaahh!) halved by Trump.
Although a good bit of the Business Insider article is a rehash of the recent Biden flip, flop, flipping on the refugee ceiling for this fiscal year, the article is nevertheless chockfull of useful information.
For the sake of time, which I am running out of this morning, here are just a few snips:
A spokesperson for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an arm of the Health and Human Services Department, said the Trump administration’s cuts to refugee admissions had hit the country’s humanitarian infrastructure hard.
“[H]umanitarian infrastructure” is code for government contractors’ budgets.
“The steady decrease in arrivals during the previous four years has resulted in decreased resettlement capacity at the local level,” they said. Between 2017 and 2021, “approximately one-third of the network had to close.”
[….]
That has raised the question: Can the US actually resettle as many refugees as Biden would like?
[….]
Officials at US refugee agencies said they would be able to meet the needs of any refugees sent their way. Rebuilding their capacity to do so is a hassle, but it has already begun. New staff are being hired, and new offices will soon be opened — the when and where hinging on support from local communities. [They are out scouting for fresh territory!—ed]
Okay, here it is for all of you refugee policy wonks! As I said, this is big!
Alicia Wrenn of HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)
Wrenn, of the resettlement agency HIAS, said her group would soon be receiving from the State Department “capacity building funds so that we can actually start to hire up and train people for arrivals.”
LOL! “agency partners!” They try so hard to avoid using the word contractors!
For the first time, the government will also be paying its agency partners and their partners on the local level ahead of time and more consistently.
“It has historically always been a per capita system,” she said. Before, “as arrivals fell, staff volume fell, because that’s the way it worked.” Now the plan is to provide a separate budget for the staff — social workers, language and cultural experts, educators — that will not be based, after the fact, on the exact number of refugees that agency ended up serving.
And, a shout-out to a refugee policy wonk I know who predicted that this was what they are doing during this time when refugee arrivals are still low.
Can you imagine the competition going on among the nine as they scramble for the Biden bucks no longer tethered to the number of refugees each contractor can manage.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris andlobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locationsfor the Unaccompanied Alien Children.
At this very moment they are all out scouting for new, fresh territory in which to place their refugee clients. See Winchester, VA.
…..they expect Biden to be ready to roll with 125,000 impoverished third worlders moving to America permanently beginning on October first.
“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew.”
(Having figured out their messaging on the mess they have made angering their friends, Sec. of State Blinken blames it on President Trump)
The Associated Pressmakes every effort to gloss over the recent controversy about the refugee ceiling that put Biden and his administration in the dog house with refugee resettlement industry “advocates.”
Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken were at odds according to White House leakers. Blinken wanted to bring ’em in faster than Biden did.
They complain that the mean orange guy really screwed up the refugee program with demands for more robust vetting of refugees to weed out those with terror connections, or those lying about family members—a rampant form of fraud in refugee resettlement. How dare he!
And, adding insult to injury, the nine contractors*** had to shrink their staffs during the Trump years because your tax dollars flowing into their coffers were cut by a few million bucks.
But all of that is going away thanks to Biden who recently dropped Trump’s plan for additional information to be required of ‘new Americans’ arriving as refugees and is going full-bore open borders—125,000 beginning October first.
Refugees arriving in US unlikely to exceed cap set by Trump
SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Joe Biden, under political pressure, agreed to admit four times as many refugees this budget year as his predecessor did, but resettlement agencies concede the number actually allowed into the U.S. will be closer to the record-low cap of 15,000 set by former President Donald Trump.
Refugee advocates say they are grateful for the increase because it’s symbolically important to show the world the United States is back as a humanitarian leader at a time when the number of refugees worldwide is the highest since World War II. But they’re frustrated, too, because more refugees could have been admitted if Biden hadn’t dragged his feet.
“About 10,000 to 15,000 is what we’re expecting,” said Jenny Yang of World Relief, adding that Biden’s inaction for months after taking office in January was “definitely problematic.”
“That delay meant not being able to process refugee applications for four months. We weren’t able to rebuild for four months, so it really was unfortunate,” Yang said.
As he looked to the midterm elections, supposedly Biden (rightly) feared that the public wouldn’t tolerate a huge refugee flow while the border was in crisis.
“To be clear: The asylum process at the southern border and the refugee process are completely separate immigration systems. Conflating the two constitutes caving to the politics of fear,” said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This is important, Blumenthal is right, do not conflate the US Refugee Admissions Program with the illegal aliens invading the southern border.
The 125,000 refugees proposed for FY2022 are in addition to the hundreds of thousands of supposed asylum seekers flooding into the country.
The AP continues…..
Weeks later, on May 3, Biden raised the cap.
So far this year only about 2,500 refugees have arrived, with less than five months left before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
More than 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved to come to the United States, but thousands were disqualified under the narrow eligibility criteria Trump established in October when he set the low cap.
Before the Trump administration’s drastic cuts, the United States had admitted more refugees each year than all other countries combined under a program now 41 years old.
It is Trump’s fault!
But a senior official familiar with Blinken’s thinking said it quickly became clear that the State Department offices responsible for refugee resettlement had been so gutted that they wouldn’t be able to process and absorb that number of refugees.
Biden’s got leakers….
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, described the situation as “aspiration meeting reality” and said Blinken reluctantly concluded that 62,500 wouldn’t be possible in the short term.
“It turned out there was even more damage done than we knew,” Blinken told reporters this month.
The Trump bashers give short shrift to the China Virus as one explanation for the slowdown in their goals to change America as refugee travel was slowed worldwide.
Due to travel restrictions in and out of refugee processing sites worldwide, the U.S. suspended refugee arrivals from March 19 to July 29 of last year except for emergency cases. Only 11,800 refugees were admitted in the 2020 fiscal year, the lowest number in the history of the program.
[….]
The “sad truth” Biden warned when he finally set the target at 62,500 is that goal won’t be achieved.
Instead, the administration and advocates are working to fix the program by 2022 when Biden has promised to raise the ceiling to 125,000.
LOL! He dares not do otherwise now that he has experienced the wrath of the “advocates”—refugee placement contractors.
***Update***Breitbart reporter JohnBinder reported just yesterday that Shapiro is helping move illegal aliens into the US interior too.
In 2016, with the big push to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in America, the Shapiro Foundation patriarch Ed Shapiro got the idea to increase the number of refugees that resettlement contractors were bringing into the US by pushing for an expansion of the government-run refugee resettlement model used in the US to a system similar to Canada’s.
Canada has a government program and in addition allows for private groups to sponsor refugees outside of the government program.
Now I might argue for private sponsorship if that was how our entire system was run, with no taxpayer funding permitted, purely private money for private charity. But this “new era,” as they are calling it, is simply to make more places available for third world refugees.
By the way, family foundations are a way for very wealthy people to shelter their wealth from taxes, but still use it for pet (often political!) projects.
We are Ed & Barbara Shapiro, and along with our two young-adult children, we make up The Shapiro Family. Our philanthropic work through the Foundation is an incredible labor of love and each one of us invests considerable time into the meaningful projects that we get involved with.
We are inspired by Nelson Mandela’s quote: “History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children.”And for the first 15 years of our Foundation, we did so largely passively, through our initial significant grantees: Boston Children’s Hospital, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Horizons for Homeless Children and scholarships to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA Anderson School.
I guess helping America’s children just wasn’t satisfying enough, or woke enough, for Ed. so…..
2016 marked a turning point for our Foundation. Ed and Barbara led a successful community-wide effort–including local, regional and national partners—to sponsor Syrian refugee families being resettled in Greater Boston. This program convinced Ed to start his next chapter, retiring from his 27-year investment management career in order to devote himself full-time to tackling the global refugee crisis.
Ed carried the highly focused approach he used during his investment career to the family’s philanthropy and decided to concentrate almost exclusively on refugees and immigration.
NPR is on it!
NPR’s Amos
And, so now here we are with NPR Refugee Reporter-in-Chief, Deborah Amos, telling us all about how Shapiro is not only using his own money for refugees, but is soliciting funds elsewhere in order to move more money into the hands of mostly federal resettlement contractors to find more community sponsors for refugee families because America has run out of poor children and families in need of help.
One of the funders of Shapiro’s new gig is none other than George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
By the way, these Leftie movers and shakers are masters at public relations and media manipulation. A big part of what they are doing with this is to generate warm and fuzzy stories as churches, synagogues and mosques join hands to “sponsor” poor refugee families.
‘New Era In Resettlement’: U.S. Refugee Advocates Count On More Community-Based Help
When President Biden announced this week that his administration would raise the cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 for this fiscal year, refugee advocates breathed a collective sigh of relief. The number is far above the historically low limit of 15,000 refugees set by the Trump administration. Biden’s announcement was a stark turnaround after weeks of pushback from refugee advocates, outraged by a previous order keeping the 15,000 limit.
Biden is calling on communities to do more, to put foreigners first!
One of those most elated by this week’s announcement is Ed Shapiro, a Boston-based philanthropist and advocate for reimagining the U.S. refugee resettlement system to enable a lot more community-based efforts.
“It is the start of a new era in resettlement,” he says.
Biden’s goal, laid out in a key phrase in a February executive order, introduces “community and private sponsorship” as an innovation that allows local groups of volunteers to become part of the circuitry of resettlement, including the day-to-day tasks of helping newcomers find housing, jobs, health care and a sense of community.
Just so you know, libertarian think tank, the CATO Institute, has been pushing this concept for the last five or so years as they say here.
The goal is to not simply take better care of the refugees the government admits, as Shapiro and Amos imply, but to expand the number admitted.
As I’ve argued before, the United States could accept more refugees using private money and private sponsors without needing Congress’s sign-off.
Amos continues at NPR….
The U.S. usually resettles refugees in a different way: The State Department contracts with nine large resettlement organizations. Volunteers play a role, but the program is centered around professional caseworkers.
Here is my favorite line from Amos. She is saying what we have been saying for over a decade—the program operates in secret!
It’s all done quietly so communities don’t reject the newcomers.
Now, the higher cap on refugee admissions means Shapiro can finally accelerate a project that has consumed him for four years. His aim is to fund pilot programs to kick-start an addition to the traditional resettlement infrastructure. “There is pent-up demand and interest,” he says. “These are people, families, who want to help.”
He partnered with the Open Society Foundation and other funders to tap a pool of donors and raised $800,000 for grants awarded in March to eight U.S. community groups in seven states. Another round of grantees will be announced this month.
The proposals are moving testimonies, says Shapiro. One, from New Orleans, came from a multifaith community group that includes representatives from the oldest Jewish temple in the U.S. and a Roman Catholic congregation.
Who are the lucky winners?
Of course at this point in theNPRstory I wanted to know which eight community groups got those first grants from Soros and Shapiro, but other than the one mentioned in New Orleans, Amos was mum on that.
Here are the eight big winners of $100,000 each. I have to laugh because most are among the nine federal refugee contractors*** already raking in millions of taxpayer dollars for their ‘charitable’ work.
Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas (Kansas City, KS)
Church World Service North Carolina (Durham and Greensboro, NC)
Ethiopian Community Development Council (Denver, CO and Washington, D.C.)
Home Is Here NOLA (New Orleans, LA)
Interfaith Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) & Home for Refugees USA (Los Angeles, CA)
New Roots Fund (Seattle, WA)
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) Albany Field Office (Albany, NY)
World Relief Chicagoland (Chicago, IL)
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris andlobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are alsopaid to find locationsfor the Unaccompanied Alien Children.
“President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity.”
(Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus)
Big mistake—they let Biden talk to the media!
You surely know by now that Chairman Joe blabbed to the media over the weekend that the reason he hasn’t moved on flying more of the third world to America via the US Refugee Admissions Program he helped create in 1979 is because the Administration has a crisis at the borderand can’t do two things at once.
The primary agency of the federal government for refugee admission decisions is the US State Department. Here we see that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is trying to clean things up, but he doesn’t seem to understand that he already approved the 62,500 cap increase for this fiscal year in February and it was sent to the Hill by the President via the State Department for consultation as the law requires.
The only thing missing to start the flow for these last two months was Biden’s signature.
As I mentioned on Saturday, Biden and Harris have made such a hash of the refugee program (okay by me!) that it begs the question—what else are they screwing up?
Blinken defends Biden’s refugee cap, Afghanistan withdrawal in exclusive interview
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Biden administration amid a barrage of criticism from Democratic lawmakers and refugee advocates for maintaining a Trump-era limit on refugee admissions for now.
While President Joe Biden pledged to admit 125,000 refugees in the new fiscal year next fall, Blinken wouldn’t commit to a number, telling ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz, “Look, the president’s been clear about where he wants to go, but we have to be, you know, focused on what we’re able to do when we’re able to do it.”
That wait-and-see language from Blinken and the White House, citing the “decimated” state of the refugee resettlement program, enraged several prominent Democrats, as well as refugee resettlement agencies (aka the contractors***) who said they are ready to accept Biden’s pledge of 62,500 for the rest of this fiscal year.
Jayapal represents Seattle.
“President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity. We cannot turn our back on refugees around the world, including hundreds of refugees who have already been cleared for resettlement, have sold their belongings, and are ready to board flights,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.
Big mistake: saying they would keep anything Trump ever did!
As a result, after the White House had announced Friday that Biden would keep former President Donald Trump’s historic low cap of 15,000 refugees, the administration backtracked and said it would raise the cap next month.
“We’re able to start to bring people in who’ve been in the pipeline and who weren’t able to come in. That is starting today, and we’re going to revisit it in the middle of May,” Blinken said.
Some 35,000 refugees have been vetted and approved for resettlement in the U.S., according to the International Rescue Committee, a resettlement agency.
Handy fall back! Blame it all on Trump!
With Biden’s order, those resettlements can begin again, but they will be limited, with the administration saying Friday it would set a “final, increased refugee cap” next month after a few weeks of arrivals and blamed the Trump administration for leaving the program “broken,” in Blinken’s words.
[….]
Refugee resettlement agencies agreed that Trump left the nation’s program in tatters through funding cuts and onerous vetting measures, but they’ve said they could scale up quickly to meet Biden’s original target of 62,500, if the administration helped provide resources.
“Provide resources” is code for send more of your tax dollars to the contractors!
Instead, Biden on Saturday blamed the historic number of migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border for keeping the refugee cap low for now — a reason Blinken didn’t cite.
And, in the meantime, the World Socialist Web Sitesays they are all weaving and dodging because Biden is trying to appease the ultra-right! Huh!
Biden seeks to appease ultra-right with refugee policy
Let me ask you: are any of you right-wingers appeased by the delay in resettlement as the border is being overrun?
Again, this was an amusing unforced error on the part of the disorganized administration since the cap is just that, a cap, a ceiling, that they could have left at 62,500 while knowing they weren’t going to get anywhere near that number before the fiscal year ends on September 30th. I am not complaining, just noting the rookie political blunder.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
Americans Last! is their motto!
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the contractors’ lobbying push that actually begins today on the Hill.
Update April 18th: Biden himself commits to increasing the numberof refugees to be admitted; references the border saying we couldn’t do two things at once, but now we can (oh really! so what changed?).
“This is a breathtaking betrayal of the plan to ‘build back better.’”
(Matthew Soerens World Relief, a refugee contractor)
Don’t get me wrong. I am just fine with it. In fact, I find it hilarious.
However, Biden/Harris have now so screwed-up the US Refugee Admissions Program (which I know a little about) with their ham-handed incompetence that it makes me ask how badly are they screwing-up elsewhere—-like handling the pandemic or dealing with Russia and China?
We know they are creating a catastrophe and angering most Americanswith their policy, or lack of a policy, at the southern border!
And, that is not so funny.
Now, by not going forward with his promise to reset the annual refugee cap to 62,500 for what remains of the 2021 fiscal year, RRW readers know that Biden has been pissing-off his friends in the NO Borders community.
Leading the pack of the pissed-off are the refugee contractors*** whose business it is to place third world clients in your towns and cities while being paid by you, the taxpayer, to do it.
And, see here that the final straw for those who helped Biden steal the White Housewas when a contractor, the International Rescue Committee, published a report saying Biden was ‘welcoming’ fewer refugees than President Trump.
If that wasn’t bad enough, yesterday all hell broke loose when the White House announced it would leave TRUMP’S CAP of 15,000 (or fewer) refugees to be admitted by September 30th in place.
The “faith groups” (aka contractors) were “outraged.”
Nothing Trump did should ever be left in place!
A few hours later Biden/Harris backtracked and said they would set a new higher cap/ceiling in mid-May.
Keep in mind that while running for the presidency Biden promised his 80 million (ha! ha!) voters that he would admit 125,000 annually.
There is a lot of coverage of the “betrayal.” Here is one account at Religion News Service:
Biden reverses course on refugee cap after faith groups express outrage
WASHINGTON (RNS) — President Joe Biden’s administration has reversed a decision to keep in place a historically low cap on refugee admissions left by Donald Trump, saying it will raise the ceiling next month after faith-based groups initially decried the move as an “abandonment of our ideals.”
Matthew Soerens of World Relief
Biden signed a memorandum Friday (April 16) aimed at speeding up refugee admissions this year — but that memorandum does not increase the so-called refugee ceiling, something the president has pledged to do when speaking to religious audiences.
Although the memorandum leaves open the possibility of raising that number should the United States resettle the maximum 15,000 refugees this year, news that the ceiling will at least temporarily remain at that historic low was met with disappointment by many religious communities, including the faith-based groups that partner with the federal government to resettle refugees.
By Friday afternoon, TheAssociated Press and CNN reported the Biden administration has reversed course, announcing plans to lift the Trump-era refugee cap next month in the wake of widespread pushback from allies.
The White House confirmed to Religion News Service on Friday that officials intend to revisit the refugee ceiling sometime in the coming days, saying in a statement, “We expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15.”
Keep reading hereto see what the other Christian contractors, in addition to Soerens, had to say about their man Joe yesterday.
In a more tempered response, see what the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is saying about the flip-flopping from the White House.
‘Relieved but disappointed’: How America’s Jewish refugee aid agency is doing 3 months under Biden
“We’re relieved but disappointed,” said HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield following Friday’s initial announcement that the cap, also known as the refugee ceiling, would not be raised.
Following the second statement, Hetfield added, “There’s no reason to delay raising the refugee ceiling. It’s just a ceiling, it’s not a floor. They should be focused on what’s the goal and how are you going to reach it?”
It is all Trump’s fault!
The fight over the refugee cap encapsulates a dilemma confronting HIAS as the agency moves from Trump to Biden. On one hand, HIAS leaders are glad that the United States no longer has a president who opposes refugees, separates families at the border and fires up his base with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
On the other hand, they say that Trump did so much harm, and made immigration so heated an issue, that it will be a challenge just to bring the immigration and refugee systems back to where they were before Trump.
Returning to a point in which the U.S. allows hundreds of thousands of refugees a year, and passing immigration reform through Congress, these leaders say, feels even more daunting. [HIAS was heavily involved in lobbying for failed Comprehensive Immigration Reform some years ago.–ed]
“It’s just a relief to have that administration in the rearview mirror,” said Melanie Nezer, vice president for public affairs at HIAS. She dubbed the Trump era “the fire swamp.”
But Nezer is cognizant as well of “the sheer amount of time, effort and creativity it’s going to take for the new administration and those of us who work on these issues to unravel and fix it.”
“The prior administration really decimated our infrastructure, our systems, our staffing,” she said. “It’s stunning to think about the damage that was done.”
[….]
Trump’s actions on immigration, beginning with the travel ban, spurred a flood of donations to HIAS.Since Trump’s term, the agency more than doubled its annual budget to $90 million. But resettling refugees — how the organization had once spent the majority of donations — became unprecedentedly controversial and difficult.
With its windfall, HIAS sued the Trump administration over its travel ban, increased its advocacy work and shifted its weight outside the U.S.
For refugee resettlement nerds there is a lot of useful information in this article, sokeep reading.
Here is the data from the State Department showing the paltry number of refugees admitted in the first half of the fiscal year.
This is what has the contractors hopping mad.
Notice (sorry the screenshot isn’t clear, but take it from me) that although we are admitting hundreds of thousands of illegal border jumpers from Central America, more are being admitted as refugees through this legal avenue.
2050 total for six months. They will have a hard time getting to even 15,000 at this rate.
***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the unhappy contractors.
They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders. As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.
“We’re relieved but disappointed,” said HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield following Friday’s initial announcement that the cap, also known as the refugee ceiling, would not be raised.
Returning to a point in which the U.S. allows 
Here is the 