I suspect this opinion writer (C.A. Joseph Peters) from Ypsilanti, Michigan writing in The Eastern Echo is connected in some way to federal resettlement contractor US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, but there is no mention of his affiliation and we are thus expected to believe he is just a member of John Q. Public.
Michigan is already in the top five states for Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrant population. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/02/26/what-is-the-population-of-middle-eastern-and-north-african-immigrants-in-your-state/
Michigan is the best candidate to accept Iraqi and Syrian refugees, not because of its railroads and factories, forests and rivers, or even because of its system of government, but because of Michiganders themselves. Of the many chapters of the American immigration success story, two of its finest – Polish immigration in the early 20th Century and Lebanese immigration half a century later – were written in Michigan. Michigan may yet write a third.
The situation is this: Iraqis and Syrians are fleeing in the tens of thousands, and Michigan is in need of people. Michigan accepting these refugees would not only be generous but practical.
Mr. Peters then goes on with a lot of the mumbo-jumbo about Polish and Italian immigrants as if they are the same as Middle Eastern Muslims in their world view. Then he talks about the Christian Middle Easterners as if that is all they will get from Iraq and Syria. In fact, they will get mostly Muslim refugees from Syria.
The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a non-profit refugee aid organization, reported that of the more than 120,000 Chaldeans (Iraqi Christians) who made their way to Detroit almost half a century ago, more than half of them are now business-owners, now helping new Iraqi refugees get on their feet in their new state.
Peters: Michigan ought to “welcome” hundreds of thousands!
The crisis in Iraq and Syria is known well enough. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing. And Michigan, a state that has welcomed Middle Eastern refugees before, ought to welcome these hundreds of thousands who are feeling [fleeing?–ed] the region today, and encourage one generation of Middle Eastern Michiganders in preparing the next.
Michiganders need to bombard The Eastern Echo with another point of view!
Michigan is this year in the top five resettlement states,see here. A few years ago the US State Department, fearing Michigan was in overload, slowed the flow (Detroit News 2008) but it looks like that limited moratorium is off now!
….invite in more “children” because more migrants means more money for government contractors! (she doesn’t say that! I do!)
Lavinia Limon is the CEO of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, known in the refugee industry as USCRI. Below, published at the Budapest Business Journal (of all places) is her six-point prescription for what the Obama Administration should do to save the ‘unaccompanied alien children’ (child “refugees” she calls them) because how we respond will “define us as a Nation,” she says.
Revolving door! Doing well by doing good!
Limon in 1996 as head of Bill Clinton’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/person/42360
It’s mentioned in her bio at the end of this opinion piece, but keep in mind she is one of several refugee contractors who have moved in and out of the revolving door from ‘non-profit’ contractor to government giver-of-grants and then back out again.
She was Bill Clinton’s head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS)after first working in a ‘non-profit’ resettlement agency, and now she heads up the ‘non-profit’ group USCRI where she seeks grants from her former USCRI VP (Eskinder Negash) who now heads Obama’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Did you get that?
And, be sure to have a look at this post we wrote in 2008 when we nicknamed her “whoop-de-do” when one of her resettlement subcontractors was caught dumping (and not caring for) refugees in Waterbury, CT. It had been revealed to the public that the contractor keeps a cut of what the refugees each are allotted by the feds and she told the reporter that the feds weren’t keeping up with the economic times and she mentioned everyone would squawk if their salaries weren’t growing. She said:
“Whoop-de-do” ….“God help us if our salaries had not kept pace with inflation like that.“
So, let’s see how the inflationary times are treating USCRI and her salary! (I’m going to get to her prescription for handling the southern border invasion, but this is too good!).
In 2008, we reported Ms. Limon’s 2006 salary (while USCRI was taking in $18 million):
In 2006 her salary and other compensation was $195,478. That is up about $20,000 from the previous couple of years.
Are you ready for this!
First, you need to know that in its 2013 Form 990, USCRI took in $35,676,146 and $35,429,570 came from government grants (page 9)—that is, 99% of their funds are from you—the US taxpayer! (much worse than any contractor*** we have reviewed so far). They apparently make virtually no effort to raise private funds in what was supposed to be a public-private partnership when the Refugee Act of 1980 was signed into law by Jimmy Carter.
So what is Ms. Limon’s salary today? Drum roll please!
Now working as a government contractor, you can hire Ms. Limon to speak. http://speakerpedia.com/speakers/lavinia-limon
On page 7 of that Form 990 we learn that Lavinia Limon is making more than the Vice President of the United States whom she ever-so-gently disparages in her op-ed at the Budapest Journal.
Her salary from USCRI and other sources related to her work there is $289,192. It went up 32% since 2006! Has your salary increased that much over so short a time? If she were in the legitimate private sector, then what they pay is none of our business, but she is essentially a government employee, so we have every right to blow our stacks!
Family business? One Peter Limon is listed in that Form 990 as well pulling down a salary of $115,878 and $23,991 from related income.
Consider all of that information when you read this opinion-piece (that you paid for!).
…..we’ve proposed six actions that the United States should take to resolve this issue. We’ve personally handed our proposal to every member of Congress, and we’ve spoken about it with every reporter who’s called. We’re getting some traction on these simple, yet tested ideas:
1. Respect families by allowing parents from El Salvador and Honduras who reside legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status to apply for their minor children to reunite. The children’s status would then be linked to their parents. This would immediately reduce immigration court backlogs, and would apply to an estimated 30–40 percent of the children surrendering at the border.
2. Keep kids out of the courtrooms by instituting a Children’s Corps based on the Asylum Officer Corps model. Officers will have training in child-sensitive interview techniques and Best Interest Determination standards, and will determine whether a child is eligible for legal relief. This will move the adjudication process from an adversarial judicial process to an administrative process for most children. Reports indicate that 40–60 percent of these children may be eligible for legal protection.
3. Help children avoid the dangerous journey by allowing them to apply for refugee status from their home country. We’ve previously used this process so that Soviet Jews, Vietnamese, and Cubans could avoid life-threatening escapes. Additionally, other North and South American countries may be willing to accept the children for resettlement.
4. Engage the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to determine international protection needs using its well-established procedures.The UNHCR could then refer cases to the U.S. Department of State for further interviewing and approval before resettlement in the United States, and possibly other countries.
5. Forgive the children by granting Children’s Protected Status (CPS) to all unaccompanied children who have already been brought into custody.We used this approach with Cubans and Haitians who arrived illegally in 1980. The government could announce a cut-off date after which new arrivals would be subject to expedited removal. Granting CPS will relieve the government of the burden and cost of adjudicating the cases of the thousands of unaccompanied minors who are at the border, and will increase the Department of Homeland Security’s capacity to handle other immigration cases.
6. Introduce hope by creating a Regulated Entry Procedure for 10,000 unaccompanied immigrant children per year per country from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. As precedent, a lottery system has allowed 20,000 Cubans to enter the United States annually for the past 34 years. The children would enter the United States legally through a process managed and regulated by the U.S. government.
I love the United States, and I have high expectations for its international behavior and reputation. We can do better, and I commit to being part of the solution.
She began funding legal work for the “unaccompanied minors” nine years ago!
Last night I was looking around to see if all of the federal refugee resettlement contractors were in on the lobbying campaign to Congress to get more money (your money) for their work with the ‘unaccompanied alien teens’ surging our border, and came uponthis story at the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants(USCRI) website.
Jane Fonda with the North Vietnamese in 1972.
Digressing for a minute to explain to new readers, these nine federal refugee contractors are not simply privately-funded humanitarian do-gooder ‘non-profits.’
They are community organizers who advocate for open borders (they lobbied for S.744, the Senate ‘comprehensive immigration reform bill’) just as La Raza does, which they have a right to do, if they stay within legal requirements of their federal grants.
However, the part that pushes me over the edge, and it should you as well, is that these “charities” are almost completely funded by us through our tax dollars. One of them is as much as 99% funded by taxpayer dollars, therefore what they do is very much our business!
[See USCRI’s Form 990 for 2012, their total income was $35.7 million and you gave them $35.4 million—99% of their income is your money—only $246,576 came from private donations!]
As supposedly private non-profits, they are not open to the scrutiny of protections such as the Freedom of Information Act or even financial audits of what they and their 350 subcontractors do with their share of your tax dollars.
Here is a list of quasi-government agencies pretending to be non-profit charities that we would like to see become household names.
Angelina Jolie discovering the third world in 2005. http://africabeat.blogspot.com/2005/12/what-angelina-jolie-can-tell-us-about.html
USCRI held a conference earlier this year in Washington, DC about the “children” (the unaccompanied alien minors) surging the border and in attendance were the First Ladies of Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. See USCRI’s write-up here.
But this is what jumped out at me—Angelina Jolie got USCRI’s ‘unaccompanied alien minors’ program going 9 years ago, but you get to pay for it now!
Every year thousands of children, alone, vulnerable, and fleeing difficult and dangerous circumstances, turn up on U.S. borders. The migrant children most often are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico.
USCRI’s program was established in 2005 with a grant from actress Angelina Jolie to protect the rights of immigrant children. The national program has grown to provide human trafficking services, migration prevention programs, and social work assistance. The Center has served more than 5,000 children in the U.S., and trained thousands of attorneys across the United States to represent unaccompanied migrant children in removal proceedings.
UN Special Envoy Angelina Jolie has every right to fund whatever she wishes with her private money, but since USCRI is effectively a government agency (99% taxpayer-funded) we can be critical of what we believe is a treasonous program doing potentially greater harm to America than anything ‘Hanoi Jane’ did in 1972.
Near the top of the list of our most-read posts almost every day is our Fact Sheet on Refugee Resettlement. In addition to that fact sheet here is a handy report from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) that was published in December that I just came across while searching for something else.
ORR Director Negash: we served 143,000 “refugees” last year.
It is a year-end review for FY2013 and the cover letter is written by ORR Director Eskinder Negash, formerly a Vice President at the contractor US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). His former boss at USCRI, President Lavinia Limon, was a former director of the ORR (did you get that! the ultimate revolving door between grantor and grantee!).
Here are some numbers one should get firmly planted in one’s mind (that applies to me as well!) when people ask you how many refugees are there. Here is what Negash says the ORR “serves:”
….with the United States welcoming refugees from 65 countries across the globe this past year. The highest number of overseas arrivals represented a slight switch from those of the past few years, with nearly 19,500 Iraqi refugee admissions and 16,300 Burmese refugees accounting for more than half of all refugee arrivals.They were followed by Bhutanese (9,100), Somali (7,600) and Cuban refugees (4,200), with Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia rounding out rest of the top ten admissions groups in FY2013.
The overall population served by ORR and its partners, however, grew to a projected 143,000 new arrivals in Fiscal Year 2013, including almost 72,000 refugees and Special Immigrant Visa holders, an estimated 46,000 asylees and Cuban/Haitian Entrants and Parolees; more than 500 Victims of Trafficking, and nearly 25,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC).
And yippee, in the very next paragraph he says they are almost all on a path to citizenship and VOTING! Those unaccompanied kids as well!
The numbers only tell part of the story: most of the 143,000 people ORR served last year are on a path to U.S. citizenship that began the day they arrived. Former refugees, asylees, and UAC are making positive changes in communities across the country—and will continue to do so throughout their lives—opening businesses, buying homes and raising families, and voting (and running!) in local elections.
I often say that we take 70,000 refugees a year on average, but I think we need to follow Negash’s lead and start using a number twice that—143,000 a year arriving in the US and in need of “services” you, the taxpayers, are providing.
Senior VP says shutdown will sully our reputation around the world!
Not surprisingly the shutdown of the US government, that will soon be two weeks old, is causing havoc for contractors including those nine big federal refugee resettlement contractors who frankly could not survive without your tax dollars.
LeLaurin: We get most of our funding from the federal government!
Here is a new boo-hoo story, this time from Voice of America. Previously we heard a similar tale of woe (here) also from St. Louis.
As is the case with most formulaic refugee stories, it begins with a some sad refugees, but part way through we have a spokeswoman from the International Institute of St. Louis (a subcontractor of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants), giving us a frank recitation of their problem.
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI — The U.S. government shutdown has temporarily frozen resettlement of refugees in some parts of the United States. Dozens from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who hoped to arrive in the Midwest state of Missouri in October are in limbo abroad. Family members anxiously awaiting their arrival fear the longer the shutdown goes on, the less likely they will reach their destination.
Read about the unhappy refugees, then here is Suzanne LeLaurin:
“This is not healthy for our country,” said Suzanne LeLaurin, senior vice president at the International Institute, the non-profit group providing the travel funds for Subba’s parents and 34 more refugees – from Iraq, Somalia, Cuba, Burma, and Eritrea.Now, all are in limbo. “It’s not healthy for our reputation around the world, and I think that all of us would wish that Republicans and Democrats alike would sit down and come to an agreement and get the government back in business.”
“We get most of our funding from the federal government, maybe 60 to 70 percent, mostly because of our refugee resettlement services,” said LeLaurin.
She said more is at stake than just resettlement. The support system that helps refugees once they arrive in the U.S. also depends on federal funds. Everything from rent, utilities, and food to staffing the International Institute is at risk as the shutdown continues.
I can’t resist checking these “non-profit” groups’ Form 990s which they file with the IRS. The most recent one available for the International Institute of St. Louis is here. When you go to page nine, note that they took in $4.3 million that year (rounded number) and a whopping $3.7 million came from “government grants.” In fact that is 86% from taxpayers! It is possible that all of their government grants are not federal; perhaps there is some state and local dollars in the mix which would maybemake LeLaurin’s estimate of 60-70% accurate.
And when she says staffing will be affected if the slowdown continues, you bet it will with over $2 million of their budget going to salaries and benefits!
At what point is an organization no longer a private non-profit and is instead a government agency subject to scrutiny by elected officials and citizens? That is what I would like to know!
For new readers, you might want to check our St. Louis archive and be ready to be shocked about all the problems there with refugee issues.
