Was there
fraud in the huge resettlement of Burmese ‘refugees’ to the US? by
Ann Corcoran 2/27/18.
They must have found something at the USCIS or a thousand Burmese
living in the US right now wouldn’t have gotten a letter to report to a USCIS office.
Was there fraud in transit country,
Malaysia?
(Checking Wrapsnet I see that since FY06 we have admitted a whopping 167,583
Burmese people and they were coming before 2006 and are still
coming, see map below.)
Here is a short article at the Des Moines Register about the “summons” Burmese
living in Iowa have received:
Dozens of refugees in Iowa received
letters from immigration officials asking them to appear for an interview and
provide information that validates their status.
The refugees are from the country
formerly known as Burma, a group that has grown in the past five years to
include more than 8,000 living in Iowa.
She [Abigail Sui] said at least 50 refugees in Iowa, all who came from
Burma and to the U.S. through Malaysia, got the letter from the
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Department that requested the
in-person interview. One letter required travel to
Indianapolis, while a refugee from Indiana appeared at the USCIS offices in Des
Moines for an interview Monday, according to EMBARC.
“A current USCIS investigation has raised concerns about identity and
biographic information provided to USCIS in a number of cases involving Burmese
refugees, including many who have resettled in the U.S.,” said Sharon Rummery,
a USCIS public affairs officer based in San Francisco.
She said in an email that the USCIS sent 1,000 requests for interviews
nationwide that “will help determine the refugee’s immigration status or
eligibility for future immigration benefits.”
The interviews are voluntary, but Sui
said that she thinks consequences are possible if the refugees do not go.
Already facing resettlement
hardships, the refugees would have to fund a trip to the interviews and take
time off work, said Sui. In addition, no interpreters would be made available.
Can you hear the immigration lawyer
stampede now—no taxpayer-funded interpreters is a big no-no! And, how
dare the Trump Administration dig more deeply into the US Refugee Admissions
Program. More here.
Here is a map from the US State
Department’s Refugee Processing
Center showing where the 167,583 Burmesehave
been placed since FY06. Obviously there is an error as there is no number
on the dark blue Indiana. Texas takes top honors.
New readers may not know that
Wyoming is the only state with no refugee program.
My archive on the Burmese may be
found by clicking here.
Most of the Burmese are not Muslims
but in the last few years, the US has begun admitting larger numbers of the
so-called ‘Rohingya,’ Muslims from Burma and Bangladesh.
Politico says Trump refugee slowdown is the
result of “engineered chaos”, by Ann Corcoran 2/27/18.
It is an unnecessarily long article
written by Politico reporter Meredith Hoffman. You can read the
whole thing. But, I do want to make a point or two before I move on to other
things (like Leo
Hohmann’s latest on his trip to South Dakota).
The article begins as usual with a sympathetic case (star of the
story) of an African woman who got in to the US and is now separated (because
of Trump) from the children she left behind.
It goes in to the usual stuff we have
been hearing about—the ban, Trump’s low refugee ceiling, the refugees trickling
in, the ‘hardship’ the contractors are facing, but it mentions an issue I found
most interesting.
The Trump Administration has shifted a
focus away from sending USCIS officers
abroad to interview prospective refugees and sent them instead to the border
and elsewhere in the US to process the huge backlog in US asylum claims that
piled up as Obama shifted these officers abroad.
Asylum a huge and growing problem!
Other than Mexicans, extra-continentales, arranging their movement to
the US border, getting travel advice and information about immigration
lawyers!
From: https://newrepublic.com/article/146919/this-route-doesnt-exist-map
Readers, the asylum issue is huge and
will become an even greater challenge if this horrifying story at The New Republic (hat tip: Judy) is any indication, many thousands of migrants who can’t get in to an increasingly
unwelcome Europe are headed to South America with the goal of reaching our
southern border.
These are all clever people who know
that if they are caught at the border, they will ask for political asylum
(there will be an immigration lawyer waiting for them) and will spend years
here as that process slogs along.
Now to Politico and the usual whine-fest. This is only a
small bit of the story. I see that Barbara
Strack, after ‘retiring,’ has
begun talking to the media. (Emphasis is mine, along with paragraph
breaks for easier reading.)….workers’
[the usual cabal] impression of engineered chaos comes as
the State Department is already using low numbers of refugees to justify the
closure of dozens of offices of resettlement agencies, which are private nonprofits that contract with
the federal government. The resettlement agencies and employees
still standing are left with the question of how to do their jobs under an
administration that at best is making resettlement a very low priority.
In
a year in which the president simply banned whole groups of refugees from
entering the United States, it’s far from unexpected that arrivals would be
below those of previous administrations. But
Trump’s high-profile executive orders halting refugee admissions last year are
just part of the resettlement program’s disruptions.
More than a year after the original ban, resettlement workers paint a
picture of chaos and confusion, and a field that has been upended by dramatic,
sometimes seemingly arbitrary, changes. “If the
refugee resettlement program were an assembly line in a factory, it works
efficiently because every station knows what to do and how to do the handoff,”
said Barbara Strack, who was chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S.
Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) in the Department of Homeland Security
until retiring three weeks ago. “What
the administration has done this year is break that assembly line in multiple
places at the same time.”
Trump
is prioritizing asylum processing and that makes them all pretty angry, but
should please those (like you and me!) who don’t want to see asylum seekers
allowed to roam free until their cases are heard.
It’s not just the bureaucratic re-routing that is holding up the
process. Another dramatic impetus for the drop in refugee arrivals is that
USCIS is assigning about half of its Refugee Affairs Division officers to the
border and to asylum offices in the U.S. interior instead of abroad, Strack
said, which has a dramatic effect on USCIS’ capacity to do refugee interviews.
Under past administrations the reverse has been true: Asylum officers
were occasionally sent abroad to help screen refugees, especially under the
Obama administration, which ordered as many asylum officers as necessary to
help screen enough refugees to reach the ceiling, she said. (The Obama administration came
just shy of its 85,000 ceiling in fiscal year 2016, with 84,994 refugees.)
Readers
might remember that Obama was hell-bent to get as many Syrians in to the US as
possible during his last year in office and hired many more officers to get
them processed.
Politico continues….With
only half the resettlement officers working abroad as usual, the Department of
Homeland Security has had to cut back drastically on trips for employees to
screen refugees in those countries, known as circuit rides.
DHS
cut its circuit rides to fewer than five locations abroad in the first quarter
of this fiscal year, which began in October, resettlement sources said. That’s
less than one-third the usual amount in that same time period in previous
administration.
The rides were also shorter, staffed with fewer officers and included
none to the Middle East, multiple resettlement sources confirmed. And while DHS has added more locations
to its second quarter, the rides will remain much shorter than their usual
six-to-eight-week duration, and still
include no Middle East locations.
Then this! Trump: A ceiling is a ceiling, it is not a goal!
As
we have said ad nausea, the Refugee Act of 1980 describes
a ceiling chosen by the President in advance of the fiscal year. A ceiling is a
cap, not a goal to be achieved. The
refugee industry has for decades attempted to make it a goal to be
reached!
…..the people I spoke to in the resettlement world all agreed on one
thing: The Trump administration is more than happy to stay far below that
45,000-refugee ceiling. “Past administrations have looked at the ceiling
[wrongly—ed] as a goal,” said Strack, who served in the federal government 26
years and in refugee resettlement the past 12. “That’s not the case for this
administration.”
So to conclude… They can call it “engineered chaos”, but I see
what the Trump Administration is doing is pretty clear.
Why
process more people abroad when wannabe ‘refugees’ are piling up at the US
border, or are already here and have never been screened? Sounds like there is a clear goal here to keep us safe and create order
out of the chaos Obama left us with!
These
are the private contractors that are paid by the head to place refugees in your
towns and cities. Come on Politico why
can’t you tell your readers how many millions they are paid annually to do
their ‘charitable good works!’
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%)
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/politico-says-trump-refugee-slowdown-is-the-result-of-engineered-chaos/
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