Posted on 03/20/2016 8:59:08 PM PDT by Ray76
Guest View (op ed)
Readers impressed by Mary Poole’s February 26th guest opinion, “Facts show Missoula can safely welcome refugees,” might want to learn about contemporary realities in refugee resettlement that Poole, co-founder of Soft Landing Missoula, didn’t mention.
First, refugee resettlement in the U.S. is hardly the work of private, sacrificial charity that one might expect from the names — such as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and Episcopal Migration Ministries — of prominent national “voluntary agencies,” or “volags,” involved. For example, International Rescue Committee [IRC], the volag that Poole says would plant refugees in Missoula, is a $560 million/year organization (2014 financials) whose main support, approximately 80 percent, is grants from governments, including at least $190 million from U.S. taxpayers. (Refugee programs are about 15 percent of IRC’s activities, which also include distributing assistance abroad following wars and natural disasters.)
For the nine national refugee volags and their hundreds of regional and local affiliates, maintaining the refugee influx is essential for their finances. This fundamental point was made explicit by David Robinson, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration until April 2012. In a paper prepared for a year 2000 seminar at the National War College, Robinson wrote, “[The volags], including the IRC, form a single body called the Committee on Migration and Refugee Affairs (CMRA). The CMRA wields enormous influence over the Administration's refugee admissions policy. It lobbies [Congress] effectively to increase the number of refugees admitted for permanent resettlement each year …. In fact, the federal government provides about 90 percent of its collective budget. If there is a conflict of interest, it is never mentioned. … The solution [the CMRA’s] members offer to every refugee crisis is simplistic and the same: increase the number of admissions to the United States without regard to budgets or competing foreign policy considerations.”
Because their performances are judged in part on how soon refugees brought in under their auspices attain economic self sufficiency, the volags focus on this. But “self sufficiency” in this context is defined by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, and — amazingly — it merely means that refugees aren’t receiving either Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Refugee Cash Assistance. So refugees can be collecting SNAP (i.e. “food stamps”), medical benefits, housing benefits, energy assistance, and/or Supplemental Security Income, yet still be officially considered “self sufficient”! Thus a priority of the volags is to get “their” newly settled refugees signed up for benefits.
Further, those welfare programs are almost exclusively federal, thus not counting the financial burdens that an influx of refugees also levies on local governments, especially their schools and courts.
Then there’s the matter of “Just who is a refugee?” Condensed and paraphrased from the 1980 Refugee Act, a “refugee” is a person who is outside his country of citizenship and is unwilling to return there because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. But when applied by U.S. bureaucracies and courts, there are surprises here, too. For example, deaf Mexicans who come illegally to the U.S. and apply for asylum (another category of refugee status) now have a substantial chance of succeeding. It’s understandable that such people may have difficult lives, especially in rural Mexico, but it’s absurd to call their situations “persecution,” and it sets up the U.S. to become welfare agency for the whole world.
Cases of Central American women with abusive husbands provide another example of the elastic criteria for “persecution” — and further costs for U.S. taxpayers.
To be blunt, going back decades and even ignoring terrorism concerns, U.S. refugee programs have been fraud-ridden, another class of example being the refugee “families” from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana that DNA testing in 2008 revealed weren’t families at all, just unrelated people who’d spotted an opportunity to move to the U.S.
Perhaps all these additional considerations have previously eluded Soft Landing’s Mary Poole. In any event, the United States exists to benefit our own citizens, and public policy should be made with that concept foremost in mind, not based upon uninformed sentiment and emotion.
-- Paul Nachman, a retired physicist, volunteers in a research group at MSU-Bozeman and is a founding member of Montanans for Immigration Law Enforcement [MILE], www.MontanaMILE.org
References:
- IRC financials: http://feature.rescue.org/annual-report-2014/downloads/2014_IRC_Annual_Report_web.pdf [See p. 24.]
- IRC grants from U.S. government agencies http://www.rescue.org/sites/default/files/resource-file/FY2014%20IRC%20990.pdf [See file pages 19 – 20.]
- David Robinson’s seminar paper: http://tinyurl.com/Robinson-talk [See pp. 6 – 7.]
- Criteria for refugees’ “self sufficiency”: http://www.gao.gov/assets/600/592975.pdf [See footnote #6 on page #3 and text and footnote #43 on page #27.]
- Asylum for deaf Mexicans: http://fusion.net/story/205119/deaf-mexican-immigrants-declaring-asylum-us/
- Asylum for Central American women who’ve suffered domestic abuse: http://immigrationimpact.com/2014/09/02/landmark-decision-on-asylum-claims-recognizes-domestic-violence-victims/
- Fraud among “families” of African refugees: http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/746446_Refugee_Program_Halted_As_DNA_Tests_Show_Fraud_Africans_Lied_to_gain_entry_to_the_US_.html
Thank you. I’ve been saying for a few years that these so-called refugees are being dumped on us by proessional grant writers creating lucrative jobs for themselves at tax payers expense.
They all have warm and friendly names so that is hard to verbally attack them. Catholic Charities receives over $2 billion per year of tax payer money. Much of that is to dump future terrorists ... I mean refugees .... on us.
They belong to an organization with standing declarations of WAR and CONQUEST against mankind! They should be treated accordingly!
Surprise, surprise: White collar gibs me dats!
bkmk
But first they'll plead "asylum" to get hefty monthly SS checks.....PLUS SSI for various ailments. Then the gravy train begins in earnest. The mis-spelling of their odd name is another way they get benefits under several identities.
Here's how the needy Muslims cash-in. This is very common in the Muslim community...this one got caught b/c he murdered two Christians.
REFERENCE A federal criminal complaint detailed a Texas Muslims schemes to bilk the US govt: Claiming he couldn't work he scammed taxpayer disability assistance funds w/ complaints of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue symptoms, affective disorders, and so on.
He maintained several addresses on the Texas property to facilitate various schemes and used various names.
He was collecting tax dollars for a son supposedly living overseas.
At the same time he was secreting real estate, jewels, vehicles and cash in US and foreign bank accounts.
Texas Muslim---Serial Killer of Christians---on Disability and Food Stamps,
had Diamonds and 200 Credit Cards Hidden on Texas property
Front Page Magazine | 6/20/2014 | Daniel Greenfield / FR Posted by Dqban22
This sort of thing is surprisingly common among Muslims -very few seem to have jobs but they drive around in luxury cars and are well-dressed and fed. The only reason this case came to light is because the Texas Muslim refugee committed two murders in Texas, one of which he actually got away with.
The murder of Christian believer, Gelareh Bagherzadeh, was reported earlier. Gelareh Bagherzadeh was an Iranian Christian who came to this country only to be murdered by a Muslim because she encouraged his daughter to marry the man she loved.
The Texas Muslim claimed he was too disabled to work. But he wasn't too disabled to kill.
BACKSTORY The Texan, a strict Muslim, was furious when his Jordanian-American daughter married a man without his permission. The Muslim, Ali Mahwood-Awad Irsan, blamed his daughters husband, relatives say. They say he also faulted one of her closest friends, 30-year-old Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a Christian convert who widely denounced Islam.
<><> First Christian-believer Bagherzadeh was killed, gunned down outside her parents Texas Galleria townhouse complex in January 2012.
<><> Eleven months later, Irsan’s son-in-law died after being shot multiple times in northwest Texas, in the Harris County apartment he shared with his wife.
The Texas Muslim thought he could get away with murdering because he had already gotten away with so many other things in Texas.
Federal authorities executed a search warrant at Irsan’s sprawling, 5-acre property 40 miles north of Houston, where they allegedly found cash, diamonds, pearls, weapons and phony passports hidden in attic rafters, in secret compartments throughout a cluster of trailers and outbuildings and even inside the buried drum of a clothes dryer at the Conroe, Texas property.
The Muslim Irsan, his wife Shmou Ali Alrawabdeh, and another daughter were subsequently arrested on a variety of federal fraud charges and are in federal custody.
A federal criminal complaint detailing the discoveries recounts a saga of nearly 20 years in which the 57-year-old naturalized citizen from Jordan, and his family, allegedly scammed taxpayer disability assistance funds claiming “fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue symptoms,” and “affective disorders” while secreting real estate, vehicles and cash in US and foreign bank accounts.
The complaint also alleges the Muslim Irsan:
<><> was receiving taxpayer funds for a son not living in the US,
<><> maintained several addresses on the property to facilitate various schemes, and,
<><> once disabled a safety feature on a saw then purposefully cut himself to receive a $75,000 settlement.
The Muslim Ali was certainly industrious and entrepreneurial, just not quite in the way amnesty advocates like to claim.
Also found on the property was a makeshift gun range, which witnesses said “five or six Muslim families” frequently visited to fire AK-47s and information about Irsan’s attempts to get a silencer. Nothing to do with Islam I’m sure.
The rest of the scam ...... While there have been no allegations of terrorist ties regarding the Muslim familys alleged (a) foreign bank accounts, and, (b) suspicious wire transactions, Irsan’s strict adherence to radical Islam may have been a motive in the alleged murders.
Authorities are also re-examining a 1999 case in which Irsan was not indicted after claiming self-defense in the shooting of son-in-law Amjad Alidam, who was married to Nasemah Rachelle Irsan.
Prosecutors also revealed, in connection to the social security fraud and credit card charges against Irsan, that they found more than 200 credit cards with various names and multiple variations of his own name throughout the home.
Arresting officers say they also found more than 40 similar credit cards in his wallet the morning he was arrested. His daughter also alleges, among multiple other schemes detailed in court documents, that Ali Irsan purposely disabled the safety device on a Ryobi rotary saw and purposely cut his own foot. Prosecutors say he used that injury to receive a $75,000 settlement from the manufacturer.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/muslim-killer-on-disability-and-food-stamps-had-diamonds-and-200-credit-cards/print/
Yet another example of the Leftist hypocrisy of ‘separation of church and State’.
They’ll soon need to update the SoL plague: Give me your tired, huddle masses, yearning...for FREE (taxpayer provided) benefits
DNA testing is racist! It is disproportionately impacting people of color who are trying to game the system.
Yes, some people are making a lot of money bring refugees here, and we are paying their salaries.
And most of the so called refugees from Mexico and central America are not escaping persecution, they are just escaping poverty and domestic/gang violence, all of which should be handled by their home governments, not the U.S. taxpayers.
The Muslims believe they are entitled to collect the jizya or tax on non-believers, so to them collecting our SS and welfare payments is their right. There have been some mama’s that have openly admitted that.
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