Today I had a question from a reader who asked me this:
Can you point me in the direction to find out how to track what is going on in my own and adjacent states?
It is almost like asking me, as I am beginning my 15th year of writing about refugees, tell me all about the US refugee program! And, I might ask how many hours do you have?
My reader’s question is not unreasonable and it is one I would have asked 15 years ago. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but where could I begin?
So, here is my recommendation to any of you reading this post who are fairly new to the refugee controversy and the network of government actors and non-profits that call the shots, please use my search window. It is really very good!
Since my reader lives in Wyoming, let me say first she is lucky because Wyoming is the only state in the nation with no refugee admissions program (so far!). There was an attempt a few years back, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t one again, to open the state up to the ‘joys’ of third world diversity.
I covered that controversy extensively as it unfolded.
The first step would be to simply search RRW for each state (typing state name in search window) and be prepared for a very large number of posts to appear for each one—after all there are 9,667 posts at RRW!
If you are reading my posts on your phone, please open RRW on your computer and see the search window in the upper right.
You may wonder why some photos/images are missing for older posts and that is because I was deplatformed and had to scramble to save my material. Some images were lost in the process.
After you have read as much as you can handle about each state—all of the states surrounding Wyoming have seen their share of controversies—then you should have an idea about which of the nine contractors*** have subcontractors in those states.
Find out where they are located and call them on the phone to find out more about what they are doing.
And, don’t be stupid by being confrontational! You want to get information right? Then the best thing to do is play dumb! Seriously! Sound interested in their work!
Likewise you have a state refugee coordinator. I previously had a whole list of those, but can’t put my finger on it now. However, you can search the internet for refugee agencies in your state. You should call the coordinator too and ask for information (after you have read enough of my posts to get a feel for the program).
Knowledge is Power
And, one more thing of a thousand things I could write! Check out a series I wrote a while back entitled ‘Knowledge is Power‘ for an overview of the program.
Take the time to learn about the US Refugee Admissions Program (believe me, it isn’t going away anytime soon!) before jumping into action because it will do you no good to launch an activism initiative until you have some basic understanding of how it works.
The Open Borders agitators and the refugee contractors (with media backing) know their stuff and will quickly neutralize you if you don’t have your facts.
And one last thing…
Right now the contractors are on a hunt for new resettlement sites and to expand existing ones as I reported here about Winchester, VA. If you hear that your town might be a target, get in touch with your local elected officials and see what you can find out.
***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!
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.
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.
“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.
“What’s going on? We thought this was going to be a new time for a new era for resettlement. Why are these cases getting canceled?”
(Natalie El-Deiry, International Rescue Committee, describing what refugees are saying.)
My headline could have been a headline in the era of (that mean guy) Donald Trump, but believe it or not that is big news in the Biden/Harris era where the team running the country had already told Congress they want 62,500 refugees flown in by September 30th.
(Please know that this 62,500 would be in addition to the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands, who will overrun our southern border this year all claiming that they too are refugees.)
Yes the contractors*** are squawking as their “clients” are turned back at airports across several continents, but funny that there are no angry demonstrations against the man, their man, they helped install in the White House.
There are other stories with headlines blaming the mess on policies leftover from Trump!
Hundreds Of Refugees’ Flights Canceled Due To Biden Red Tape
Nearly 300 refugees who had been approved and booked to arrive in the United States last week to begin a new chapter in their lives had their flights canceled at the last minute, according to several resettlement agencies.
With the help of the State Department, resettlement agencies across the country had begun to process and book hundreds of refugees to enter the U.S. in March after the Biden administration announced it would be raising the refugee cap.
The decision was applauded as a crucial first step in rebuilding the refugee system after it was dealt a series of blows by then–President Donald Trump, who spent years demonizing refugees and decimatingthe resettlement programs.
But nearly a month after announcing the refugee increases and notifying Congress, President Joe Biden has yet to formally sign off on the higher cap.
Without Biden’s signature, refugee admissions are still restricted by Trump’s record-low 15,000 cap for fiscal year 2021 and his decision to exclude refugees from Muslim-majority countries like Syria and Somalia. The delay has forced a slew of canceled tickets and left hundreds of refugees in limbo and resettlement agencies scrambling.
The State Department has canceled flights for at least 264 refugees this month and more cancellations are expected, according to resettlement agencies.
[….]
After Biden was elected president, Wilondja [refugee star of this story] began to feel hopeful again. The new administration launched an effort to overhaul the immigration system, including raising the refugee cap to 125,000 for the next fiscal year (which starts Oct. 1, 2021) and allowing an additional 62,500 refugees to be admitted this fiscal year.
To understand how high a number 62,500 is (to be accomplished in less than seven months), here are the high and low years for refugee admissionsafter the George HW Bush era where he admitted hundreds of thousands over his four years in office.
Clinton’s high year (numbers rounded) was 119,000, and low (for a whole year) was 69,000.
Bush: High year was 69,000, and low was 27,000.
Obama: High year was 85,000, and low was 56,000.
Trump: High year was 54,000 (because part of that fiscal year Obama was still in office), and low was 12,000.
So you can see that if Chairman Joe pulls this off (62,500 by September 30th and 125,000 next year) he would far exceed the numbers that Obama admitted through the US Refugee Admissions Program, and in the midst of the pandemic no less!
***For New Readersthese are the nine federal refugee contractors who worked to put Biden and Harris in the White House, are lobbying for millions of illegal aliens to be transformed into legal voting citizens, and they have succeeded in getting the new administration to promise to raise the ceiling for refugee admissions to 125,000 for next year FY2022—that is the highest it has been in 29 years.
The 62,500 number is for the remainder of FY21. FY21 ends in less than 7 months. And, again, these numbers are in addition to those fake asylum seekers coming across our borders.
They are largely paid by you, the taxpayer, for their work of changing America by changing the people, and in so doing, are putting struggling Americans last!
By bringing in even greater numbers than we have in the past we can show the world that we have “moral authority” and even those dastardly Chinese will have to pay attention!
They are all getting excited for Biden/Harris and here the Leftwing Brookings Institution*** in Washington says forget the idea of simply restoring our Refugee Admissions Program, it needs to be reformed to be even more robust when Biden gets to the White House in January 2021.
I thought I was going to be reading about real reform of the program when this headline was brought to my attention. But alas, reform=more poor (sick!) third worlders for your town.
COVID-19 and the chance to reform US refugee policy
COVID-19 has exposed the underlying fault lines in societies around the world and in modern globalization. Yet by revealing long ignored flaws, it presents a rare chance to reform.
Unsurprisingly, refugees — the vast majority of whom live deeply precarious lives — have been among the most threatened by the pandemic.
A new U.S. administration should seize the opportunity presented by COVID-19 to build a better refugee policy, both for refugees’ benefit and for U.S. national security and strategic interests. [No one has ever shown me that our national security benefits from bringing in people from countries that hate us!—ed]
With the 70th anniversary of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees approaching in 2021, now is an opportune time for an update to U.S. refugee policy.
[….]
Today, vibrant[They cannot write a refugee story without using that word!—ed] refugee communities can be found in cities like Los Angeles, California, Nashville, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, which host the largest number of Vietnamese, Kurds, and Bosnians in the United States, respectively. [Notice they don’t mention the vibrant community of Somali Muslims in Minneapolis!—ed]
A compelling argument can be made that America needs refugees and owes part of its economic success to those who came to its shores seeking shelter from persecution and violence. The arrival of refugees helped to uphold America’s identity as a multicultural nation that accepts all victims of persecution who would come to its shores.
But that evil creature Trump has caused our “moral authority” to go into the toilet!
Blah, blah, blah…
I’m very interested to learn, if it’s true, that a battle is going on among Ds about whether to restore the program or go bigger….
As the 2020 presidential election draws near, a key division amongst Democrats who hope to see President Trump leave office in 2021 is between the restorationists, who think things can go back to the way they were before Trump, and the reformists, who see the hurricane of the Trump administration as an opportunity to build back stronger. COVID-19 should render this debate moot with regards to U.S. refugee policy.
Biden has already said he is going big in January (but won’t the pandemic still be raging in January)! And, I have no doubt he and Kamala will be eager to jump on the UN bandwagon on the Global Compact on Refugees!
There are already signs that a post-Trump United States could adopt a more helpful stance on refugees. Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised to rescind the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, restore access to asylum, and increase yearly refugee resettlement quotas to 125,000, a move that would show solidarity with countries hosting large numbers of refugees and likely spur U.S. allies to follow suit. There is also support in Congress for shouldering a greater refugee burden, as seen with Refugee Protection Act proposed in November 2019.
With a definitive end to the COVID-19 pandemic nowhere in sight, the threat facing refugees and the political stability of their host countries calls for the next administration to go beyond simply restoring the traditional U.S. leadership role on refugees. To address the challenge of rebuilding after COVID-19, the United States should endorse the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR).
And then this! By bringing in even greater numbers of refugees we can stick it to China, say the great minds at Brookings?
A revamped U.S. commitment to helping refugees carries direct benefits for U.S. national security priorities, in particular with respect to the strategic rivalry posed by a rising China.
Firstly, revamping its leadership role in managing refugee resettlement would go a long way in helping America reclaim the moral leadership it has enjoyed in past decades, which enabled it to create unique solutions to problems.
America’s support for refugees does more for it in a “battle of ideas” than its military and economic capacity alone: an America that actively protects the less fortunate might more easily win hearts and minds globally while also serving its own national security interests.
It drives me mad, when they say things like that—“win hearts and minds globally”—with not a bit of proof that anyone loves us more, surely not the Chinese!
And what about Americans’ hearts and minds!
The devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep flaws in countries around the world and endangered the health and livelihoods of millions. To build a better, more democratic, more equitable world after the pandemic, the United States could start by helping refugees, rather than what it can do by merely seeking its own benefit.
In the wake of the Chinese virus crisis the US has only one obligation and that is to take care of Americans FIRST!
***Brookingstries to pretend it is centrist however,
Starting with the 1990 election cycle, employees of the Brookings Institution gave $853,017 to Democratic candidates and $26,104 to Republican candidates. In total, since 1990, 96 percent of its political donations have gone to Democrats.