DONALD TRUMP ISN’T JUST SLASHING THE REFUGEE QUOTA, HE’S DISMANTLING THE ENTIRE RESETTLEMENT SYSTEM
(So very sad…they don’t get insider information like they did under Obama!)
After many paragraphs….
Adam clark world relief
Adam Clark of World Relief is lamenting that they no longer get any insider information from the government!
A refugee ceiling of 25,000 would be the lowest since the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, and it would follow the hard-line approach to all types of immigration touted by White House adviser Stephen Miller. Last year, Miller pushed for even more aggressive cuts to the refugee resettlement program — suggesting a cap of 15,000 — but faced pushback from other administration officials, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke. With Tillerson’s and Duke’s departures earlier this year, refugee advocates fear that Miller may prevail this time around. “We don’t get any insider information. We just hear what the government chooses to announce to the public, and then we have to adjust accordingly,” said Adam Clark, director of World Relief Durham, which has a State Department contract to resettle refugees. When Trump set a cap of 45,000 last year, Clark said, roughly 60,000 already-vetted refugees were left in limbo. “Since Trump took office, we’ve learned to prepare for the worst. More cuts would be tragic, but they wouldn’t surprise us.”
Clark goes on….
The drastic decrease in refugee admissions has led to the weakening of decades-old systems that help refugees transition to life in their new home, making it likely that the program will have to be rebuilt if a future U.S. administration moves toward welcoming more refugees. Many refugee centers have shut down, while many others have been forced to cut staff, said Clark. “What made matters worse was, at the beginning of the fiscal year 2016, when [President Barack Obama] was pushing to take more refugees, many of us were told to beef up our staff in order to be able to accept 85,000 to 100,000. Then, after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the number was slashed to 45,000. Several hundred staff members lost their jobs.”
Obama promised us 100,000 so we beefed up or staff and now we have to fire them!
Readers, have you ever seen such a dysfunctional and chaotic way to run a program where the government pays these supposed non-profit groups on a refugee per head basis and then when numbers fluctuate, the agencies run to the media and wail about their budgetary shortfall!
Where is Congress?
Why can’t Congress get off the dime and dump this whole flawed system?
The result has been the reduction of the overall refugee flow to a bare trickle. “The pipeline has dried up,” said Clark of World Relief. “When there aren’t enough people abroad to interview and process the cases, there is no way to keep the stream of vetted refugees coming.” In the past year, Clark said, his Durham office has seen only about one-third of its usual number of cases. “In 10 years of this work, I’ve seen numbers fluctuate somewhat, but the changes under the Trump administration have been by far the most drastic,” he said. “This feels like a different kind of change.”
Clark goes on to report that they aren’t getting as many Muslims as they would like in North Carolina.
“We’ve definitely seen a shift in the nationalities of our clients since Trump,” said Clark. “We’re getting fewer Afghans, no Syrians — the pattern seems clear.”
[….]
Sirine
Sirine Shebaya, senior staff attorney at the national civil rights and legal organization Muslim Advocates, said the religious makeup of the incoming refugee pool is striking as well.
“Despite the fact that over half of the world’s refugees come from three Muslim-majority countries — Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan — admissions of Muslim-identifying refugees fell by 94 percent between January and November 2017,” she said. [So why is it our problem when Muslims can’t settle their differences?—ed]
As of May, only about 2,000 Muslim refugees had been admitted this fiscal year, down from 38,900 in fiscal year 2016. Syria, Iraq, and Somalia are no longer among the top five countries of origin for refugees, reversing a trend that had taken shape in recent years. Shebaya blames a combination of burdensome vetting measures, Trump’s myriad bans, and an overall anti-Muslim sentiment for the reversal. “It seems that the government is intent on making it as difficult as possible for Muslims to come to the United States, whether as refugees or immigrants.”
(moar at sauce, has links, whole site is a goldmine for (((refugee fuckery)))
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2018/08/17/unhappy-refugee-contractors-not-getting-insider-information-out-of-trump-administration/