~Basil

Stephen Maly, vice-president of WorldMontana, continues beating the drums to bring Syrian refugees to Montana (“Refugee resettlement in Montana revisited,” IR, Jan. 17). He should know better. People familiar with U.S. refugee-resettlement programs do know better.

One central fact these people know is that refugee resettlement has become a business — big business. Instead of sacrificial charity undertaken by compassionate souls, resettlement now involves high-dollar collaboration between the U.S. government and nine national non-governmental organizations, including Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and International Rescue Committee.

Far from being donation-driven religious or civic charities, such organizations are dominantly federal contractors, running their refugee operations primarily — often above 90 percent — with government largesse. As refugee-policy expert Don Barnett wrote recently in the Washington Times, six-figure executive salaries “are the norm at the roughly 350 organizations affiliated with the nine major contractors. There are additional hundreds of supporting NGOs — most started and staffed by refugees and recent immigrants — soaking up grants from every agency of government except NASA.”

A regional example is Colorado’s Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, which covers refugee resettlement in Montana. According to their annual reports, refugee services consumed about $5.1 million of their 2013 fiscal year’s $13.4-million budget. Meanwhile, about $10.9 million of their $14.1 million revenue for that period came from government grants and contracts. According to their 2013 IRS tax return, the actual benefits — both cash and in-kind — bestowed by LFSRM upon the 1,362 refugees (and asylees) they served amounted to $2 million. This implies that $3.1 million went for refugee-program overhead, including the $122,595 total compensation to program vice president James Horan.

It’s unclear from the news reports about Maly’s refugees proposal whether WorldMontana, with its modest annual budgets of about $125,000, has ambitions to jump on this taxpayer-funded gravy train.

Montanans dubious about Maly’s ambitions have additional reasons for skepticism. An important aspect of these programs in cities nationwide is that, once they’ve agreed to accept a few refugees, the cities’ officials lose their say in the process, despite a legal requirement that the State Department’s resettlement bureaucrats consult regularly with state and local authorities about the targeted cities’ capabilities. Then their cities get inundated with needy people.