Tag: US State Department

Report: White House considering refugee cap of 25,000 for Fiscal Year 2019

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It begins…..

The annual negotiating about how many refugees the President should aim to admit to the US in the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1 of this year, is underway.

But the difference between those machinations for say 2016 when the refugee resettlement contractors***, which are paid by the head to place refugees in your towns and cities, were pushing for 200,000 and up and Obama set the ceiling for his final year at 110,000 and today demonstrate that the President, who ran on reducing the numbers, is keeping his word.

donald-trump-stephen-miller
Stephen Miller has been with the President since early in the campaign. I had a laugh just now. When looking for a photo for this post I see that the vast majority of Miller’s media photos show him with a scowling expression on his face. 

The contractors have already staked out 75,000 as their top desired number and now comes word that the “evil” Stephen Miller, Trump’s right hand man on issues involving immigration, wants far less.

25,000 is the number being bandied about, but rumors persist that Miller continues to think that a cap of 15,000 would take care of the TRULY persecuted people.

The New York Times  has a very detailed report.  I can’t snip it all, but encourage you to read the whole thing.

Don’t lose sight of one important point: 

We have a backlog of 700,000 asylum claims to process. Those are people who got in to the US by some other means (mostly illegal) and claim they should be considered as refugees. If granted refugee status they become eligible for all the welfare goodies a UN-chosen refugee flown to the US gets.

Therefore as the refugee contractors help more and more migrants coming illegally across our borders file asylum claims, they are only making it worse (under this President) for refugees waiting abroad.

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Judicial Watch sues Department of State for failure to respond to FOIA request on Obama secret selection of new resettlement sites

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Long time readers will remember that for a couple of years we were on a hunt to reveal the forty plus new resettlement sites the US State Department was quietly targeting for placement of the huge flow of refugees they expected in the waning years of the Obama Administration (and planning ahead for the Hillary years to come!).

New site development guide
Obama State Department’s guide for community organizers to teach them how to set up new resettlement sites in their unsuspecting communities. I only discovered it by chance.   https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/12/03/arrogant-church-world-service-closes-doors-in-poughkeepsie/

We were able to identify some sites in various stages of planning just because local newspapers reported that their town was being chosen (or might be chosen), but there was never any official release of information from the DOS.
Thus, Judicial Watch went to work to try to uncover the list and the criteria being used to select new sites.
In December 2016 this is a list I had put together from various news reports:

Below are new sites we have identified so far of the supposed 47 the Obama Administration is (or has been) trying to get established.

One of the first things the Trump Administration must do is to make all of this information public information.  Here are some of the sites we have identified so far by just keeping an eye on local news reports in 2015 and 2016:

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Afghan special immigrant visa (SIV) holders and families enter US in high numbers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Maryland and Virginia are in the top five welcoming states…
state depart. seal
I’ve been told that the flow of these ‘special’ immigrants are helping to keep federal money flowing to the resettlement contractors*** as they are treated as refugees (but not counted as part of the 45,000 ceiling set by the President last September) and as such, the contractors are paid by the head for their work in resettling them.
Just now I checked Wrapsnet to see what those numbers looked like. I’ve written other posts on the topic before, here, so this is an update.
Prior to FY14 we admitted small numbers of the people that supposedly helped us in some capacity in Afghanistan, but the number began to skyrocket in FY14.
The top year so far, 16,866 Afghan SIV arrivals, was in President Trump’s first year in office.
Top states for Afghan resettlement (regular refugees and SIVs) from FY07 to the present were California (20,171), Texas (8,229), Virginia (7763), Washington (2,898) and Maryland (2,745).
Here are some partial screen shots. The whole graph obviously doesn’t fit on the page.
Top of graph:

Screenshot (509)
Note that the first column in white is the number of normal refugees we admitted and the second is the SIVs and their family members.

 
Bottom of graph:
Screenshot (510)
Unfortunately, you can’t see the far left with the names of the states.  The number in the dark column is the total number of refugees plus SIVs that went to each state.

 
 

The total number of Afghans admitted to the US, 60,623, above is from FY07 to the present. Less than 10,000 were determined to be refugees.

 
*** Here are the nine federal refugee contractors. They have been complaining as their regular paying client numbers (refugees) have declined, but it seems they have some taxpayer supplied funds coming in with this huge push to bring in Afghan ‘interpreters’ and their families.
The original Refugee Act of 1980, that set up this monstrosity, envisioned a public-private partnership that over the years has almost completely morphed in to a federal program.
The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees (SIVs too) and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!  From most recent accounting, here.

No new resettlement site in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but where is State Department site list?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It has been missing for awhile!  What is up with that.  I thought we were going to have more transparency for communities that are (or might become) refugee placement towns and cities.

Bartlett with map
This is former State Department Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Larry Bartlett, proudly standing in front of the site map that PREVIOUSLY was posted annually at Wrapsnet along with a directory list of sites.

This morning I saw this brief mention about Ann Arbor that had been fingered as a possible new resettlement site at the end of the Obama Administration when his State Department was planning as many as 40 new sites (older ones getting overloaded?).
Michigan Live:

Samaritas, Michigan’s largest refugee resettlement agency, had planned to open an Ann Arbor office and that’s now on hold because there are not enough refugees coming to the area any more, according to John Yim, supervisor of new Americans in Michigan for Samaritas.

(For new readers Samaritas is the Lutheran resettlement agency.  Why did they change their name? Who knows.)
You might want to visit this post in which I reported on the State Department’s “New Site Development Guide” published under Bartlett’s leadership.
The Ann Arbor mention reminded me to check Wrapsnet for the:

R&P AGENCY CONTACT LIST EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION

The most recent map (like the one Bartlett is showing-off in the photo) is from FY16, but the full contact list is missing.
It hasn’t been available for awhile, so how is anyone supposed to know if their town or city has a refugee office?  I suspect its absence is also hampering the refugee industry activists. Don’t we all have a right to know where refugees are being placed and which of the hundreds of subcontractors are still open for business?
The old list is here at my blog.

We have been hearing that as many as 100 of the 350 or so offices are to be closed, and we would like to know which ones!

Where is the transparency?
Come on State Department, what are you hiding?  There are really only two reasons for not making this information available:  incompetence or they want to hide something.

Under Trump, Muslim refugees from Burma (Rohingya) are numero uno

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you the other day that we had a slight increase in the number of refugees entering the US in the month of May.  The number is still way below what the refugee contractors*** need to assure that their federally funded budgets are flush with your involuntary contributions via Washington.
Today I checked Wrapsnet (FY18 data) for the Muslim refugee numbers and learned this:
The percentage of Muslims entering as refugees is way down compared to Bush and Obama years.  It now stands at 15% when it was approaching 50% under Barack Hussein Obama.
(Total admissions so far 14,321 and 2,184 are listed as Muslims of some sect or another.)
But….
 

Rohingya refugees mostly women
See my Rohingya Reports category with 224 previous posts:   https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/category/rohingya-reports/

 

…much to my surprise I see that Burmese Muslims (Rohingya) top the list!

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