Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans help refugee
contractors stay afloat, by Ann Corcoran 3/8/18
I
heard recently that the refugee resettlement agencies (the big nine) which the
State Department contracts to place refugees in your towns and cities were busy
resettling ‘interpreters’ from Afghanistan and those federal payments were
helping keep them financially afloat.
So…I
checked some numbers at Wrapsnet and
was amazed by what I saw. Sure enough we are bringing in Afghans at an
astounding rate.
From FY08 to FY18 we have admitted 49,358 ‘interpreters’ from Afghanistan and that number does not include their spouses and children. Holy cow! Were there really nearly 50,000 people doing translation work for us? (And, more to come!)
I
know I can hear it now—-shouldn’t we take care of those who helped us in Iraq
and Afghanistan (while we were helping their countries!), but really, 50,000
and more! (I think you can also surmise from this flood of supposedly
friendlies out of Afghanistan that we are done there, but that is a story for
another blog.) Know that our usual bunch of federal
contractors are paid to place those ‘refugees’ as well.
I
early on wrote about the Special
Immigrant Visa program for Iraqis that ol’ Ted Kennedy got
placed in a Defense Authorization bill in the dark of night in 2006, but have
never followed it closely. (Numbers of slots available were low. For
comparison, we admitted 18,084 ‘interpreters’ from Iraq during the same time
period we have admitted nearly 50,000 Afghans!).
However,
I see this morning that Donald Trump, when signing the Defense Authorization
bill for FY18, also signed in to law a new Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program which
permits the entrance to the US of thousands more Afghans in that category.
Read all about it here, and
note that the ‘interpreters’ don’t even have to have been employed directly by
the US government! They could have been working for allies and presumably NGOs
too!
(I have something else I have to do today, so this is just your intro.
to this under-the-radar push for more Middle Easterners to be distributed
around the US.)
Here
are screenshots of a few pieces of the data at Wrapsnet.
Below is the top of the data sheet on our Afghan admissions. Circled
in red is the column for Special Immigrant Visas compared to the number of
regular refugees from that country. On the fourth line down, that is
California which is obviously being flooded.
See that in Trump’s first (partial) year in office (FY17) we admitted
an astounding 16,866 ‘interpreters’ and in this fiscal year (2018) to March 5th
we have already admitted 7,017! Again those numbers do not include spouses and
children.
To
conclude, although the regular refugee numbers are way down as we reported here.
8,583 refugees have been admitted in 5 months. You can add to that
another 7,017 paying SIV clients (and their families!) for the VOLAGs
(resettlement contractors) to place in your towns. (There are also
‘interpreters’ still coming in from Iraq, but numbers are much lower now.)
Here
are the nine federal refugee contractors. They have been complaining as their
regular paying client numbers (refugees) have declined, but it seems they have
some taxpayer supplied funds coming in with this huge push to bring in Afghan
‘interpreters’ and their families.
The
original Refugee Act of 1980, that
set up this monstrosity, envisioned a public-private partnership that over the
years has almost completely morphed in to a federal program. The number in
parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the
taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!
From
most recent accounting, here.
·
Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) (secular) (93%)
·
International Rescue Committee (IRC) (secular) (66.5%)
·
US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) (secular) (98%)
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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