I’m dashing off this post as I run out the door to make it to the next city this morning on my RRW road trip… Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts is being notified about refugees arriving in the state. This is new news….
This is your usual fluffy puffy piece about happy, grateful refugees.
However there is a little nugget in here that I didn’t know. Apparently governors are being notified by the feds about who is coming and how many. It is not clear if they are being notified where they will be placed. If they are being notified, this is new news and a demonstration that our complaints about the secrecy of this program are changing how the US State Department and its contractors have operated for decades.
From the Omaha World-Herald:
During June alone, 2,406 Syrian refugees arrived — more than the previous six months combined. Such numbers appear to have the Obama administration on track to meet its stated budget year goal of resettling 10,000 refugees in the United States by the end of September.
Nebraska’s Syrian refugees arrived without fanfare, which was by design.
Local agencies settling the families on behalf of the U.S. government said they didn’t treat these arrivals any differently from the hundreds of other refugees they help relocate each year.
[….]
The Ricketts administration — which despite its protestations last November has acknowledged being powerless to stop the federal government’s resettlements — was aware that Nebraska had received its first Syrians. The governor receives a monthly report from the federal government with general information on refugees settled in the state, including nationality, gender and age.
In a statement to The World-Herald last week, Ricketts called on President Barack Obama to answer his and other governors’ calls to tighten security checks on new refugees.
More here.
Gotta run. We have lots of previous posts on Nebraska especially interesting is one where a town rejected a meat packing plant because they didn’t want the disruption of immigrant/refugee labor. Type the word Nebraska in our search window to learn more.
It is no surprise that the Election 2016 debate about refugees should have begun in earnest again after the slaughter in Nice.
But, as everyone focuses on security screening, I want to repeat again that this is about numbers. The Tunisian killer would not have been stopped by security screening. He was just one of tens of thousands of Muslims living in France because France never said NO! to more Muslim immigration.
The bottomline is that there is a threshold that is crossed once the Muslim population reaches a certain point where Islamists become emboldened and energized. France is there, so are many other European countries. We don’t want to get there, but it is coming fast. The election of Hillary Clinton will assure that America will cross that threshold too! Be sure to watch this youtube video about the Nice terror attack! (hat tip: Dick)
From Fox News—-Hillary wants 65,000 Syrians admitted to the US and we previously reported that the resettlement contractors want 100,000.
The terror attack Thursday in Nice, France, that left at least 84 people dead has reignited the refugee debate in the 2016 presidential race, with Donald Trump blasting Hillary Clinton’s calls to let in thousands more and saying, “we’d better get awfully tough.”
The terrorist behind the attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was not a refugee but a French resident originally from Tunisia. The attack nevertheless has rekindled concerns that accepting more refugees from Islamic State-occupied Syria raises the risk for the U.S.
The Obama administration has pledged to accept 10,000 refugees from Syria by the end of September. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that 5,211 refugees had been brought in by the end of June and the U.S. is on track to meet the administration’s target.
Clinton, though, back in September called for increasing that number to 65,000 – a 550 percent increase from the administration’s current target.
“I would like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000 and begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in,” she told CBS News.
Have a look at this article from Arab American Newsfrom last week. Not enough housing in Dearborn where all the refugees want to live to be with their own kind of people reports the Arab American News.
It starts out with the usual heartwarming stories about refugees finding new lives in Michigan (the state getting the most Syrian Muslims) but then read down 11 paragraphs where we hear about the trouble the new arrivals are having after basically being left in the lurch by resettlement contractors and in one case NO agency is helping them.
Readers this is very common, we’ve heard it repeatedly over the years and instead of taking fewer refugees that could be taken care of properly, the federal contractors are overloaded (there are never enough volunteers backing up the paid staff!) and the refugees complain. And, you can’t blame them, they have been sold a bill of goods about life in America and their expectations are very high. Get this….how is it that a whole family is basically wandering around loose in Michigan with no one responsible for them but another refugee.
The Kabati family now enjoys a new, seemingly peaceful life, but anticipated the challenges that lay ahead as soon as they arrived at the airport.
Kabati said while other refugees were greeted at the airport by representatives of refugee aid groups and taken to their homes, they were greeted by a friend, who offered to provide any further assistance the family needed. Kabati added because they had no family in Michigan, the IOM inadvertently held his friend, also a recent Syrian immigrant, fully responsible for their aid.
The family friend gave them shelter for two days, until he secured them an apartment.
As of Saturday, Kabati and his family have not received paperwork and needed assistance to initiate their resettlement, like Social Security numbers, insurance and food stamps.
Kabati said he and his family are eager to start learning English, so they are able to get around and communicate with others. A tough language barrier prevents them from integrating into American society.
So far, no aid group has offered to place them in ESL courses, unlike the cases with other refugees.
Yikes! How many other Syrians have simply been flown in to a city and dropped? You might not have a lot of sympathy for them, but you should. The refugees are just pawns. Again, we see evidence that this program is being run with incompetent leadership and is not about caring for the the world’s downtrodden as its first priority. This is an example of gross incompetence on the part of the US State Department and some contractor which dropped the ball in Michigan!
Why? Because instead of slowing the flow to a level that could be accommodated and assimilated, the UN and the US State Department are sending them into communities at unsustainable levels hurting both the refugees and the citizens of the town or city unlucky enough to be a target site. Continue reading the storyfor the litany of other complaints the new Michigan Americans have.
The primary contractors operating in the state are the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LSS Michigan), the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and get this, in Dearborn, it is USCRI—the same agency that isn’t doing a very good job in Lowell, Mass.
The lack of transparency that surrounds the resettlement of third world refugees through the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program is likely the single-most important factor in why I have been writing about it for nine years. Almost nothing makes me so angry as the arrogant treatment of citizens in towns across the country as refugees are placed in communities with no advance warning in most cases and certainly no thoughtful discussion and planning. Lavinia Limon is the woman making the decisions about which refugees go to Lowell. USCRI is also in charge of Twin Falls, Idaho and is opening new offices in Rutland, VT and Reno, NV. Go to our extensive archive on Limon (formerly Bill Clinton’s director of the ORR) to learn more: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon
For decades the only way citizens learned of the program was when it was already up and running and problems had occurred and here we learn from the Lowell, Massachusetts city manager that they have had the same experience.
BTW, controversies like the one on-going in Rutland, VTactually started the same way—a mayor secretively worked with the federal government to ‘welcome’ Syrians to town, and when the residents found out all hell broke loose directed mostly at the mayor for acting secretively.
Here is the latest news from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily who tells us about some excellent reporting from the Lowell Sun on that case from last week where a Syrian man was arrested for allegedly making advances at a 13-year-old at a public swimming pool.
The secrecy of the federal refugee-resettlement program has once again been highlighted by a local official who has seen the dark side of the program play out in living color.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, a 13-year-old girl was twice groped at a public pool last week by a 22-year-old man freshly imported into the community from Syria as a “refugee.”
The city manager of Lowell told his local newspaper Tuesday that he was not even notified by the U.S. State Department or its resettlement contractor that Syrians were being delivered to his community.
Emad Hasso, 22, of Syria pleaded not guilty Friday to inappropriately touching the girl at the state-run Raymond Lord Memorial Pool in Lowell, according to the Lowell Sun.
This marks the second high-profile sexual assault on an American girl in the past month by a refugee. On June 2, a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, was reportedly raped by an Iraqi refugee boy while an older refugee from Sudan filmed and coached him during the assault.
Hasso is one of 18 Syrians, all of them most likely Sunni Muslims, who have been secretly planted in the Lowell community since May, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center online database.
City Manager Kevin Murphy said he’d like to receive regular numbers from the federal contractor that resettles refugees in the city. The International Institute subcontracts with the main federal contractor, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or USCRI, to deliver refugees to Lowell.
The city does not know when or from where refugees come to Lowell, Murphy said, and is only made aware of them in instances like this one where a refugee gets arrested or otherwise singled out for bad behavior.
“I think we’ll reach out to the International Institute to see if they could cooperate with us in the future by letting us know when they relocate individuals to Lowell,” Murphy said.
Good luck with that!
There is much more here, including a list of the cities where large numbers of Syrian Muslims (yes, they are 99% Muslim and mostly Sunnis) have been placed this year, continue here.
By the way USCRI is the primary federal contractor and the International Institute is a sub-contractor. Be sure to see this older postwhen USCRI’s office was ultimately closed in Waterbury, CT (they weren’t caring properly for the refugees they had placed). See why I referred to Limon for years as ‘whoop-de-do.’ One more thing that will interest you folks in Idaho. Click here to view a copyrighted photo of Lavinia Limon with the CEO of Chobani Yogurt at the Clinton Global Initiative last September. They are all in this together—MONEY!
Update: Breitbart has just learned that the Vermont Health Dept. has treated 17 cases of ACTIVE Tuberculosis in the refugee population placed in that state by the US State Department.
I’ve been remiss in not reporting on the drama in Rutland, VT last week as the Aldermen there voted on whether to place a referendum seeking the public’s approval (or disapproval) of the city becoming Vermont’s next federal resettlement site. The Aldermen of Rutland, VT are asking Richard (Asst. Sec. of State for Populations, Refugees and Migration) for more information on the plans for the city. The nerve of them!
I am woefully behind on the Vermont news (although I did post on the latest regarding ACTIVE TB in the state here), so forgive me if more important things have happened since the vote. HereWatchdog.org reports on the vote (they voted to not put the referendum on the ballot).
By the way, the focus has been on Syrian refugees resettling there, but once an office is open, a smattering of many other ethnic groups will be brought in—Somalis, Congolese, Burmese, Iraqis and so forth—making assimilation even harder as each ethnic group creates its core community. Myriad ethnic groups also increase the expense to local tax payers for the school system and even the health department as interpreters must be provided for each group.
You shouldread Watchdog.org for all the details of the debate, but I wanted to emphasize one thing mentioned by one of the Aldermen:
David Trapeni, a two-time mayoral candidate and the organizer of the petition drive, criticized the resettlement plan as too open-ended.
“It’s not a hundred — it’s hundreds of refugees that come,” Trapeni said. “Once you open that door that’s it — you’re going to get hundreds, and you’re not going to have any say.”
I cannot stress enough how significant Trapeni’s comment is. He is exactly right! You cannot shut the spigot off once the pipeline starts to flow. You can’t next year say, well, that doesn’t work for us and expect the feds and their contractor to shutter the office they opened and fire the staff. This program builds on itself because first, the agency is paid by the head to resettle the refugees, and secondly they are hellbent on bringing in the family members once the original seeds are planted.You will be even more vilified when you say we don’t want families reunited.
In the controversy in Spartanburg, SC a year ago, the contractor/feds promised to bring in only 50 refugees, now the plan for next year is 150 (I didn’t check the exact number, but it is at least that many). It will not end, just ask the mayors of Manchester, NH or Amarillo, TX who have been trying for years to close the spigot!
Aldermen ask Asst. Sec. of State Anne Richard for more information
This (news) is a very interesting turn of events and frankly I have to give this local body a thumbs-up for even taking an initiative like this. Basically they are signaling that local governments have a right to all the facts. That is the last thing the refugee industry wants to set a precedent about. The arrogant feds and contractors are so accustomed to operating in secrecy that they don’t want to be in a position to answer questions. A word of caution…
However, when pressed they have been able to put on shows for the public as they did in Spartanburg, SC and in Twin Falls, Idaho where they came to town and held private meetings (Spartanburg) or held a stacked public meeting as they did in Twin Falls and gave their positive spin on refugee resettlement. (So Rutland should be prepared for such a propaganda initiative from Washington.)
Nevertheless, every city government should be so audacious as to demand more answers from the federal government. After all, your town will be changed forever!
I’ll be very interested to see how Ms. Richard responds to the letter (read it here). Will she decide the controversy in Rutland isn’t worth pushing any further and move on to another (weaker) target town in Vermont? Or, will she put up a fight here as a show of power by bringing in her dog and pony show? Read the whole story at the Times Argus.
Our Rutland archive is here (for new readers!).
