The Mayor, city council and county commissioners of Missoula County Montana have given their blessing to the New York City-based International Rescue Committee headed by former British Foreign Secretary and globalist David Miliband (good friend of both George Soros and Hillary Clinton) to begin the colonization of Montana with third world refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia beginning in Missoula.
I have so much to say, where to begin? First, if you are a new reader, see all of my previous posts on Montana by clicking here. Remember the driver for these new offices (this article says Tallahassee, FL just got a new office) is that Obama has upped the number of refugees to be resettled this year from the recent 70,000 a year to 85,000 for FY2016 (runs from Oct. 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016) and frankly they are running out of ‘capacity’ in existing resettlement cities.
Cities are overloaded and experiencing problems with such things as inadequate housing and not enough jobs for refugees. Tensions are building in overloaded cities and they are looking to get a foothold into fresh territory.
So, since we learn in this article that the approval for the resettlement was granted for this fiscal year, it should happen quickly, AND it also means that the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has already sent a R & P Abstract to the US State Department.
The Abstract is the document that is supposed to have been created with consultation with local elected officials. Did that happen?
Where is the plan?
First thing I would ask is for the Mayor/city council/commissioners to release to the public the R & P Abstract.
See what one looks like by clicking here. You are entitled to this document no matter what they say!
Wiser mayors, like the one (a Democrat!) in Athens, GA, demanded that the IRC present a plan (to the public) that described the housing availability situation in the city, how many children would be added to the school system, was there an adequate public healthcare system available, and where would they work. She wanted a “formal refugee integration plan.” The IRC and the State Department refused to provide a plan and last I checked they had reached a stalemate (could have been resolved by now, that was in 2014).
And, one more thing before this latest news from Montana, be sure to see my “Ten things your town needs to know” when a resettlement agency is about to open in your town.
Here is what the Missoulian says about the decision by the federal government to seed Montana soon!
Now that it’s a reality, there’s much work to be done before a refugee resettlement office is up and running in Missoula.
“There’s a process through the (U.S.) State Department, which is already occurring, but it’s not instant,” Bob Johnson of the Seattle office of the International Rescue Committee said this week.
Coming to Montana once the IRC has a foothold! This is the IRC’s handiwork in Seattle! Somali refugees have gobbled up much of the public housing and are protesting a plan that would require them to pay a little more for that housing when they find a job. Signs in the back say “No Rent Hike.”
The IRC announced last week it had the go-ahead from the State Department to lay the groundwork to establish an office in Missoula for the second time. Johnson was at the ground level when the first one opened in 1979 to help hundreds of people fleeing persecution in Southeast Asia – most of them Hmong from the highlands of Laos – after the Vietnam War.
Today, the IRC is one of nine resettlement agencies in the U.S. The Missoula office will be the 27th in the nation for IRC, the most recent opening in Tallahassee, Florida, in March 2015.
Missoula was the first to announce plans to open this fiscal year, which began in October. The Obama administration raised from 70,000 to 85,000 the number of refugees the nation will accept in fiscal 2016. It also bumped up to 10,000 the number of refugees the U.S. will accept from Syria, an act that has escalated fears of domestic terrorism in the U.S.
Pay attention to this next part! The nine ‘non-profit’ federal contractors sit around a table once a week in Washington and decide where to send each refugee.
“They process the refugees who’ve been accepted and assign them to the nine different agencies that work with them,” said Johnson. “They have an allocations meeting once a week that all the agencies attend. There’s a formula of who gets which cases, and then the agencies will assign them to local offices based on capacity, language capacity, the existing population that’s already there and so on.”
The IRC’s application to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration for a Missoula office proposed a staff of 2 1/2 positions – an executive director, a caseworker and a half-time finance manager. The latter job is expected to bloom into a full-time position when numbers warrant it.
[….]
The placement of a resettlement office has touched off a barrage of protests from all quarters of the state, many citing security issues. Mayor John Engen, most Missoula City Council members and all three county commissioners have publicly supported it and voiced confidence that the screening process is adequate.
First, concerned citizens of Montana must contact the local elected officials and ask to see the IRC’s “application to the State Department” and the R & P Abstract.
The Mayor, City Council, and Commissioners must have those documents! If those elected officials claim they never saw them and were not involved in their preparation then you can be sure they have let you down! They are not doing their jobs to protect their citizens both financially and security-wise.
Then if you suspect that they do have the documents and are simply not making them public, use whatever Public Information/Freedom of Information law you have in Montana to obtain them.
And, while you are at it, be sure to research the legal structure of Miss Mary’s Soft Landings, get their incorporation papers with the state (usually through the State Attorney General’s Office). IRC will certainly have to incorporate a non-profit in the state as well. See if you can find out if that process is underway.
Find out if Montana has a state refugee coordinator. Tell the public who that is.
Some concerned citizens should also be publishing a state-wide blog or website to publish everything you learn about the program in the state and identify all of the elected officials and groups like the Chamber of Commerce (cheap labor!) pushing the resettlement. And, always remember they hide behind the humanitarian mask, but somewhere there are some global business interests looking to assure a steady supply of cheap immigrant labor to the state—find out who they are!
Bottomline is to get your facts and publish them! The only way this program has become so advanced over the last 30 plus years is that it has operated in virtual secrecy. Demand transparency!
Photo: See my December 2014 post about the housing proposal being protested by the Somali ‘community.’ Work! Pay more rent!
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Tennesseans urged to sign petition, Governor must hear from the people!
Posted by Ann Corcoran on March 27, 2016
Editor: This is a guest post by Don Barnett, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a resident of Tennessee.
Barnett:
The resettlement program is so little understood and secretive that the contractors can make blatantly false statements and be assured those statements will be reported as fact by the media.
As reported in The Tennessean, the contractor notes that “a 2013 report presented to the Joint Government Operations Legislative Advisory Committee determined that refugees and their descendants provided $1.4 billion in revenue for Tennessee between 1990 and 2012, compared with requiring $753 million in state support.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam (R) doesn’t want to rock the boat on refugee flow to TN. Photo: http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2015/06/30/lawmakers-downplay-obamas-impact-insure-tennessee/29491441/
The 2013 study was actually very limited and makes no such sweeping conclusion.
In assessing the cost of publicly funded benefits for refugees the study looked at just 2 programs – public education (including ELL) and Tenncare(Medicaid). It ignored a whole range of programs which Tennesseans use and fund both with Tennessee tax dollars and as federal tax payers.
Sen. Mark Norris noted that at last count 11 state funded programs were being accessed by arriving refugees.
The study assumed that refugees were using Tenncare (Medicaid) at the same rate as average Tennesseans even though up to 59% of refugees have been placed into Tenncare upon arrival in recent years.
A recent federal study found staggering welfare usage rates even among those in the country for 5 years – majority still on food stamps, 44% on Medicaid, 29 % of families with one or more members on SSI, 17% on TANF and so on.
In spite of known high welfare usage among refugees, the report assumed refugees pay state taxes at the same rate as average Tennesseans.
The study, which was supposed to have determined to what extent the feds had placed an unfunded mandate on the state of Tennessee, was hijacked by the pro-refugee lobby, i.e. the local Chamber of Commerce and refugee contractors.
The seemingly positive outcome of the study was foreordained even though the study authors themselves concluded “The information necessary to complete a comprehensive study on the possible cost shifting from the federal government to the state for the resettlement of refugees is not available.” And even though a complete reading of the study does not allow for any positive conclusion despite refugee industry statements.
Perhaps Tennesseans best hope is passage of senate resolution SJR467 which would allow The Thomas More Law Center to sue the federal government over refugee resettlement on 10th amendment grounds. The public services law center will take the case at no charge to the state of Tennessee. Not only might it shed light on this program, but most importantly it would clarify to what extent, if any, the federal government can force a state to use state taxes to cover unfunded costs imposed by a federal program.
The resolution has overwhelming support in both houses of the Tennessee legislature but has stirred fierce opposition from the usual suspects, including Governor Haslam.
All Tennesseans concerned with this should sign the petition included here http://keeptnsafe.com/petition/ and tell the Governor to stop trying to block the democratic process.
For our extensive Tennessee archive, click here. See here for background on what the governor is doing.
This political work on-going in Tennessee, on the question of refugee resettlement and states’ rights, is groundbreaking!
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Posted in Changing the way we live, Colonization, Comments worth noting/guest posts, Community destabilization, creating a movement, Nashville, Pockets of Resistance, Reforms needed, Refugee Resettlement Program, Resettlement cities, Taxpayer goodies, The Opposition, Who is going where | Tagged: Tennessee | 4 Comments »