By Dr. Glenn Mollette
We hope for fewer taxes instead of more taxes. We hope for better fiscal spending and less wasteful spending. It would be nice if the very poor who are hurting could be helped until they are back on their feet. However the idea of delivering lifetime checks to adults who will not try to work has become a tiresome practice for many Americans.
Millions of Americans are addicted to their welfare and would rather hang on to the addiction of their welfare than go and find a paying a job. Welfare must become a temporary source of relief and not a lifestyle that's passed on to future generations. Most Americans are willing to help anybody a couple of years but the time comes for change.
We all know of cases of long-term debilitation. America should help those who are blind, suffering with chronic diseases that keep them imprisoned in wheelchairs and other forms of diseases and handicaps that imprison people and prevent them from
doing life and working like other Americans.
Americans hope for better days. We have been flooded with immigrants in this country. We cannot continue receiving a hundred to hundred fifty thousand illegal immigrants pouring into this country. Regardless of how sorry you feel for the hurting people from other countries how many people can we absorb into our schools? How many can we absorb into our welfare system? How many Americans who have been here for years can afford to lose his or her job to someone who is willing to come and work for slave wages? How many refugees can we bring into our country? Since the 1980 Refugee act we have averaged 98,000 refugees per year. By the way Senator Joe Biden was one of the sponsors and Delaware has taken in very few refugees.
Nine nonprofit organizations are making millions of dollars every year by bringing anybody they can into this country? They are the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Lutheran Immigrant Aid Society (LIRS), International Rescue Committee (IRC), World Relief Corporation, Immigrant and Refugee Services of America (IRSA),
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Church World Service (CWS),
Domestic and Foreign Missionary Service of the Episcopal Church of the USA,
Ethiopian Community Development Center (ECDC). The money comes from the federal government or our pockets. Below are some of the sources of income for Volags, the nine nonprofit organizations:
a. $1,850 per refugee (including children) from the State Department.
b. Up to $2,200 for each refugee by participating in a U.S. DHHS program known as Matching Grant. To get the $2,200, the Volag need only show it spent $200 and gave away $800 worth of donated clothes, furniture or cars.
c. The Volag pockets 25% of every transportation loan it collects from refugees it "sponsors".
d. All Volag expenses and overhead in the Washington, DC HQ are paid by the U.S. government.
e. For their refugee programs, Volags collect money from all federal grant programs - "Marriage Initiative", "Faith-based", "Ownership Society", etc., as well as from various state and local grants.
The program is so lucrative that in some towns the Catholic Church has lessened support for traditional charity works to put more effort into resettlement. It uses collection offerings to promote the refugee resettlement program. When you start multiplying Seventy thousand to a hundred thousand refugees times even just a $1,000 you come up with some nice profit. The Volags get millions of dollars of other support from foundations and other nonprofits and a lot of community volunteers who help them with assimilating the refugees into their community.
The nonprofit agencies only have to spend four months with the refugee until they are free to be anywhere in the United States doing whatever they want to do. The refugee program is a multi million-dollar moneymaker to these nine nonprofits. The Catholic Charities group is the largest group and surprisingly they have been bringing in thousands of Muslims who in turn have been buying their old churches and turning them into mosques. So let's get this straight. Our federal tax dollars are funneled into the Catholic charity, a Lutheran charity and seven other charities. This money is supposed to be used to bring seventy to a hundred thousand refugees to America. This number changes year to year. These people come from all parts of the world.
Refugee access to welfare on the same basis as a U.S. citizen has made the program a global magnet. The federal programs available to them include:
∙ Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) formerly known as AFDC
∙ Medicaid
∙ Food Stamps
∙ Public Housing
∙ Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
∙ Social Security Disability Insurance
∙ Administration on Developmental Disabilities (ADD) (direct services only)
∙ Child Care and Development Fund
∙ Independent Living Program
∙ Job Opportunities for Low Income Individuals (JOLI)
∙ Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)
∙ Postsecondary Education Loans and Grants
∙ Refugee Assistance Programs
∙ Title IV Foster Care and Adoption Assistance Payments (if parents are qualified immigrants - refugees, asylees, etc.)
∙ Title XX Social Services Block Grant Funds
The numbers of people coming to your state are not exactly proportionately. As I said earlier Delaware, where Joe Biden lives, receives hardly any refugees. Other states like Florida, New York, Texas, Maryland and Kentucky have been bombarded with refugees. How many thousands can any one city and state take on? We are talking about year after year thousands of people being transplanted to your town, your subdivision. Since 1980 with the act we have taken in over three million refugees. The additional cost to the welfare system is between 10 - 20 billion dollars. There must be major curtailing of this program until we can get this nation on its feet.
Americans are hoping that Congress and our new President Trump will help us. Will jobs really come back to America? Will Congress really cut the corporate tax rate and make it more affordable for corporations to operate in this country? We need jobs. Our children are graduating high school and college every year. They want to move on with their lives and have a life. We need to help them.
Our Veterans struggle with employment, housing and medical care while we bring in 70,000 refugees and treat them better than our Veterans.
Our military is surviving in old beat up barracks. They often do not even have air conditioning in the summer and have old decrepit furnace systems in the winter. They are driving old equipment that mechanics work on every day to keep running. Over the years our government has lessened the numbers of our servicemen and women making it more difficult for soldiers to advance having to leave the military because they could not promote. It's time our government brought our military out of the doldrums of despair and made it once again the shining star of the world.
America's high school students should have access to community colleges and we should keep them as cheap as possible. Every kid in America should have an opportunity to go to college. Our country may not be able to offer community college for free but it needs to be as close to free as we can make it. Professors have to be paid and buildings built but let's keep both within reason and we can make college accessible for all.
There is a lot of worry and fear in America these days. Will Congress cut the Social Security checks of aged America? Are we safe as there are more and more random acts of violence? Congress and President Trump are wrestling verbally, tweeting, debating and voting about our future. Americans can make phone calls and write emails and letters to our leaders in Washington. We can protest and organize in our own communities to work for change.
We can only hope our elected leaders will work to help this nation and preserve an America that our grandchildren might wake up to enjoy.
Thanks to refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com for their statistics and information.
Glenn Mollette is a syndicated columnist and author of eleven books.
He is read in all fifty states. Visit www.glennmollette.com
Contact him at [email protected]. Like his facebook page at www.facebook.com/glennmollette