Encourage Your Lafayette City-Parish Council to Address Refugee Resettlement

On Tuesday, December 15, 2015, Mr. Mike Mills of Lafayette, LA, provided some background information on refugee resettlement in Louisiana to your Lafayette City-Parish Council, as seen below. He asked the Council to address the issues he presented within 60 days, and plans to return to the Council in February 2016 with your signature as added as leverage to our request. Please encourage everyone in Lafayette Parish to sign the petition.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Lafayette Consolidated Government
705 West University Avenue
Lafayette, LA 70506

Dear Lafayette City-Parish Council,

In 1984, the Immigration and Nationality Act created a program called “Wilson-Fish” as an alternative to state government administrated refugee resettlement programs. Our home, Louisiana, is 1 of 12 of these so-called “Wilson-Fish states.” Because this “Wilson-Fish” program gives the Federal Government’s Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority to implement refugee resettlement programs directly with private contractors, there is an overwhelming propensity for state and local governments to be cut out of the process, despite the fact that our local and state governments will ultimately be required to support these migrants.

For example, “Earlier this year, a Congressional Research Service report found that 74 percent of the refugees who arrived in the past five years were on food stamps, 56 percent were accessing Medicaid, 47 percent were receiving cash assistance, and 23 percent were in public housing. Only 11 percent were getting health insurance through an employer.” This is a tremendous financial burden to our nation’s citizens. It has been projected that a family of four would cost the U.S. $257,481 over the next five years. We are concerned about the financial burden this will place on our city just as much as we are concerned about the secretive nature of the program itself. Shockingly, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Charities received a total of $551 million from the federal government in 2014 for refugee resettlement.

We understand many of those working in these contracting organizations care about the refugees, but we are concerned that there is not enough transparency in the process by which they operate. Some of these organizations profit much more from using our tax dollars to move refugees and migrants here than they would if they lobbied to use our tax dollars to settle these people in other locations closer to their origin (a prospect that would enable our nation to help more than 12 people for every 1 that it invites to live here in America.)

We are also gravely concerned about the security of our State, given the fact that our nation is taking tens of thousands of migrants from the very same nations that are home to deadly ideologies and violent terrorist organizations and networks who are working hard to attack America. FBI Director James Comey continues to warn us that they cannot properly screen Syrian refugees entering the United States. Nevertheless, the President has vowed to take tens of thousands of refugees, and we understand that some of these men and women are already arriving in our neighborhoods.

Given this background, we would like the city council to just consider the following questions: 1.) Has the federal government consulted with our state and local government about refugee resettlement and if so, with whom and when? 2.) Have the charitable organizations paid by our tax dollars to resettle refugees worked at all with the city council to provide transparency to the process? 3.) Are you aware of how many refugees have entered or will enter the parish, and are you able to determine the financial burden this has placed on our local community?

We assume you are like many of us, and you simply don’t know the answers to the above questions and we don’t fault you for that. We would like you to consider adding the refugee resettlement issue to your agenda so that it can be discussed, in a public forum, in the future so that concerned citizens have a place to go to voice their concerns and lend their support to the city’s leadership.

Specifically, we would like the City Council to research the “Absorptive Capacity” of this community to receive refugees and to hold a public hearing to issue the findings of that research sometime in the next 60 days. Will the city council be open to doing this research and informing the public on its findings?

Respectfully yours,

Lafayette Parish Resident