Do you live in a preferred refugee resettlement community? There are 82 of them in America, and a lot of them are in small towns where you’d least expect to find them.
Do you live in a preferred refugee resettlement community? There are 82 of them in America, and a lot of them are in small towns where you’d least expect to find them.
Refugee resettlement is big business, and nine organizations, called volags, have a virtual monopoly over the business. They are the ones that Department of State has selected because they are located or use subcontractors in communities where refugees have “ample opportunities of sustained economic independence.” Or so the State Department would like you to believe. In reality, there is little follow up on whether this assumption merges into reality.
Our local refugee resettlement contractor in Walnut Creek, California, a preferred community, even denies preferred communities exist. She claims there are not refugee resettlement communities but grant recipients, as if these grant recipients operate in cyberspace without a geographical location.
Preferred communities do, of course, exist. And while it is true that refugees might not always be settled within the preferred community, they are always settled within proximity to the preferred community, which is also known as a “seed community.” This is a term your local refugee contractor will not want you or the local media to hear. It refers to seeding refugees within proximity to the preferred community.
If you want to see how living in or near a preferred community will affect you life, you need to look at the YouTube video of the July 7, 2015 meeting of the Kandiyohi County, Minnesota board, where a local resident details the impact of refugee resettlement on his community.
Beyond the impact on local welfare, educational, medical and housing resources, a grave concern is security. These are exacerbated because neither the federal government nor the volags and their subcontractors will reveal the number of refugees they tend to unleash on the local taxpayers.
The myth of refugee resettlement is that the federal government pays for the refugees. Those payments only exist for six months, at most, and then the volags and their subcontractors show the refugees the way to the local welfare systems.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 49 percent of refugees end up using one or more welfare programs.
How many refugees are we admitting? This number is as elusive as much of the other data on refugees. In fiscal year 2013, the volags worked with 70,000 refugees. But when special immigration visas, asylees, and unaccompanied children are added to the mix, this number does not come close to the total number of refugees. In FY 2013, that number exceeded 140,000.
Lest you consider this an insignificant number, the preferred communities programs see the refugees as seeds to be planted in certain locales. Consequently, the impact in any locale can be disproportionate and create an immigrant culture antithetical to American values.
The Minneapolis area, for example, has been a preferred area for resettling Somalis. It was ground zero for recruiting for the jihadist group al-Shabab, and a decade later it is the focal point for ISIS recruitment in America.
Citing a congressional study, an NBC report says more than 250 Americans have attempted to join ISIS. Minnesota’s Muslim refugees have become a fertile population for ISIS recruitment.
The volags and the community influentials that support them would tell you that their refugees are well vetted, citing a State Department site to verify this.
But as noted by Michael Steinbeck, the assistant director of the FBI, there is no way to adequately vet refugees that come from a failed state.
In January of 2016, Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab had reported in private messages on social media that he fought alongside jihadi groups in Syria, including an affiliate of al Qaeda. Al-Jayab’s Sacramento residence is within the seed community of our own Bay Area. But none of our local resettlement contractors has come forward to showcase him, let alone claim him.
The federal indictment revealed that Al-Jayab was conspiring with a fellow Iraqi refugee, Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, of Houston, who was indicted for providing material support to ISIS.
An ABC News investigation, in 2009, had highlighted the seriously flawed refugee screening system when Waad Ramadan Alwan and fellow refugee Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, both of Bowling Green, Kentucky, had been found to be planning a terrorist attack on American soil. Both had been permitted to resettle near the Fort Knox and Fort Campbell Army bases.
Needless to say, as with the jihadis from Minnesota, no volag came forward to showcase the Bowling Green terrorists as their clients.
Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan refugee, pleaded guilty to working with al Qaeda to bomb the New York subway system at multiple locations, an operation that Attorney General Eric Holder called one of the greatest terror threats on American soil since 9/11.
• Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.
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