The pushback started earlier this year in South
Carolina, then spread to Minnesota, Idaho, and now North Dakota.
Michigan and Ohio are also organizing against
what local residents say is a sinister and sneaky federal program that almost
never gets serious coverage from local media. It’s the U.S. State Department’s
refugee resettlement program, which has been humming along on autopilot since
Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, signed by President Jimmy Carter.
Since that time, more than 3 million refugees
from Third World countries have been permanently resettled in more than 190
American cities and towns.
On the rare occasions when the program attracts
national media coverage, it almost always gets spun in a positive light, citing
emotional, sometimes tear-jerking stories of refugees rescued from violence in
their homelands.
But activists say there’s another side to the
refugee program that isn’t being told.
No longer satisfied with pat answers, residents
in several states are starting to ask the hard questions. They are showing up
at meetings, starting blogs and email lists, digging up information and bypassing
local media to inform their friends and neighbors of what’s really going on
with the refugee movement.
In conservative Twin Falls, Idaho, for instance,
a group of 100 activists are going door to door informing their neighbors about
how the refugee program works. Organizer Rick Martin says most people are
surprised to find out that the United Nations picks most of the refugees
destined for America, and that the Catholic Church, the Lutheran and Episcopal
churches, along with evangelical and Jewish groups get paid by the federal
government to resettle refugees in the U.S.
“When we mention that the U.N. is involved most
of the time they won’t believe it, so we have to show them the articles,”
Martin said.
The U.N. connection could explain why so many
Muslim refugees are coming to the U.S. from jihadist hotbeds like Syria and
Somalia while persecuted Christians in Syria, Iraq and Egypt have a hard time
getting within sight of the Statue of Liberty. It may also explain why Muslim
countries with plenty of open land, such as Saudi Arabia, aren’t taking in more
of the Sunni Muslim refugees being created by jihadist-inspired civil strife in
Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.
Changing the demographics of small-town America
Hundreds of residents in
Fargo and Cass County, North Dakota, are the latest to get active. More than
2,500 have signed an online petition titled “Stop Lutheran Social Services in
Fargo!” at
change.org.
LSS, a subsidiary of Lutheran Immigration and
Refugee Service, one of the nine resettlement agencies or VOLAGs, has been
funneling U.N.-selected refugees into Midwestern states areas like the Dakotas
and Minnesota for years. Since 2002 the small cities of Fargo and West Fargo
have received 3,647 refugees from more than two dozen Third World countries
including 1,397 refugees from Bhutan, 670 from Somalia, 567 from Iraq, 209 from
Liberia, 196 from Democratic Republic of Congo, and the balance from Iraq,
Afghanistan, Russia, Cambodia, Chad, Columbia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda,
Sierra Leone, Sudan, Burundi, Burma and Bosnia, according to government
databases.
On Thursday of last week
Lutheran Social Services announced
it has rejected the online petitioners’
plea, saying it would continue to resettle refugees from around the world in
Fargo, demonstrating once again that the agency works for the federal
government and the United Nations, not the people of Fargo or North Dakota.
At that point the petition had 450 signatures.
By Saturday afternoon it was up to 2,370 signatures and by Sunday afternoon it
surpassed 2,500.
The petition states that “Lutheran Social
Services has already brought 350 immigrants to Fargo this year and plans to
bring more in the second half of the year. We need to send a message to the
legislative body in our county to stop this without having a vote by the
population of Cass County. We would like facts and data on the immigrants and
refugees already brought in by LSS.”
A steady stream of cheap labor for meat packers
The fact that a private agency like LSS can
single-handedly change the demographics of a city without that city’s consent
just doesn’t seem right, said petition organizer Damon Quadnik of Fargo.
Lutheran Social services is “ruining Fargo for
their own profit,” states Quradnik, who started the petition less than a week
ago.
Ouradnik said he is also reaching out his North
Dakota senators seeking their help in shutting off the spigot of refugees being
resettled at taxpayer expense by Lutheran Social Services. He wants them to
stop the resettlements until the residents of Cass County have had a chance to
vote on the issue.
Citizens are also starting to organize against
the mass resettlement of refugees in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and nearby Willmar,
where Somali refugees have been sent for years by Lutheran Social Services and
Catholic Charities to work in meatpacking plants owned by Hormel.
The nine private resettlement agencies,
including “charities” within the Lutheran, Catholic, Episcopalian, and
evangelical churches, get federal grants to resettle the refugees, essentially
acting as front groups for the government, but without the transparency and
accountability that would be expected if the government did the work itself,
said Bob Enos, spokesman for T-3 (Truth and Transparency in Taxation) in St.
Cloud. His group is pushing for more openness in the way refugees are resettled
in Minnesota.
“I think the meat packers had a lot to do with
this,” Enos, a former businessman, told WND. “These are people in business
whose raw materials won’t allow them to outsource overseas, so if you can’t
bring the factory overseas you bring overseas to the factory.”
Overall, the United Nations has sent nearly
500,000 refugees directly from the Third World to more than 190 cities and
towns across the U.S. since President Obama took office.
But the refugee pipeline from the Mideast and
Africa really got jumpstarted under presidents George H. Walker Bush and Bill
Clinton. Since 1990, more than 3 million foreign refugees have been permanently
resettled in the U.S., with approximately 1 million coming from
Muslim-dominated countries that have a history of hostility toward America such
as Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uzbekistan and
Iraq.
The nation of Myanmar,
also called Burma, which is run by Buddhists, is also now trying to unload its
Muslim minority, known as the Rohingya, to any country that will take them as
“refugees.” The nation’s Buddhist monks fear rising radicalization of Muslims
around the world will envelop the Rohingya and so they are increasingly being
herded into refugee camps bound for countries in the West, according to a June
2015 report
by the Institute for Security and Policy Studies. The U.N. has already sent about 1,000 Rohingya
to the U.S.
In one country where the U.S. could have used
the refugee program to rescue persecuted Christians – Syria – it has failed to
do so. Over the past year more than 1,150 refugees have entered the U.S. from
Syria with only a small handful of 40 Christians among them, while 95 percent
have been Muslim, according to a search of federal government databases.
Mounting resistance in Idaho
Another city that is organizing and pushing back
against the refugee program is Twin Falls, in the conservative state of Idaho.
Chobani Yogurt operates the world’s largest yogurt plant in Twin Falls and a
massive new meat-packing plant is on the drawing board in Boise, making it
prime territory for an influx of low-skill, low-wage foreign workers.
Idaho, a sparsely populated agricultural state,
has been infused with 10,166 refugees from the Third World since 2002,
according to federal databases.
But the resistance is
now in full swing. Some 100 people showed up at a series of townhall meetings
last week hosted by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and almost all of them were there
to express concerns about refugees, according
to TVOI News.
Crapo in July told
the Times-News of Twin Falls that he
“understands the need for a refugee program” and mostly defended it at the
townhalls, but said he was open to considering a temporary moratorium as
requested by a bill introduced July 29 in the House by Rep. Babin, R-Texas.
Residents also want the state to close a
longstanding refugee welcoming center at the College of Southern Idaho, citing
fears the immigrants it hosts could include Islamists from Syria. One man told
Crapo at a townhall meeting he didn’t think the U.S. should be accepting men of
military age from Syria, which ups the risk that they could have connections to
jihadist groups like ISIS or al-Nusra Front.
The newly formed Idaho group is going
door-to-door to inform residents of the plans to drop more than 300 refugees,
some from Syria, on the Twin Falls area starting in October.
The State Department assures those who ask
questions about security that refugees are the “most highly vetted” of all U.S.
immigrants.
But the FBI, which is responsible for doing the
vetting, refutes that notion.
One of the FBI’s top counter-terrorism experts,
Michael Steinbach, warned Congress on Feb. 11 that the U.S. is not in a
position to screen the Syrians because it has no boots on the ground and no
access to law enforcement or intelligence data in the “failed state” of Syria.
House Homeland Security Committee Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, also warned in
two letters to President Obama that the Syrian refugee program could become a
“jihadist pipeline” directly to the United States.
Listen to Rep. McCaul’s statement on Syrian
refugee program
"Bringing in
Syrians, who are predominantly of Muslim background, may be opening the door to
terrorists pretending to be refugees," Rick Martin, head of the Committee
to End the CSI (College of Southern Idaho) Refugee Center in nearby Buhl, told
Reuters. "We're not
against legitimate refugees. They need to be treated with dignity and respect.
But it would be easy for someone to lie about their background."
Reuters reported the State Department's claim
about intense vetting of refugees without mentioning the FBI's expert testimony
to the contrary by Steinbach.
Minnesota focusing on financial burden, secrecy
Rather than delving into
the security risks of jihadists slipping into the United States, Enos and the
Minnesota activists stay focused on the financial impact of refugees on their
cities, counties and state. Most of the refugees are abandoned by the
resettlement agencies within three to five months of arrival, leaving the
responsibility to care for them to state and local governments and school
systems, A recent study
by the Congressional Research Office showed 74.2 percent of refugees receive food stamps, 56 percent
are on Medicaid and 23 percent live in public housing.
"It is intolerable that private
organizations can unilaterally transform communities in the United States
against the will of the people who built them, and add insult to injury by
leaving the financial burden on local taxpayers, while they pocket
millions," Enos said.
Enos, who has been prying information from LSS
for months, said the program could never stand on its merits if the government
were not so secretive and adept at using contractors to hide information.
"The secrecy with which resettlement
agencies do business could not happen without the assent of our federal
government," he told WND. "If the feds ran these programs directly,
transparency might be assured by the Freedom of Information Act. But private
contractors are exempt, and the feds know this. They know that the resettlement
program is, at its core, unsellable to the American public."
Anyone who takes a public stand, or even demands
answers to basic questions about the refugee program, such as how many will be
coming each year, from what countries and a breakdown of costs to the school
and health systems, or the impact on housing and labor markets, automatically
gets branded a "racist" or a "bigot," as Enos found out
last month when he stood up to speak at a meeting in St. Cloud.
A local union organizer held a rally at the
courthouse against the "racists" who dared to ask questions about the
refugee program, while a professor at St. Cloud State University chimed in with
an email blasting Enos and the "racist" speaker. Enos never mentioned
race in his short talk at a local VFW hall, focusing his comments on the
economic burden caused by refugees.
Working around biased media
Without exception, the activists tell WND that
their local media has not given them a fair shake. Local newspapers and TV
stations often quote the resettlement agency officials as the final authority
on the refugee program, slanting and omitting basic facts about how the program
is really run.
In Fargo, WNAY
TV 6 ran a story quoting Lutheran Social
Services CEO Jessica Thomasson saying that "beyond a conversation once a
year about how many refugees the organization's staff can handle, they don't
have much of a say in how many people are sent here or where they're sent from.
That's all up to the Federal Government."
This is not how the
resettlement business works, says Ann Corcoran, who has been following the
refugee industry for eight years through her blog Refugee Resettlement
Watch.
"She is right that Washington is making the
decisions for North Dakota – and every other state – receiving the U.N.-chosen
refugees, but her parent organization — Lutheran Immigration and Refugee
Service — takes her suggestions for how many her local subcontracting office
can handle and where they will come from," Corcoran said.
Every week or so, the LSS parent organization
sits down with U.S. State Department employees and they divvy up the refugees
partially dependent on what amenities each town has to offer the refugees in
the form of subsidized housing, jobs for low-skilled people and available
classroom space in each receiving community.
"They even take into consideration the
presence of a mosque or two," Corcoran said, since roughly half of the
70,000 refugees imported into the U.S. every year come from Muslim-dominated
countries.
"Maybe Congress should have a role, but
they don’t, mostly because they have abrogated their responsibility,"
Corcoran said.
Congress drops the ball on oversight
Just before summer break, Rep. Brian Babin,
R-Texas, introduced HR 3314, the Refugee Resettlement Accountability National
Security Act, which seeks a moratorium on all resettlements until Congress can
audit its costs and impact.
Babin, the first congressman to take an interest
in the oversight of the refugee resettlement program in more than 30 years, is
hoping to get some co-sponsors when Congress returns from summer break but so
far he hasn't found any.
His bill would "press the pause
button" on a program that grants permanent legal residency to nearly
70,000 new refugees a year. The refugees qualify for a smorgasbord of welfare
benefits on day one upon arrival, including food stamps, subsidized housing,
public education, Medicaid and WIC (federal aid for women, infants and children).
While there are success stories of refugees who
have gone on to lead productive lives, many lead lives of chronic dependency.
Worse yet, some have fallen into a life of
crime.
WND
has reported on numerous cases of criminal and terrorist activity among refugees over the past
year, most recently reporting on a case Friday in which three Somali-Americans,
believed to be refugees or children of refugees, were arrested in Portland,
Maine, for the brutal murder of a local man.
In April, six young
Somali men from refugee families in Minnesota were arrested and charged with
repeatedly trying to board flights to Turkey where they planned to cross the
border and join ISIS in Syria. This case, just the latest in a string of Somali
refugees involved in terrorist activity, led U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger to
admit at a press conference that "We
have a terror recruitment problem in Minnesota."
On Jan. 30, WND
reported that the FBI announced
its newest "most wanted terrorist" was a Somali refugee working as a
cab driver in Virginia who was recruiting for al-Shabab, an al-Qaida affiliate.
He reportedly left the country for Somalia but has dual-citizenship and could
return to the U.S. at any time.
These are just a few of the cases involving
"bad apples" who got to American shores as either refugees or were
born in the states as children of refugees. There are dozens more such cases,
including one refugee from Uzbekistan who was convicted in Idaho last week of
planning attacks against U.S. military installations.
Babin's bill would temporarily suspend all
refugee resettlements until the Government Accountability Office completes a
thorough examination of its costs on local governments, states and American
taxpayers, as well as the risks to national security.
"The Refugee Resettlement Program has been
running on autopilot for far too long with little regard to economic, social
and national security implications," Babin wrote in a recent op-ed.
"We need to step back and examine all aspects of this program. Such as,
why is the U.N., whose policies often run counter to the best interests of the U.S.,
even in the equation?"
The entire program is run at the administration
level as the president sets the agenda every year for how many will be
resettled and from what countries, Corcoran said. He then sends a letter to
Congress requesting "consultation."
"Historically members of Congress
responsible for this program merrily rubber stamp whatever the president
says," Corcoran said.
LSS of North Dakota is a
$40 million a year operation with $10 million coming from government grants. See
the group's IRS Form 990 here:
So its little wonder many residents are growing
weary of the secrecy from the resettlement contractors, the stonewalling from the
State Department and the silence from Congress.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/growing-chorus-across-u-s-no-more-refugees/
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