Tag: Refugee Resettlement

More refugees to Wisconsin….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..and more federal dollars to fund them (well, to fund the contractors).

There is nothing unusual about Wisconsin.  Everyone is going to get more refugees and Washington will surely have the funds flowing to the contractors* now that the Obama Administration is free to go full steam ahead.

If you live in Appleton, Barron, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee and Oshkosh, here they come.

From AP at Fox 11:

MADISON (AP) – Agencies in six Wisconsin communities will receive a total of $1.5 million to help resettle new refugees.

The state Department of Children and Families says the latest refugees arriving in Wisconsin are mainly from Burma, East Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nepal. To receive refugee status, a person must have a well-founded fear of persecution and not be able to safely return to their home country.   [LOL! Now they are saying East Africa so as not to say Somalis.—ed]

That definition of a refugee is important.  It used to mean that the individual refugee had a fear of persecution, now one only needs to be from a certain region of the world and one is assumed to be persecuted.  The refugee industry has long wanted that expanded definition and now they have just made it so.  And, hey, didn’t Obama tell us that Iraq and Afghanistan are safe—after all, he says we don’t need our military there!   Somalia has a new government and is encouraging its people to come home.   And, who is persecuting in Nepal?

AP continues:

The state has funded refugee programs using federal money, beginning with the Hmong resettlement in Wisconsin. Local agencies provide a host of services to the refugees, including language and literacy classes, school enrollment, job information and mental health services.  [You pay for all of this!—ed]

The funding has been targeted for agencies in Appleton, Barron, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee and Oshkosh. About 1,000 new refugees are expected to settle in Wisconsin this year.

For Wisconsin readers, you can learn more about refugees in Wisconsin here at your state agency website.  Five of nine federal contractors appear to have divvied up Wisconsin.

An afterthought:  Just as I hit publish I remembered that I wanted to mention that one of the bits of information for you to note at the Wisconsin website might answer an oft-asked question, namely, do refugees who come as senior citizens get social security?  The answer is yes—for up to nine years.   SSI will continue past that time if they become US citizens:

A refugee senior must naturalize within nine years of arrival or lose eligibility for SSI.

* The ORR website is down, but for new readers the big nine contractors who hold a monopoly on federal contracts are:

The so-called “religious ” contractors receiving tax dollars:

US Conference of Catholic Bishops  (we just mentioned them yesterday, here)

Church World Service

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services

World Relief

Episcopal Migration Ministries

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

The secular contractors:

US Committee on Refugees and Immigrants

International Rescue Committee

Ethiopian Community Development Council

Tennessean op-ed: Catholic Bishops must contribute more; consult communities

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update January 26th:  The Nashville Scene doesn’t like Barnett’s commentary, attacks Barnett Alinsky-style.  They are so predictable.

On the heels of my post yesterday about the US Conference of Catholic Bishops “National Migration Week” comes this zinger of an opinion piece from longtime observer of the federal government’s refugee resettlement program, Don Barnett, published in The Tennessean also yesterday (highlights are mine):

Refugee resettlement was once the work of self-supporting charities that invested their own resources and were directly responsible for outcomes. Today, it is the work of federal contractors who spend public resources and have no responsibility three months after the refugee has been “resettled.”

A July Government Accountability Office report, “Refugee Resettlement — Greater Consultation With Community Stakeholders Could Strengthen Program,” is critical of refugee contractors and how they place refugees in local communities across the U.S. In particular, the report cites lack of adequate consultation with local “stakeholders” before placing refugees in a community. The agencies that resettle refugees are compensated from 17 different federal programs tailored to refugee resettlement, as well as from numerous nonspecific grants and programs at the federal and state levels.

The largest resettlement contractor is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which resettles refugees through its affiliate, Catholic Charities.

As the GAO report notes, a network of contractors, known as “voluntary agencies,” “selects the communities where refugees will live. … Voluntary agencies consider various factors when determining where refugees will be placed, but few agencies we visited consulted relevant local stakeholders, which posed challenges for service providers.”

The report found that “… most public entities such as public schools and health departments generally said that agencies notified them of the number of refugees expected to arrive in the coming year, but did not consult them regarding the number of refugees they could serve before proposals were submitted to the (U.S. State Department).”

Since striking a deal in 2008 to manage the federal dollars for other, smaller refugee contractors in the state, Catholic Charities of Tennessee effectively runs refugee resettlement in Tennessee. Today, only 35 percent of its annual budget is dedicated to nonrefugee social services. As the GAO report notes, for organizations such as Catholic Charities, “funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”

Sure enough, resettlement in Tennessee went up dramatically after 2008. In fact, since 2009, Tennessee has taken an average of about 1,450 refugees per year, a 62 percent increase over the average number resettled from 2004 to 2008. The total number of refugees resettled to the U.S. actually went down at the same time that Tennessee’s number of resettled refugees went up.

More refugees mean more government services, since the contractors assist the refugees for only three months or less in the vast majority of cases. Most refugees go into TennCare for varying periods of time. TennCare and other welfare programs such as Families First are used by refugees at much higher than average rates and are partially supported by state taxpayer dollars.

Refugee resettlement is very profitable for the nonprofits. There is a reason why refugee resettlement is Tennessee Catholic Charities’ biggest mission. All of its non-refugee social services are smaller, less lucrative and almost all are shrinking from year to year. Ironically, its national motto is: Working to Reduce Poverty in America.

USCCB took in an astonishing $72.1 million in revenue from refugee resettlement alone in 2011, 97 percent of which came from government contracts, grants and earnings from federal refugee programs. A significant portion of this money does not have to be shown as having been spent on refugees. In other words, millions flow to the contracting agency with no strings attached. (My personal favorite in this money racket: USCCB received $3.7 million in 2011 as a commission for collecting on the loans made by the U.S. government to refugees for airline tickets to the U.S. USCCB is under no obligation to spend any of this money on refugees.

Federal contractors will always act like federal contractors. But is it too much to ask refugee contractors to cover at least a portion of the costs borne by Tennessee taxpayers today? Is it too much to ask for more of a voice for the taxpayer who, after all, is the main stakeholder in this program?

Terror funding trial beginning for San Diego Somalis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

No sooner do I tell you about the touchy-feely politically correct novel about Somalis in Maine, then I see the news that yet another terrorist funding trial is opening in San Diego.  Four men, including a mosque leader, are charged with sending money to the Al-Qaeda franchise in the Horn of Africa—-al Shabaab.

Just last month, here, we learned that a San Diego Somali woman got 8 years in the slammer for the same thing.  Taxpayers get to pay for their resettlement and then their prison terms.

Coincidentally, I  learned tonight that lucky San Diego was the first US resettlement city for Somalis in the early 1990’s.  (I’ll tell you about that tomorrow).

Somalis are busy standing trial—we reported on the Somali Christmas tree bomber case here a few days ago!

This is the latest news, emphasis mine, from UT San Diego.  (hat tip: Shariah Finance Watch)

SAN DIEGO — The San Diego trial of four Somali men charged with sending money and support to the terrorist group al-Shabaab is scheduled to begin in federal court this month.

A federal grand jury indicted the men in 2010 on charges of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization and money laundering.

They have all pleaded not guilty. The men are accused of funneling about $8,000 raised in San Diego’s Somali immigrant community to al-Shabaab fighters in 2008.

At a hearing last week before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller on pretrial motions, the four defendants sat quietly in the jury box. A group of supporters filled the seats in the courtroom’s gallery — men sitting on one side and women on the other.

The defendants are Basaaly Saeed Moalin, a cabdriver; Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, the imam of a City Heights mosque; Issa Doreh, former president of a nonprofit group aiding the Somali community; and Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud of Anaheim.

Who are these lawyers?  Inquiring minds would like to know!

Interest in the case is high within the immigrant community in San Diego and nationally. The men are being represented by lawyers from around the country who were recruited by a legal foundation that since 2001 has raised money to represent Muslims accused of crimes in federal and state courts.

There is more, read it all.  And, this is funny, lawyers for the defendants want to keep mention of al-Qaeda out of the trial so as not to remind jurors that violence and death are associated with Jihadists.

For new readers we have resettled more than 100,000 Somali refugees to cities large and small in the US over the last 25 years.  See one of the most widely read posts here at RRW.  In three years since 9/11 ( Bush years 2004, 2005, 2006) the number of Somalis arriving topped 10,000 per year.  Those refugees then began bringing in the family (chain migration!) until 2008 when shock of shocks! the State Department discovered that as many as 30,000 Somalis had lied about their kinship and weren’t related at all.  The State Department then closed the “family reunification” program for Somalis.  It has recently been re-opened for new and legit family members, but they have no intention of finding and deporting the liars.

Thailand trying to save itself from economic and cultural ruin by deporting Rohingya Muslims

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update January 15th:  The UN putting the screws to Thai government, here.

Well, that isn’t the title all of the mainstream media news accounts use (or any of them use!) to describe the recent discovery of 400 illegal migrant Rohingya being held by traffickers in Southern Thailand.  The usual title of the story sounds like this “Evil,  mean, xenophobic, racist, Islamophobic Thai government deporting poor starving souls, says Human Rights group.”  (My exaggeration of course).

Here is the story all over the news today (not FOX News).  This version from AFP (emphasis mine):

BANGKOK — Around 400 Rohingya migrants discovered in a raid on a camp hidden in a remote rubber plantation in southern Thailand will be deported back to Myanmar, Thai police said on Friday.

The group, 378 men, 11 women and 12 children, were found in a makeshift shelter in the plantation in Songkhla province where they had languished for three months waiting to be trafficked to a “third country”, local police said.

Acting on a tip-off officials stormed the shelter on Thursday and found the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group not recognised as citizens in Myanmar who have fled sectarian unrest in their thousands to Thailand and other countries.

“They are now waiting for deportation which will be done by Thailand’s immigration police,” Lieutenant Colonel Katika Jitbanjong of Padang Besar local police told AFP.

“They told officials that they had volunteered to come (to Thailand),” he said, adding police were seeking an arrest warrant for the Thai landowner on charges of human trafficking and sheltering illegal migrants.

Rights groups decry Thailand for failing to help Rohingya migrants who reach its territory, instead pushing them back to Myanmar or on to neighbouring countries including Malaysia, which offers sanctuary to the minority.

EVERYONE knows that if they are allowed to stay, tens of thousands will follow them to Thailand.

For more on Rohingya refugees (who are being resettled in small numbers in the US) visit our Rohingya Reports category.   This is post 132 in that category.  And, LOL!, if I ever write a book on Refugee Resettlement, the Rohingya will be used as my primary example of how the “humanitarian” industry builds a public relations campaign for massive resettlement.  I wasn’t around for the start of our Somali mass migration to America, but I bet it went just like the Rohingya case is now going.

And, don’t forget, find a copy of the Trojan Horse—the Islamic doctrine of immigration—and read it!

Writer: Bhutanese ‘third country resettlement’ sets a bad precedent

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Joseph Mathew (or is it Mathew Joseph?) writing at the International Business Times has penned an interesting article giving us the background on why the people of Nepali origin were expelled from Bhutan which led to the US (under the Bush Administration and continuing into today) taking tens of thousands of those expelled people to America over the last five years.  Here is just one recent post about Bhutanese/Nepali people coming here en masse.

Below are my excerpts from the article by Mr. Mathew:

The long pending issue of the repatriation of Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin, who were housed in the UNHCR-sponsored refugee camps in the eastern Nepal districts of Morang and Jhapa since early 1990s, was “resolved” to many by the Third Country Resettlement proposal put forth and being carried out by countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and the Netherlands. As of now, a sizable section of the refugees have been resettled in these countries, with a majority of them now living in the United States.

These Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin were expelled from Bhutan in the early 1990s as a result of the state sponsored Bhutanization drive epitomized in the promulgation of “Driglam Nam Za” (code of social etiquette) in 1989, which stipulated strict controls over the people of Nepali origin who inhabited the southern districts of Bhutan.

The author explains that the ruling class in Bhutan feared the growth of the population of people of Nepali origin.

A growth in the number of the people of Nepali origin and their cultural distinctiveness from the ruling elite became a cause of worry for them. The heightened political consciousness among the people of Nepali origin compounded the fears of the Ngalong ruling elite.

Several times Mr. Mathew implies that the ruling class fears of being eventually taken over demographically by the Nepali people and losing control of their government was an irrational fear.  I do remember when I first wrote about the Bhutanese years ago that there was mention of the Maoists agitating within this expelled population.  I don’t know if that is so, but that might have been behind some of the intransigence of Bhutan’s government.  Yes, I found it! here is the news story that reported Maoists in the camps.

Mathew continues:

In the last 20 years, Bhutan has undergone many changes including transforming herself from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy and became a “democracy” from above. However, while undergoing these changes Bhutan has not changed a bit her policy towards the repatriation of the refugee population located in the UNHCR camps in eastern Nepal. On the contrary, it has created many hurdles in the process of resolving the refugee problem amicably despite the efforts of Nepal.

Frankly folks,  I have never understood why Nepal didn’t want its own ethnic people back!

So why did the US get into this squabble?

I have no answer to that.  Discerning readers at this point are likely asking—why is it the business of the US to resolve a dispute involving Bhutan and Nepal and to a lesser degree India?  Why is this in our national interest?

The only answer I have is this—that open-borders agitators wanted more immigrants, more Democrat voters, more people in need of Social Services, more cheap (captive because they can’t go home!) laborers in meatpacking plants and other low-wage industries.

And, then writer Mathew brings up the downside of this wholesale dispersal of a population to the four winds.  He notes that with this UN push to resolve the issue, we helped let Bhutan, Nepal and India get off the hook.  Consequently they didn’t have to come up with a solution that might have led to repatriation (or their resettlement in their original home country of Nepal!).

The diplomatic deadlock between Nepal and Bhutan and India’s non-involvement in resolving the problem created the opportunity for the international community to step in. The context of the proposal of the Third Country Resettlement is that. The proposal for Third Country Resettlement came as a blessing in disguise for Bhutan, Nepal and India as it will definitely ‘resolve’ the refugee problem without affecting their interests and concerns. For many refugees, mainly young people, it offered new opportunity in rebuilding their lives, though the older lot among them was not in agreement with this thinking. The socio-psychological impact of the Third Country Resettlement on the Bhutanese refugees is something to be visible in the course of time.

We have already seen some of the psychological impact with the high suicide rate of Bhutanese here in the US.

The decision to move this entire “refugee” population and not resolve it between the countries involved will have “serious implications” for the future resolution of similar problems around the world:

The proposal for Third Country Resettlement in effect, in this particular case, turned out to be a rejection of the right of repatriation of the refugees. This is going to have serious implications for the resolution of various refugee issues pertaining to different regions of the world. International community, instead of making arrangements for Third Country Resettlement, must put pressure on the concerned parties to facilitate the process of repatriation for the resolution of refugee problems. As far as refugee problems are concerned, repatriation not Third Country Resettlement is the only meaningful solution. [Agreed!—ed]