Washington, D.C. (July 16, 2020) – When it comes to resettling refugees in the United States, neither the refugees themselves, nor the state and local governments that will end up having to provide them services, have a real voice in where they will be placed.
Instead,
a new Center for Immigration Studies report finds that the decision is made almost entirely by the nine contractors paid by the State Department to run the program.
And from the flow of federal dollars to these contractors' budgets to the handsome salaries of their CEOs, the report highlights how refugee resettlement has become big business – most of it funded by taxpayers.
Nayla Rush, a senior researcher at the Center and author of the report, said, "The nine resettlement agencies are paid per refugee, and refugees' initial placement into one American community and not another remains in the hands of agency representatives. At the same time, the agencies have been very critical of the Trump administration's migration and refugee policies, many even going as far as suing and lobbying against them."
The 1980 Refugee Act established the resettlement system and called for states to be consulted about the settlement of refugees and to be reimbursed for the costs of welfare and other services they have to provide. But Washington long ago stopped reimbursing the states, and the required consultations either don't take place or are meaningless. And if a state withdraws from the program, refugees are simply placed there anyway.
President Trump attempted to re-assert the intent of the Refugee Act by allowing state and local authorities to opt out of the refugee resettlement program if they felt they did not have the jobs or other resources to be able to take in refugees. The executive order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit by three of the resettlement contractors.
That is only one of the lawsuits these federal contractors have filed to protect the flow of taxpayer funds to their coffers. Rush writes, "The resettlement agency leaders have been very critical of the Trump administration's refugee policy that has lowered refugee admissions ceilings; but, bear in mind, for these organizations, lower resettlement admissions also means less federal funding." She continues, "Yearly compensations for the heads of these organizations range from a low of $151,666 to a high of $911,796."
The nine resettlement contractors are:
1. Church World Service
2. Episcopal Migration Ministries
3. Ethiopian Community Development Council
4. HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)
5. International Rescue Committee
6. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services
7. U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
8. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
9. World Relief Corporation
