Requests for information often ignored, stymied.
With Muslim immigrants streaming into the United States at a rate of 100,000 per year, some of the communities targeted for new arrivals are seeking information on their new neighbors, only to be frustrated by federal bureaucrats and their hired contractors.
How does a city get on the U.S. State Department’s list of 190 communities selected for refugee resettlement? How can cities find out who will be coming and when? What services will they use, and what will be the cost to taxpayers?
And, the granddaddy of all questions: Can the communities be assured that foreign nationals with ties to ISIS, al-Shabab and other Islamic terrorist groups won’t slip through the government’s porous screening process posing as “refugees”?
The answers to these questions are simple. Very little information is available. And there are no guarantees that some very bad apples won’t arrive in your town, says a leading expert on the refugee resettlement program.
One community that is trying to get information right now is Spartanburg, South Carolina.
On March 16, Ann Corcoran, author of the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, spoke at a national security summit in Columbia, South Carolina, hosted by former Defense Department analyst Frank Gaffney. A few days before that conference, on March 9, a story broke in the local Spartanburg newspaper that World Relief, one of the nine resettlement agencies that works under contract with the federal government, was planning to open an office in Spartanburg.
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