Are these Cuban immigrants refugees?

I bet you were under the impression that the era of Cuban refugees streaming to the US had pretty much ended.  A reader sent this article about a Cuban family being resettled in Texas by the International Rescue Committee and commented about this line in the article:

 The family said they sought asylum in the U.S. three years ago for economic reasons.

The legal definition of a refugee is:

REFUGEE - Any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

So, we don’t just take people, even families like this one who sound like nice people, into the refugee program who are economic migrants as they appear to be.  They need to be persecuted or fear persecution.

What is the big deal?  Well, refugees are entitled to taxpayer subsidized airfare loans, subsidized housing, a case worker provided through the volag and funded by you, food stamps and other forms of welfare.    Other immigrants are on their own.

One bit of information I discovered is that the Cubans don’t even have to be outside of the country to seek asylum, we now process them in Cuba.  See this information.

A bucket of cold water on the International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the top ten volags resettling refugees in the US.   Yesterday the Mercury News published the usual puff piece on an IRC fundraising intiative they held recently in San Jose. 

Then here comes Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees with a comment to throw some ice cold water on the warm and fuzzy piece:

Readers should know that the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has been mired for years with chronic problems in its refugee resettlement program in California and throughout the U.S.

At the IRC office in San Jose U.S. State Department inspectors found a refugee family living in a two-bedroom apartment with another family of three. Neither of the parents had received English lessons or job training and neither one of them had submitted a single job application. The family was barely scrapping by, and the father said that he was just waiting for IRC to find him a job and send him to English lessons. The government inspectors also met with two other IRC refugee client families – they reported that they had not received any furniture (basic household furniture is supposedly a “minimum requirement” of IRC’s refugee contracts with the government).

An inspection of the IRC office in San Francisco showed that early refugee employment outcomes to be a low 50% after one year – that is, only 50% of the refugees were employed after one year in the US, even though the US refugee program supposedly stresses early self-sufficiency for the refugees. Case files also contained a form which refugees were required to sign stating that they would accept “any job offered” (refugee resettlement agencies such as IRC receive public funds to refer refugees to jobs that will allow them to become economically self-sufficient, jobs which are sustainable – not simply to take any job offered). Home visits to the IRC San Francisco office’s refugee clients revealed one refugee family that reported that IRC had not given them any furniture. The parents were also not taking any English classes. Yet another refugee client reported that he had been placed in an apartment nearly bereft of furniture (with only a mattress and box springs, a small card table, and one folding metal chair).

The IRC needs to get its house in order.

Lest you think the IRC is a struggling outfit, here is what I wrote about them last October.  I was writing about how the volags create a kind of drumbeat by getting articles published about needy refugees.  Anne Richard (IRC vice president) had written such a piece about Iraqis that prompted my post. 

… Anne Richard is a former employee of the US State Department having worked for Madeleine Albright (the revolving door in action). She makes a salary of between $100,000 and $200,000 (based on the salaries of other VP’s at IRC). But that is ’chump change’ compared to the IRC CEO’s salary. Dr. George Rupp, former Pres. of Columbia University, brings in a cool $357,657 a year salary according to the organization’s 2005 Form 990. Thats more than the Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court receive (no wonder public service is so unpopular).

The IRC is a $200 million plus a year organization that recieves close to half of its income from you, the taxpayer. Actually it was $88 million from government grants in 2005. The immigration industry is big business and in order to stay in business it needs to find “refugees” to move around the world. 

See my post of June 23rd about a radio program from California and check out the ‘needy’ Iraqi refugees the IRC is bringing to a city near you.

Utah: Too many refugees? Just say, no! Wyoming did!

Utah is feeling the strain with too many refugees for the welfare system to handle. No sympathy here because you could just say, no! Tell the US State Department to tell their NGO contractors to cut the flow until you can get caught up with the needs of your own destitute people before they send you more from all corners of the world.  If you have trouble getting the State Department’s attention, then tell your Congressional delegation to get involved. 

Here is what the Salt Lake Tribune says today:

The dilemma has been raised on the governor’s advisory committee examining refugee services, said Michael Gallegos, director of the Salt Lake County Division of Community Resources and Development. “The question has come up: Can we turn the faucet down a little bit so we can get prepared and deal with issues already in front of us?” he said. “We don’t have the capacity to serve the refugees we have right now.”

Upon arrival, refugees are eligible for food stamps, cash assistance programs, Medicaid and other services, some of which are available for years, some for as little as eight months.

But after receiving initial housing assistance, refugee families join thousands of other Utahns hoping to obtain a federal subsidy that can significantly discount their rent. Many in this new wave of refugees will join more than 4,000 residents already on the Salt Lake City Housing Authority waiting list. They will have to wait at least two years to get a housing discount voucher

Frankly, I don’t get this. What is everyone so afraid of?  Afraid of looking “unwelcoming”?  Maybe someone will call you a racist?  There is nothing wrong with saying, we need a little breather here.  Wyoming does not participate in refugee resettlement and I don’t see that state maligned for the decision. 

Then this last line is really annoying.   

Refugees often feel helpless and alone when faced with a stack of critical documents linking them to food, medical care and other services .
“We’ve had people say, ‘It was better in the camps,’ ” Brown [Utah Refugee Services Director] said. 

We have from the earliest days of writing this blog advocated for the institution of a social and economic impact study of cities and states to help determine if a locale could handle new refugees.  If it was regularly updated better planning would surely result.

We have an extensive archive on Utah here.  Sadly Utah made the news a few months ago as the location where a little Burmese refugee girl was raped and murdered by another refugee in their housing complex.

Chris Coen weighs in on World Relief and Fort Wayne

Earlier this month we reported on a volag “cat fight” going on in Ft. Wayne, IN.  It seems that volag World Relief (Corporation of National Association of Evangelicals) is trying to horn in on Catholic Charities lucrative territory in Ft. Wayne.  

As we have reported many times on this blog, these agencies are paid by the head to resettle refugees and so they are often competitive.   In the case of Ft. Wayne there are huge numbers of Burmese going to that city which has put out the refugee welcome mat.   Those refugees want to bring family members to Ft. Wayne, and refugees in camps in Thailand also request resettlement in Ft. Wayne because they want to live near people like themselves.

This week the Journal Gazette in Ft. Wayne published this letter (scroll down) from Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees: 

Refugee agencies rife with problems

I saw the editorial “Helping refugees”  regarding World Relief’s proposal to open an office in Fort Wayne. I don’t know whether its presence in Fort Wayne will be good for all or not, but my experience with World Relief has not been positive. I am an independent volunteer assisting refugees since 2001. I started a group to monitor the U.S. refugee resettlement program with a small group of volunteers in 2002.

We found refugees who were being neglected and abused by their World Relief agency in 2003-05 north of Tampa, Fla. That refugee program was subsequently shuttered by the Department of State in 2006 because of the neglect of the refugees.

World Relief also seems to have some irregularities in its accounting.

In fairness to World Relief, though, there seem to be quite a few irregularities and neglect of refugees in the U.S Refugee Resettlement Program. There is also extensive documentation of Catholic Charities and the other eight national refugee resettlement agencies neglecting refugees. The State Department has done very little to clean up the problems.

CHRISTOPHER COEN Friends of Refugees Minneapolis

I have on my desk a GAO (General Accounting Office) investigative report on World Relief from 2004.  The report is highly critical of the volag which could not properly account for over $2 million in federal funds.  I don’t know if they have cleaned up the shoddy accounting practices or not.

One interesting little bit in the report was that when refugee numbers declined dramatically in the years immediately following 9/11, World Relief spent more federal dollars than the GAO thought reasonable.  I’m going to bet however that all the volags had a shopping spree during this time because the federal government responded to their plea for funding at the same level as pre-September 11th because the volags complained that they needed to keep offices open and paying staff in anticipation of a return to the higher number of refugees.     Bottomline is that we taxpayers paid for all these non-profits to stay in business even though the refugee numbers were extremely low for a couple of years.

A related matter appeared in the Journal Gazette in mid-June.

The Health Department in Ft. Wayne has been financially strapped due to the huge number of refugees that need vacinations and treatment for HIV and TB.   Buried in another article about outdoor cooking rules is this information:

Waldron [Health Dept. Administrator] said the county commissioners have indicated they will approve $2 million toward relocation of the infectious disease clinic.

With the growing demands in refugee care, the health department needs additional space, and commissioners have asked the department to explore existing clinic sites or other buildings that could be used by the health department. 

But, what can you do?   As I said earlier Ft. Wayne has put out the word that it is a “welcoming” city.

Volunteers are good for refugees, while volag lets them down

This is a story I missed from earlier in the month.   It’s a touching story from North Carolina about how a couple of women have been a Godsend to Burmese Karen Christian refugees who felt abandoned.   Read the whole story here.

There is a single sentence near the end of the article that caught the eye of one of our readers.

Paw Yeh shared how deserted her family felt when a refugee caseworker dropped them off at their Carrboro apartment with two days of rice and not even so much as a blanket.

Which volag left these poor scared people with some rice and nothing else?    Was it Lutheran Family Services, World Relief, or possibly the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, all paid government contractors operating in North Carolina?

Reforms needed

We see over and over again in differant parts of the country where the volags are actually discouraging citizen volunteer help with refugees while one of the important reforms we have advocated is increased involvement by the public with the care and assimilation of refugees, not less.    Had a church or other group been lined up to greet and care for this family they would never have been “dropped off” to an empty apartment.

 

International Institute of New Hampshire screws up

Add the International Institute of New Hampshire to the list of subcontractors of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) not taking care of refugees.   I know I said this before (in my Akron post), but I really couldn’t believe my eyes to see the complaints leveled against this volag in Manchester, NH and how similar they are to complaints in Waterbury, CT and Akron, OH.   The Union Leader says:

Even so, Sanderson’s [longtime director of the Institute] departure follows an approximate four-month period in which community refugee advocates brought concerns about refugee resettlement in Manchester to the institute’s Boston headquarters and U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu, who relayed them to the U.S. State Department, his spokesman said.

Sununu, R-N.H., said his office is reviewing how many federal funds go toward settling refugees in New Hampshire and how it is spent.

“Are the right resources being allocated to housing, to health care, to education?” Sununu asked during a recent visit to Manchester.

Dear US State Department, why is the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants even one of the top ten refugee resettlement government contractors?  Is it because USCRI President Limon has come through the government/NGO revolving door?

Advocates said they raised other issues since late winter: poor quality, insect-infested housing; the institute’s alleged unwillingness to forge cooperative relationships with civic and church groups and volunteers whom refugees often turn to for help; questions about how federal funds allotted each refugee are split between the refugee and resettlement agency; and Manchester’s capacity to absorb more refugees.

Manchester sounds exactly like Waterbury.  Most puzzling to me is why do these International Institute’s not seek enough help from churches and apparently even turn volunteers off.  We have been advocating a reform of the program that would put more responsibility for resettlement on volunteer churches and other groups, not less! 

Baines [former mayor, Robert Baines] was mayor in 2004 when the city succeeded in getting a three-month moratorium imposed on refugee resettlement after Manchester became overwhelmed with an unexpected influx of mostly Africans, including 34 children who became lead poisoned. Baines attributed most of the problems to the state’s other refugee resettlement agency, the Concord-based Lutheran Social Services of Northern New England, which he said brought refugees to Manchester without notifying school, health and other city officials.

Since then, the state’s largest city — which historically has absorbed most of the state’s refugees — has suggested other communities share in taking in refugees. 

That is no surprise.  We are hearing that everywhere?   Why us?  Why so many to our city?  It is simply because you let the program take root in the first place and at one point some leaders in your city were perceived as “welcoming”.  And, anyone who squawked too loud was silenced with charges that they were racist, xenophobic and uncharitable.

Based on some hardhitting comments to the Union Leader, the city isn’t so “welcoming” any more.  Here are just two:

While the citizens of this state and this country continue to get strangled by rising prices and a devalued dollar, we are forced to be a host to people without basic means of support. This is done against our will and without a vote. Therefore every employee of the International Institute as well as Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charaties should be identified and then mandated to pay for every refugee that is settled here. They should also be mandated to serve the prison term each refugee recieves for any crimes commited. Then you would see how fast this BS would stop.
- John S., Manchester, NH 

Whether you’re a hard-nosed conservative or a bleeding-heart liberal, the bottom line is this: the will of the people must dictate political action. If a majority of residents are in favor of these programs, do it. If a majority are against, you don’t do it. Too often in this country, people like Bracy, Benedict-Drew and Sununu act without the slightest regard for the will of the majority of the community’s residents/voters.
- Matt, Manchester

John and Matt have hit the nail on the head.  If the volags (supposedly volunteer resettlement agencies) had to use their own funds (and not the taxpayers funds), resettlement would be slowed to a manageable level.  Also, we have contended from the earliest days of this blog that communities should be given all the facts and then the community should decide if they want refugees in the first place, or at some point should be able to say they have enough for now.

You know the old saying, “the buck stops here,”  well this buck stops with the US State Department and USCRI whose pres., Lavinia Limon , gets a few of those bucks herself ($195,000 annual salary courtesy of the US Taxpayer). 

Read about Waterbury, CT here and Akron, OH here. 

Refugees replace illegal aliens at meatpacking plants

Yesterday a reader sent me a story written by Miriam Jordan at the Wall Street Journal, but you would know it, the Wall Street Journal wants a subscription before you can read the whole thing.    I wasn’t looking forward to copying large sections of it from a pdf file, so this morning I was happy to see that American Renaissance has done that work for me here.    They didn’t take all the sections I thought interesting but they  do have enough of the story for you to get the gist of it as well as some comments worth reading.

Our volag worker, Mike, told us this week that Refugee resettlement should be about economics—-bringing healthy workers into the US—the Wall Street Journal pretty much confirms with this story that it is.    I think it’s time for refugee advocates to drop the pretense and stop beating the citizenry over the head with the humanitarian angle and admit much of this program is driven by big business—like Swifts or Tysons Food— and their big business head hunters in the State Department and some of the volags.

I wrote about the refugee situation in the Texas panhandle back in early May here and here.

Note:  The health department for Cactus, TX needs to check with the health department in Ft. Wayne (Allen County), IN where they do have huge expenses related to the health of the Burmese refugees, esp. involving TB.

Fort Wayne, IN: Volag cat fight?

I’m posting this whole short article from the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette about a second refugee agency horning in on Catholic Charities territory in Ft. Wayne, IN.   The article is revealing in several ways.  First, it confirms what we have written about in the past that the top ten volags (not really voluntary agencies because they get paid) are competing with each other for customers (refugees).

The article also helps answer a question I had from a reader just this morning.  The reader (who learned about us because I wrote a letter to VDARE) asked how are cities picked to be resettlement cities?  This article confirms another thing we have written about, that the volags (and not the federal government) choose the cities.  Volags are non-governmental organizations!  They have no power over local community governments!   

And, pay attention!  This is really important!  Once a city is deemed “welcoming” and doesn’t squawk it will receive more refugees through family reunification.  The volags take applications for family members from the refugees they have previously placed and the refugee population increases while the volags get the per head government payment.

Here is the whole article:

 

An international humanitarian aid organization will visit Fort Wayne next week to discuss opening a refugee resettlement office in the city.

Five staff members of World Relief Corp., one of the voluntary agencies used by the U.S. State Department to place refugees in American communities, will conduct meetings with churches, business leaders and other support agencies, said Tanya Thomas, World Relief’s north regional director.

Currently, Catholic Charities, in cooperation with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been responsible for resettling refugees in this area – including more than 600 Burmese last year, according to the agency.

National representatives of the 10 voluntary agencies responsible for resettling refugees meet weekly to discuss incoming cases. Based on criteria such as community resources, refugees’ geographic preferences or reunifications of families, the federal government assigns each case to a local resettlement office. [Editor:  and whether they have deemed the city "welcoming"]

Because Fort Wayne has one of the largest concentrations of Burmese in the U.S. – estimated at more than 3,000 – refugees in camps in Thailand often request to come to the Fort Wayne area.

The frequency of requests for placement in Fort Wayne drew World Relief’s attention, Thomas said.

World Relief’s national staff spoke with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Indiana’s state refugee coordinator about opening an office in Fort Wayne, and both expressed support, Thomas said.

The office would primarily resettle Burmese of the Karen and Chin ethnic minorities and refugees from a few African and Asian countries.

Local resettlement offices receive less than $500 per refugee from the federal government. [Editor: this is deceptive because the volags receive all sorts of other government grants from other agencies in addition to this fee from the US State Department.]

If the agency decides to open a local office, the timing of its opening would depend on funding, Thomas said.

Debbie Schmidt, executive director of Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, said she is uncertain whether there is a need for a second refugee resettlement office in the city.  [Editor:  Hissssss]

She expressed concern that having two offices might cause confusion among the schools, medical offices and other community agencies that work with refugees.

 

We have written extensively about the huge refugee community in Ft. Wayne and the problems it has created for taxpayers, especially with the health department of Allen County (the cost of TB treatment alone has been burdonsome). 

I discussed the squawk factor the other day in my post on Aurora here.  That is World Relief involved there too. 

At least 75 Iraqi refugees resettled in Boise

The Idaho News reports:

BOISE - Thousands of Iraqi refugees are leaving their war-torn country and coming to America in search of refuge. 

In just the last year alone, more than 4,000 Iraqi refugees have fled to cities across America - with at least 75 landing in Boise - and hundreds more could come by the end of this year.

The article is written in the starry-eyed way reporters write when they do not seek out opposing views. She interviews one of the refugees, a 57-year-old reporter whose grown children remain in Iraq. It is hard to be away from them. And the climate isn’t what he is used to.

Sabah Googled Boise when he found out he and his family would be moving here. He was shocked to see the Boise weather and landscape.

“(On) Google, you see the clouds moving and the Boise River,” he said. “You think what’s happening there - my God.  This is a crazy area, with the snow, everything white.”  

But of course everything has turned out just fine.

Sabah says the people of Boise have welcomed he and his family with open arms. [Does the newspaper have a copy editor? Did the reporter go to college? The people "welcomed he"?] 

“They are very receptive, helpful, friendly and smiling.”

He says he looks forward to calling the City of Trees home.

“When the plane landed here, right away, I felt the place like it’s a haven,” he said. “A kind of wonderful place.”

Well, everything’s hunky-dory then. No need for further investigation.

Ann wrote about Boise in April, just one of many posts on the city. You’d think this reporter could have looked at some of the complexities of refugee resettlement there instead of just repeating the usual shallow line. Maybe RRW should establish an award to the rare reporters who go beyond the press releases on this issue.

Gateway cities: the Sacramento example

Check out this article “Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrants in Suburban America” at Immigration Daily a publication of the ILW.com.  (You might even want to subcribe to the free publication.)

We’ve mentioned Gateway cities in the past.  Traditionally immigrants arriving in the US went to certain cities. Two that come readily to mind are  New York and Los Angeles.  All that has changed and immigrants and refugees are spreading out not just to large and medium-sized cities but to suburban areas as well.    Audrey Singer and co-authors have written a book entitled, “Twenty-first Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America” in which they describe the changing demographics throughout the US.

Here’s one example from this article about the book:   The apparently ‘welcoming’ city of Sacramento, CA 

Sacramento, although it is the capital of California and located in a traditional settlement state, had been largely bypassed by immigrants during the mid-20th century, but its foreign-born population began rising during the 1980s and 1990s due mainly to refugee resettlement.

[...]

 

 

Geographers Robin Datel and Dennis Dingemans identify a host of forces that have led to the re-emergence of Sacramento as a gateway of immigration. These include a history of immigrant settlement, the region’s role as a refugee magnet, the availability of inexpensive suburban housing, and the demand for both brain and brawn migrants.

Sacramento had about 250,000 foreign-born residents in 2000, and it gained another 100,000 by 2006, making it 17.6 percent foreign born. Forty-one percent of this population is from Asia; 33 percent from Latin America; and 11 percent from Eastern Europe. Furthermore, Sacramento ranked tenth among all US metropolitan areas in the absolute number of refugees that were resettled between 1983 and 2004.

 

Wow, 100,000 immigrants added to the city in just six years. 

* Note to cities:  You can say ‘no’ after awhile.